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Saturday, February 27, 2016

Song of the Week! 27 February 2016


If we do not talk about this song now, we would have to wait four more years to make the title association. Who knows if we can stay up for another four years (fingers crossed for it though)? And so in occasion for the very rare happening next Monday, here we are talking about...

 366 Nichi (366日)
Version
Taiko 12.5x3 (98)x3 (147) x5 (213)x7 (390)
Taiko +x2 (98)x3 (147) x5 (213)x7 (390)
 Taiko 12.5, Taiko +
 76
 none
 366day


When talking about the concept of "366 days", most people should associate with the occurence of leap years, a year with an extra day (as February 29) to balance out the tiny differences in orbit and calendar years because Earth's orbit hates round whole numbers. Except the song has nothing to do with this though. Whoops.

Anyway, speaking of the sentiments of a female recollecting of her previous lover even after parting ways, 366 Nichi is the almost-solo work Izumi Nakasone (仲宗根泉) of the band HY, down to the composition, lyrics and singing performance. The song is used as the theme song for the drama and movie Akai Ito (赤い糸), which is adapted from the cell-phone novel of the same name.

HY, by the way, is banded together by five old friends whose acquaintances started in high school, with Nakasone (keyboard, vocals), Hideyuki Shinzato (新里英之; guitar, vocals), Shun Naka (名嘉 俊; drums, rapping) Shinsuke Kyoda (許田信介; bass) and Yuuhei Miyazato (宮里 悠平; guitar). The name came from the initial of the five's hometown of Higashi-Yakena (東屋慶名), in Uruma city of central Okinawa. That connection also goes on to inspiring their own label Higashi-Yakena Construction (東屋慶名建設, not to be confused with actual construction companies). A peculiar perk of the band is that they almost exclusively release albums and no singles; 366 Nichi is, for example, first included in the band's 5th album HeartY in 2008.

The main feature that makes 366 Nichi notable is the scroll speed troll, exclusively on Oni: it starts with half-speed for most of the chart, and then it accelerates towards the end to a maximum of 4x speed. It becomes a catch-22 to balance whether to play normal and struggle with reading crunched up clusters for a majority of the chart, or set Double Speed and risk facing the last notes in 8x scroll speed and possibly miss. The Go-go Time settings in Oni is also different from other difficulties, and is perhaps one of the earliest instances of playing with the fireworks effect.

Other than these, the pattern is actually pretty manageable as a modern ★7 (and a slightly harder ★7 in AC12.5), when it is only simple 16th clusters at 76BPM, or equivalent to 8ths at 152BPM, with some even groups mixed in to test your off-beat processing skills.