MISSTIQ // PREMIERE—Piano Cover of Make Them Suffer’s ‘Threads’

Melbourne’s viral piano sensation Misstiq has released another ‘piano-core’ cover, this time tackling Threads by Make Them Suffer. Watch below:

Misstiq, aka Ursula Kurasik, is no stranger to the heavier end of the spectrum, having arranged works for The Amity Affliction on latest album This Could Be Heartbreak. Since 2013, she’s covered various metal and metalcore artists such as Thy Art Is Murder, Slipknot, and Northlane.

Ursula began her piano life at age six among other hobbies such as gymnastics and dancing. While the other activities fell away, piano remained —and still is—Ursula’s true love.

“At the age of 14 I developed my love for music within the heavy genre,” Misstiq says. “So starting with Green Day, then it got into Linkin Park, Bullet for My Valentine, Avenged Sevenfold, and around Avenged Sevenfold I heard a few piano songs of theirs. I thought ‘let’s try this out, there’s no sheet music online.’ Lets for the first time ever see what I can do with this. So that got me motivated to getting my ears trained, and giving me the ability to listen to something and then put it on piano.”

Keeping her toes dipped in heavy waters pushed her to gain her Licentiate Piano Diploma. At 19, she published her first piano cover, Sparks by Parkway Drive.

“Bit by bit I got comments out of nowhere, and I’m like ‘Oh yeah cool, you know this guy from Mexico wants me to do this Parkway song,’ or you know, this and this. So it just slowly started to branch out. At the time I was studying at uni, a Bachelor in Music Composition. I was always doing something with music. At the moment I’m about to finish my Masters in Teaching with music. Throughout you know my uni years, I had the time to constantly upload new covers, and doing stuff that people recommended for me to do, and also doing songs that I would enjoy.”

She also teaches music as a substitute teacher in schools. It’s also led her toward working within heavy music, not the most piano-dominated genre. “I just have a lot of clients that want me to write music for their album, like piano, and synth, and strings.”

As for her current arrangement, choosing Threads was easy.

“From start to finish they’ve got amazing melodies, and the chorus in this particular song, when I first heard the piano right in the background, I’m like ‘Oh, damn. I wish the piano was a bit more prominent,’ and they maybe had like a section later on where you could just hear the piano because the melody is amazing, and the chord progression under it. So what I did with this arrangement to make it sort of unique, is I added more harmonies to the piano, added more feeling to it.”

How does one make a distorted guitar rhythm “fit” a piano?

“I used [what’s called in music theory] an interval, ‘Major second and minor second.’ It makes the piano’s tone sound clashy. Which sort of represents the feeling you get from a distorted guitar, if that sort of make sense.”

Her covers has raised her profile, and her next goal is to work with more bands and more clients. She’s also got a ‘dark-pop’ project with Brett Anderson, formerly of Buried In Verona, called Don’t Die Like I Did.

“You’ve got two people, that sort of branch from that genre and his lyrics tell a story. So I’ve added piano into it. A lot of beats and stuff, strings, drums, and all that. So we’re like a pop, you could say it’s like pop, but we’re not you know cliché. Very interesting stuff.”

WATCH > Home Is For The Heartless