OCR04338 - *YES* Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening "Ballad of the THIEF Fish"

[Emunator]

All right, let's knock the form stuff out.
 

• Your ReMixer name: 227
• Your email address: 
• Your website: https://jdoes.art/
• Your userid (number, not name) on our forums, found by viewing your forum profile: 17063

• Name of game(s) arranged: The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (the Game Boy original, if that distinction matters post-remake)
• Name of arrangement: Ballad of the THIEF Fish
• Name of individual song(s) arranged: Ballad of the Wind Fish
• Your own comments about the mix, for example the inspiration behind it, how it was made, etc.

Used to be a lurker back in... 2003? 2004? Something like that. Signed up in 2007, apparently, before disappearing for a decade. I relate to that "making it an exercise" bit in the FAQ a lot these days; after a decade or so spent largely away from music, I've been making another go of it lately on Youtube and my go-to method of practice is making songs using just one random thing.

 

First, I made a song using only the audio recorded from a hand puppet. Then a Taco Bell cup. Then movie dialog. This is my fourth random-limitation song, made only with the audio of Marin singing Ballad of the Wind Fish on a Game Boy Color, captured through the headphone... port? Jack? Anyway, so I grabbed the audio from the headphone hole, layered it (and used PaulXStretch's granular craziness) to turn it into a bunch of other instruments, and then made a soundfont out of it for super flexible and CPU-light drums. Everything else went into the free Vital synth's sampler to tweak and distort in various ways. So all the audio is from the Game Boy.

While I originally put this together for my Youtube channel (the video should be up sometime on June 11th and include some video that goes over the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nFU37T6MmI), I don't remix things often and OCRemix popped into my mind. Figured I'd give it a go.

 

Have a good one, person-reading-this.

Source: 

[prophetik music]

what a unique method of audio creation.

there's obviously a ton of really creative synth work in this, and the arrangement is both expansive and clearly from BotWF. there's a bit of copy-pasta between the opening and at about 1:17, but it's minimal. the real focus here is all the crazy sounds you're getting out of that original lead tone, which is impressive. i particularly liked the fm bell sound. i think the length is perfect, too - this quickly could have become tedious but it doesn't overstay its welcome while still being interesting and showcasing a variety of different ideas.

this is pretty neat. it's a go from me.

 

 

YES

[MindWanderer]

Far from overstaying its welcome, it actually feels a little short to me.  You got tons of mileage out of this technique.  The bell was indeed a highlight, as were the wubs, and even the percussion is impressive.  I would have happily listened to even more of it, especially given the weak ending.

There's a short Terra's theme reference in the middle there, not sure if it should get credit.

It's weird but cool.  A better ending would have been nice but it's not a dealbreaker.  Checks all the boxes.

YES

[Liontamer]

Not my cup of tea at all, but it gets 'er done. Gotta respect the creative constraints employed! (That's Je's thing.) Let's go! 

YES

[DarkSim]

I love the "4 Producers, 1 Sample" series on Andrew Huang's YT channel, where they do stuff like this with a single sample and make all sorts of crazy stuff out of it. It's a creative and challenging approach to making a track, although by limiting yourself in such a way, it's hard to say if the track turned out like you imagined it would or not. Maybe that's half the fun of it!

I dig some of the synths here, but not others, and that's of course a byproduct of the way they've been created. I think if I didn't know that you'd sampled them all directly from Marin's song on the Game Boy then I'd be less whelmed than I am. The lead at 0:28 isn't particularly pleasant, although the bass is nice and smooth, and the bell and pads work well. Making synths from the same sample naturally gives the same timbral quality to them, so there's a cohesiveness about them, but the original sample has a certain grit to it which lends itself to harsher sounds like those at 0:28 and 1:23.

I caught the Terra's theme reference in the middle there, a cool cameo in a Zelda remix!

Although I enjoyed the 'making of' video more than the actual song itself, it's definitely worth a feature on the front page.

YES