The Mask of the Priest and the Bell of the Chapel - Yasushi Ishii
Released: February 25, 2025
Tags: Hellsing, Piano
The original 2001 TV version of Hellsing is... uhhh... it's alright. It's clear that they might not have the budget, time, and manga material to tell the story that they wanted, but what's there is relatively servicable. One thing that Hellsing does have, however is style. It's got some striking visuals and my second favorite soundtrack of any piece of media (hard to beat Cowboy Bebop). Yasushi Ishii is an incredibly talented musician, and has been uploading tracks for free on his website since 2007. I highly recommend Flower Mu and Fixer! if you are only familiar with his work in Anime.
Hellsing has a lot of really fun piano tracks, but not many transcriptions outside of everyone's favorite World Without Logos. I've been needing a bunch of piano scores which are small (like, one to two pages) so that I can have some more songs under my belt, therefore I decided to pick out some tracks from Hellsing and transcribe them. This was the first one I chose since it's repetitive and easy, something I can learn in a day. In fact, this is such an easy track that I transcribed everything, including the organ and then guitar. Although I have not included them in the score, since I won't be needing it...
As I was writing this page, I actually found out that someone reached out to Yasushi Ishii and he gave them a collection of materials from the OST, including unreleased and different versions of the tracks from the show. Some of the tracks here I already knew because he published them in his blog (like Sky Walker which is a rework of Soul Rescuer), but regardless, there's a lot of incredible stuff for me to sift through. I've spent hundreds of hours listening to the first to OST disks, I'll gladly spend a few hundred more on these tracks!
