OCR04714 - *YES* Castlevania: Symphony of the Night & Metroid Fusion "Smoke & Marbles"

[Emunator]

Credits

Emunator: Primary arrangement, piano writing and performance, vibraphone

Zack Parrish: Additional arrangement, guitar performance, bass and drum programming, mixing & mastering

Lucas Guimaraes: Voice & sound design (intro)

Comments

This is our submission from round 2 of the Metroid vs. Castlevania Game Set Mash! competition. Obviously, because nobody in their right mind would ever willingly choose to mash up these two sources. The real "mystery" is why the hell we picked this source in the first place.

This piece was a bit of a rush job. The original concept for the mashup came from JSABlixer, who wanted to arrange a multi-instrument Insaneintherain-style jazz piece. Lucas also contributed a rough MIDI skeleton expanding on the idea (as well as the voices and ambiance you hear in the intro!) but after playing with it, we realized we didn't have the time or resources to do something so elaborate, and the approach just wasn't going to be feasible on a deadline. So we essentially started from scratch with roughly 2 days before the deadline.

I've never written a jazz piece before, or really performed piano extensively on an arrangement before. That said, I wanted to honor the original vision from JSA and Lucas as closely as possible, even though we were starting the arrangement from scratch, so I dove in headfirst anyway. Zack quickly joined on to save the day with his mindblowingly-realistic bass and drum programming, and laid down some guitar riffs over the track as well. We worked closely together to polish everything up, and with a combined 40 hours of work over 2 days, mustered a buzzer-beater of a track that we submitted within a few hours of the final deadline. The source usage is loose and interpretive but present throughout most of the track, so for the millions of diehard fans of the perennial VGM classic "Environmental Mystery" from Metroid Fusion, you're in for a real treat here.

[prophetik music]

"The real "mystery" is why the hell we picked this source in the first place." i admit i was wondering who in their right mind would pick EM of all tracks. it doesn't even have a triad that exists in western music theory for the entire piece. how do you arrange that?

opens with some piano noodling and lucas repeating the phrase "environmental mystery" :< and then moves into a really nice loose jazz feel. guitar is sublime. the bass and drum writing is also excellent. i was amazed to hear you actually lean into the EM augmented triad by expanding it into a broken chord and then adding a 5 to ape lydian mode. what an excellent idea to make this into a real track.

emu, if i had to suggest anything about your piano playing, i'd say to lean more into avoiding the I and V of any given chord. the bass is there to handle where the root of the chord. piano should be focusing more on the color tones (which is why jazz has such weird chords) throughout. what you did here is fine and does a nice job carrying the harmonic basis for everything else, but there's a lot of room for some really fun voicings if you unpin your left pinky from the root of every chord.

there's a nice break at about 2:02 with some call and response before we get a big drums-driven shout section. again the drums here are just so good. there's an ensemble section immediately after this, and then we get some side-by-side work in the piano and guitar to the outro.

what a great take on two diametrically opposed tracks. this works really well all the way through as an interpretive and ensemble-heavy approach to two tracks that don't really have much in common at all. i'd have thought the drums were live if i wasn't told they were programmed, and the keys and guitar really carry the track. excellent job.

 

 

YES

Edited April 29 by prophetik music
forgot to actually post a vote result, lol

[Liontamer]

@Emunator Need a source tune breakdown; help a brother out!

[Emunator]

:44 - 1:25 (everything) | A melody and chord progression from Marble Gallery (0:00 in source)

1:25-1:52 (everything) | B melody from Marble Gallery (0:20 in source)

2:03-2:08 (piano) | Environmental Mystery

2:19-2:35 | Environmental Mystery

2:35-3:05 (piano) | Bridge from Marble Gallery (:57 in source)

3:20-3:31 (guitar) | Environmental Mystery

130 seconds/211 = 62% sources usage

 

@Liontamer Feeling generous today? ;0

[Hemophiliac]

So much to love here. Actually love how free flowing this is and how loose the playing/tempo is. Letting Marble Gallery be the main shell that contains everything was a wise choice, especially considering the misery that is Environmental Mystery.  Speaking of...did I hear Lucas say "Environmental Mystery" and "Marble Gallery" in the intro talking?  Is that like the remix version of a rapper calling out their name in a track? XD

Everything is very forward into the mix, but feeling like they occupy the same room. Very clean sound, excellent work on that mixdown.

I want to echo something prophetik mentioned about chord voicing on the piano in this context. You can easily remove the 1 and 5 from a chord and still retain the quality/function. The bass will often be taking that 1, and the 5 doesn't actually pull very much so it allows you to put in so much more to add color.  I'd be happy to talk more with you regarding this if you'd like to. When you switch to comping it's effective in accenting and deemphasizing various implied rhythm. Though the rhythm is not the focus here, it's the atmosphere.

I like how Environmental Mystery was worked in a B section because it's so dramatically different from Marble Gallery. The transition and development into bringing us into Environmental Mystery is so important in getting us ready for such a big change, great job there. It's just a huge contrast no matter how you look at it.

No real complaints here at all. Would've preferred hollow body guitar sound, but that's not for me to determine what's correct.

YES

 

[MindWanderer]

For never having written a jazz piece, this sounds pretty fantastic. A little less cerebral than people who do a lot of jazz often get, but that's a plus for me. Fantastic sample usage that could fool most listeners into thinking it was a studio recording; it doesn't quite sound like a live lounge like the crowd noises suggest, but it still sounds great. The integration of Environmental Mystery can never be anything but a weird choice, but you at least made it sounds like it was your weird choice and not that it was forced on you by the compo format. The last couple of measures really made it work.

Fantastic job.

YES

[Liontamer]

:43.75-1:23, 1:25-1:29.5, 1:38.5-1:39.75, 1:41.5-1:42.5, 1:48.5-1:50.5, 2:02.75-2:08, 2:19.25-2:46.5, 2:49.5-2:54.5, 2:57.75-3:05.5, 3:20.75-3:31 = 103.5 seconds or 50.61% source usage

I'm sure there's stuff I overlooked, but some of the claimed usage felt liberal and/or fleeting, so I wanted to stopwatch it myself.

Track was 3:24.5-long (ignoring non-music talking, :07.5-:14.5, before the intro), so I needed to ID the source tunes in play for at least 102.25 seconds to consider the source tunes as dominant.

Alright, Emu gave an arrangement breakdown, and I compared it against what I could recognize; I'm good. The musicianship was solid, I just needed to understand the arrangement's construction. A lil' cerebral of an approach, but certainly jazzy and sophisticated. :-)

YES