*NO* Chrono Trigger "It Doesn't Have to Be This Way"

[Emunator]

Your ReMixer name: Lucas Guimaraes
Your real name: Lucas Guimaraes
Your email address: 
Your website: https://twitter.com/Thirdkoopa - knew nothing better to link for this
Your userid (number, not name) on our forums, found by viewing your forum profile: http://ocremix.org/community/profile/33965-thirdkoopa/
Name of game(s) arranged: Chrono Trigger
Name of arrangement: It Doesn't Have To Be This Way
Name of individual song(s) arranged:  Battle with Magus, Frog's Theme

Lucas Guimaraes (Arrangement, Mix)

TSori (Trumpet)

 

My comments: Boy, talk about an exposed arrangement. As if Solo Piano, solo guitar, or anything else wasn't hard enough, this is a solo performance on a monophonic instrument. Normally I'd do a source breakdown, but literally EVERYTHING in it was derived from the source. This idea came about for the Pixel Mixers contest month in November. TSori hit me up and went "What if we did a solo trumpet arrangement" We tossed a few ideas around.

 

So I landed up on this idea: What if there was an alternate timeline where Cyrus doesn't die, and many of them in battle are injured. The second part, which is just Frog's theme, focuses on Frog's reflection from the battle. When both themes are merged in the third part, Magus tries to explain to him his true intentions of summoning Lavos. Frog doesn't know what to believe. I left some ambiguity for the listener to imagine how it ends, but my vision is that after the two fight, they move onto their real goal: Killing Lavos. It gave me inspiration and it solved another problem: That we needed enough melodic content to carry a solo trumpet performance.

 

Okay, now for some insights on the production

 

With such a heavy idea, and an idea on how to musically execute it (thanks TSori for solo trumpet references!), I was off to work pretty fast. I know I work fast, but this was the one time where a lot of things came together cleanly. My ideas are messy, they don't always work that clean, but we went back and forth to make the piece more idiomatic. After we handled that, we worked together a LOT to hone in on the details of the performance. It was mostly in TSori's hands until it came back to me for mixing. My initial mix for the November contest was a bit rough because I had to leave for the holiday.

I went back, redid the mix some, properly mastered it this time, and now I think we have something closer to the production standards of OCR.

 

Honestly, I'm not sure how this is going to go here on OC Remix. I'm far, far more fascinated in hearing what the judge's reactions are than anything else. I hope you all enjoy it. It's certainly different - not just for OCRemix but for VGM in general. And that's what I hope to keep doing. Paying homage to our favorite games and artistic mediums by seeing how they can be pushed.

 

TSori's comments: I pitched the idea of an unaccompanied trumpet solo to Lucas after months of thinking about it myself , but never actually getting anywhere.  Fortunately, Lucas is pretty fond of wacky ideas (understatement)  so he took the suggestion and just ran with it.   After discussing a few different source tunes we settled on Battle with Magus and he turned out the first draft of the arrangement remarkably quickly.   We worked together to make a few small tweaks, mainly to give me a few more places to breathe, and then it was time to practice....A LOT .   I had asked Lucas to make this a very technical and challenging piece, and he certainly did.!   I had a blast learning and recording this, and I can't wait to see what kind of silly idea we decide to try next.

 

Edited September 6, 2023 by Liontamer
closed decision

[Liontamer]

Interesting pointilist-style opening by Logan to start. Ah, OK, that's the gimmick throughout. Just enough delay on it to give the soundscape some ambiance. That's pretty much all that's needed here as far as the production touch.

Nice arrangement concept as well. By about 3 minutes, I'm not tired of it, but I could see how others would be. I liked the tradeoffs between the two themes in the third part though, which helped Lucas's concept be something more than the performance gimmick.

YES

[MindWanderer]

Well, you certainly set yourselves a challenge here!

To get the hard part out of the way, I think the performance is great. Solo trumpet isn't my personal idea of enjoyment, but it's certainly valid, and it's executed very well here. The tone is clear, the production is clean. I have no objections on that front.

I'm not as thrilled with the arrangement. The transitions are frequently really abrupt; with no accompaniment to act as connective tissue, this is an extreme challenge, especially when the two sources don't have much in common. 2:53 in particular starts to feel like it's just doing whatever. I understand the intention of it, especially given your explanation, but it sounds really random and disjointed. There are a lot of sections, such as 1:18-1:31, that I have no doubt are in fact from the source material, but don't sound like it at all. I can't tell if you're playing a part that wasn't originally melody, or if you're just riffing in a way that becomes unrecognizable.

I really like the ambition of this, and I hate to reject TSori's epic performance here. But I feel like it's ultimately too disjointed, and the more liberal parts are too hard to grok on multiple levels.

NO (regretfully)

[prophetik music]

solo performances on any instrument are hard. since you're distilling down the soundscape dramatically, simple issues are magnified significantly. for example, slightly out-of-time triple-tonguing like at 0:20 are way more noticeable than they would be in a larger arrangement. similarly, the articulation at 0:36 is stilted in a way that wouldn't be noticeable even with a piano or guitar playing alongside. last example - the lack of vibrato on sustains (especially lower notes like at 0:52) really sticks out.

the variety of timbres used in a short period - for example, going from 2:15 to maybe 2:45 - is pretty great. i also liked the interplay of the two themes right after that section. there's certainly a lot of source represented here. i struggle however with the cohesiveness of the work as a whole. just taping together lines of sheet music from the two themes does not a complete whole make. 

tsori's clear tone is present throughout, and the fanfare-style writing is certainly idiomatic to the instrument. however, the nature of an arrangement like this requires a lot more depth of composition than this shows. there are a lot of examples of solo monophonic or close-to-monophonic works for every eligible instrument out there - i certainly played a lot of them as a collegiate and graduate musician. all of those works - be it joshua redman playing the intro to Hide and Seek, a cellist playing one of bach's cello sonatas, or something really wild like phoenix by ryo noda - feature similarly complex compositional structures that use extensive dynamics, constant use of the instrument's entire range, and often extended techniques to imitate more than just the one instrument that's being played.  in the case of hide and seek, redman uses slap tonguing to imitate a string bass to mimic a call-and-response between the tenor and 'band', and he intentionally jumps between louder and very soft parts to help add distance to the work. in the case of, say, bach's cello suite no. 1, the full range of the instrument is used to again imitate a group of several instruments playing, complete with constant push-pull of tempi and dynamics to draw out emotions and tell a story within the chord groupings. looking at phoenix (which i know mostly from playing it in 2010, so it's been a minute), there's a huge variety of extended technique used to imitate birdsong, a crackling fire, and the death scream of the eponymous avian, used in concert with the entire breadth of the instrument's dynamic and pitch range.

this arrangement does not use dynamics as a compositional device outside of a very specific section for about 30 seconds in the middle. the majority of the work takes place within an octave range, with a few notes higher and one notable section that is lower with sustains. there are no extended techniques utilized - no glissandi, no microtonal examples (which would be particularly useful when going between the two themes to help represent the disjointed nature of the section), no breath attacks or altered articulation methods outside of triple-tonguing, no mutes or altered horn methods - so there's nothing there to draw the ear either. and again, there's not even vibrato on the few sustains we do have, so there's not even really any contrast ultimately in tsori's timbre throughout. you can say that i'm splitting hairs, but ultimately there is nothing here that stands out as remarkable.

i don't think it's required for a remix to cause someone to sit up and say "that's the best thing i heard all day" and put it on their favorites. there's a ton of room for arthousey weird stuff here that nobody wants to listen to more than once. and i will admit - it's tough to think of an amateur composer identifying and executing a monophonic arrangement that it is technically proficient both for the composer and performer while still being valid for our arrangement standards. i'm sure it can and will be done eventually, but i don't think this is that. it's a neat arrangement exercise, and the performance of what was on the page is fine. however, with fewer elements comes more scrutiny. the performance isn't transcendent and the arrangement is elementary. i don't think this is good enough for the site.

 

 

NO

[Chimpazilla]

The trumpet performance here is truly excellent in my opinion, Brad's specific critiques aside, and the reverb on the instrument is just the right way to mix it.

I'm not familiar with these sources but it does sound like the themes are mixed and matched into a cohesive arrangement, although MW used the phrase "connective tissue" and that's a great way to describe what is missing, making the source connections and also transitions feel much less solid. 

I appreciate Brad's knowledge and insight on this arrangement.  I don't understand every nuance of music theory the way he does, but I feel like he describes perfectly why this track feels so awkward and why it isn't a good fit for OCR.  As I listen to this, I'm struck by the competence of the performance but also by the extreme emptiness of the soundscape and my mind tries to fill sections in with padding or other instruments.  It is very hard to obtain dynamics and emotional flavor in a mono-solo-instrument track such as this; at least with a piano there can be chords in addition to lead lines.  I think it is a bold undertaking and the performance is amazing, I just think it is too empty to stand as a full arrangement for OCR.

NO

[DarkeSword]

On 7/10/2023 at 8:51 AM, prophetik music said:

this arrangement does not use dynamics as a compositional device outside of a very specific section for about 30 seconds in the middle. the majority of the work takes place within an octave range, with a few notes higher and one notable section that is lower with sustains. there are no extended techniques utilized - no glissandi, no microtonal examples (which would be particularly useful when going between the two themes to help represent the disjointed nature of the section), no breath attacks or altered articulation methods outside of triple-tonguing, no mutes or altered horn methods - so there's nothing there to draw the ear either. and again, there's not even vibrato on the few sustains we do have, so there's not even really any contrast ultimately in tsori's timbre throughout. you can say that i'm splitting hairs, but ultimately there is nothing here that stands out as remarkable.

This sums it up for me, to be honest. It's incredibly daring to write a monophonic solo arrangement for any instrument, but if you're going to do it, you've got to do more than what's here. Larry said he's not tired of it after 3 minutes; I'm tuning out after 2. T'sori's good, that's for sure, but most of this arrangement leans hard on triple-tonguing and that's about it. I'm not saying that's easy to do. But it's also not all that interesting to listen to.

Also something that bothers me is that I think given the solo nature of this piece is that it's *really* hard, as a listener, to nail down the tempo and meter at any given time. I feel like there are certain parts where T'sori stops to breathe or moves to another section but the meter simply doesn't line up. What feels like a 6/8 section suddenly becomes 5/8 because of a rushed sustain, or even 11/16, but I feel like that's unintentional and it's just an odd timing flub. This piece feels too short to be divided into movements where the pauses between sections are not tied to meter, but the transitions between sections just feel like "whenever I've caught my breath and am ready to play the next part." Would be interesting to hear this against a click-track that accounted for the intended tempo and meter changes.

I am thrilled to see people attempting arrangements like this, so keep at it, but for this piece in particular I think we need more depth and dynamics, and a tighter performance WRT timing.

NO