ReMix: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past "Sacred Flute"
Help us take OCR
to the next level by supporting us on 
- Game: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Nintendo, 1991, SNES)
- ReMixer(s): Blue.Nocturne
- Composer(s): Koji Kondo
- Song(s): "Flute Boy's Ocarina"
- Posted: 2009-06-24, evaluated by the judges
- Terms (BETA): orchestral strings woodwinds
We're definitely looking forward to attending Distant Worlds this weekend in Baltimore - should be rather awesome! Let's keep things a' moving, though: newcomer (another one!) Blue.Nocturne (aka Dennis Kim) writes:
"I was browsing through OCR's LoZ remixes and I noticed there wasn't one for the flute boy's song. I thought it kind of iconic and the precursor to the N64's highly involved ocarina system. This song would play around the ghostly image of this strange child which plays a flute in a meadow. He would be surrounded by animals and as you approach, he disappears and the animals run away. This happened only in the Light World, and as you eventually obtain his flute/ocarina, you were able to use it to summon a bird that flies you around the map. Anyways, I decided to be less orchestral in this song, but I ended up being as orchestral as my last remix. I used full Garritan Personal Orchestra for the orchestral elements, FPC for drums, and soundfonts for the guitar work. I also was hit by a major roadblock as I finished the song, FL 8 caused annoying popping noises, but luckily that was solved and I could finally submit this. Anyways I hope you enjoy it, but if not, there's always the next submission."
While there is, in fact, always the next submission, judges were pretty down with *this* submission - especially the arrangement. It's always cool when someone takes a well-known franchise like Zelda, and in this instance a popular game within that franchise, and still picks a song that hasn't gotten a lot of attention and goes places with it. zyko wrote:
"yeah this is pretty freakin awesome. right about flute boy... very much the precursor for much of what zelda would do musically for the upcoming games. kudos for tackling this.
the arrangement is somethin else. i think that is what is most impressive here... what is obvious here is that you have a very firm sense of what the basis of the theme's music is as you took a very simple source and expanded it based on a standard zelda chord structure... you even quoted the overworld themes and, i could swear, a couple other ones in there as well."
All of the judges unanimously cited issues with production, in particular the bass and relative volume on the strings, so there's room for improvement, but Dennis has the arrangement side of his house in order, and I'd argue that it's harder to learn arrangement/composition than it is production. With some more time spent getting feedback on levels and specific instrumentation decisions, I think he's got major potential. This mix is proof of that, and honestly even from a production perspective the winds here are nice, things are clean, dynamics fluctuate, and panning has been considered. There's a lot of good things going on, in other words, and the arrangement makes the most of these components. I hope to see more submissions & development from Blue.Nocturne; this is a very promising start.
You can only go up from here, so make it happen!
