ReMix:Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! "Think on Your Feet" 3:11

Before we get to the featured track, let's once again give it up to TSori for leading his second OC ReMix album after assembling the team behind Golden Sun: A World Reignited! What made him crazy enough to try something like that again? Well, his family member Lucas M. Thomas happens to be the editor-in-chief of Nintendo Force Magazine, and Lucas has a project, The Impact of Iwata, that needed great music:

"Lucas and I had talked about figuring out how to do some sort of collaborative project between OCR and Nintendo Force since my first remix was posted back in 2017, so I was thrilled when he called and pitched the idea for this album.

He was well into writing his book, The Impact of Iwata, about the life and contributions of Satoru Iwata to Nintendo and the video games industry as a whole. He had brought on several very talented artists to create illustrations for each chapter of the book. However, he also had plans for an audiobook version and suggested that we create an album of ReMixes to serve the same role in the audiobook as the illustrations in the print book. In addition to releasing the album for free on OCR, it would be included, in whole, with the audiobook, and clips of each track would be used between chapters. I loved the idea. We pitched it to OCR staff and they were as enthusiastic about it as we were. So, we got started.

I put up a forum post to recruit, and to my surprise, all 16 tracks were claimed in less than a day! Our lineup of ReMixers is a who's who of great talent on OCR from established veterans to incredible newcomers. Each of them was very excited about the project and it shows in their ReMixes. I have no words to describe just how impressed I have been with the music on this album, so I will let it speak for itself. Suffice it to say, everyone brought their A-game to this project, and it is not only a worthy companion to Lucas's excellent book, but also a fantastic and fitting tribute to Satoru Iwata himself and the role he played in our lives.

We hope you enjoy the products of this unique partnership between OverClocked ReMix and Nintendo Force as we all celebrate the Impact of Iwata!"

This has been an incredibly special collaboration, and having TSori pull together this many talented musicians to support Lucas and Nintendo Force's heartfelt tribute to a legend is a testament to the quality of the VGM arrangement scene. For TSori's own arrangement for the album, he teamed up with Flake and a host of performers:

• Arrangement: TSori, Flake
• Piano: zmand97
• Drumset: Andrew Gossett
• Aux. Percussion: Sean R. Hanson
• Violins: KestrelGirl, ViolinGamer, optimizasean
• Violas: AnimeVivi, KestrelGirl
• Cellos: Chromatic Apparatus
• Guitar: Kalen Scott Thomas
• Bass: myuik
• Saxophones: iCrescendo
• Trombone: Flake
• Trumpets: TSori
• Mixing: PocketCrow

For co-arranger Flake, he was willing to move outside his comfort zone yet also rely on his collaborators for that extra push over the cliff:

"I had never co-arranged a ReMix project before, so when TSori reached out to me to work on arranging a track together I was eager to accept this opportunity to try out this approach. He had chosen a music style I was not familiar with, and I had never played the Brain Age games, so gathering inspiration from the various reference tracks he had at his disposal and working with him to combine it with the quirky source material was both a fun and challenging new experience. We each brought our own ideas to the table, and kept feeding off each other to create new ones together. Out of our back and forth collaboration we created what I believe is a truly unique arrangement that would not have been possible for either of us to do alone, and the performers took it one step further and really gave the track its own life."

TSori went in depth on how things came together. He *might* have had time to fully arrange this piece, if it hadn't been for overcommitting to perform on *other* Impact of Iwata pieces (Whoops!):

"Initially, I had guessed there wouldn't be any requests for a trumpet collab on this album, so I thought I had better claim a track if I wanted to do more than direct it. Brain Age was a game I remember spending a lot time, with so, I thought I'd give that a try. Because the Brain Age sources don't have much in the way of melody it seemed like a good idea good to arrange it in a more rhythmically-driven style. I was an avid locker (funkstyle street dance) when I was at university, so I patterned the arrangement after the kind of music I danced to then.

It turned out I couldn't have been more wrong about how many collab requests I'd get. Combine that with work, and pretty soon, I was swamped with neither the time nor creative bandwidth to finish the arrangement I started. I reached out to Flake, who I had collaborated with several times before and know to be basically boundlessly creative. Thankfully, he was available and interested. So I sent him what I had started writing out, and talked him through what I was going for. He framed out the other 70% or so of the track right away and we started trading a draft arrangement back and forth, building on each other's ideas tii we had a full score. This was a truly collaborative arrangement. In fact, our "complete" score had only placeholders for all of the percussion, guitar, and bass. Sean Hanson, Andrew, Kalen, and myuik essentially wrote their own parts in the track in addition to providing superb performances.

I always try to do as much of a track as possible with live performers, and for this genre I think it was essential. That meant it was going to be a very big collab. There are a lot of familiar names from my previous OCR outings, and several new ones. They all turned in stellar performances on what is, at points, a deceptively tricky arrangement to perform. Some of those string licks are quite tough, but KestrelGirl, AnimeVivi, ViolinGamer, optimizasean, and Chromatic Apparatus delivered great performances.

zmand97 and iCrescendo, on piano and saxes, respectively, carried almost all of the source melody throughout the track. Their performances are the core of the ReMix and they both gave the track exactly what it needed to both be a familiar Brain Age tune as well as something new.

Flake and I rounded out the ensemble as the brass section, with Flake putting his trombone skills on display, and me getting an excuse to dust off my old lead jazz mouthpiece and put it to use again.

PocketCrow answered the call for mixing, and though I had never worked with him before, he impressed the heck out of me with the quality of his work and his understanding of how to balance the ensemble.

This is the album version of the track so we owe our thanks for mastering this track and the album as a whole to ZackParrish.

Hope you all enjoy "Think on Your Feet"!"

So nice to thank everyone, and I'd be remiss not to also thank DarkeSword (website & torrent), Hemophiliac (videos), José the Bronx Rican (trailer), and Darkflamewolf (collaboration space) as well for their parts in bringing this album release to fruition. DarkeSword in particular was the epitome of "Think on Your Feet"! Meanwhile, judge prophetik music spoke well for the panel's sentiment; a groovy groove where the performers were locked in that was capped off by amazing post-production:

"what a stack of performers credits! excited to hear this one.

percs come in at about 0:07, and we get a bass and piano groove at 0:15. more horns are in at 0:30, and we get a variety of stabs and rhythmic elements through this section the Menu theme. guitar in particular is really set into the mix well here, it's hard imo to balance an electric in a jazz stack and it's done well here.

1:25 is the next section the sax parts are more active here. drum work in here is particularly impressive. after a percussion break, there's the title material again and then the menu. i agree that the string licks could have been messy but they're well-done. the track as a whole is a lot brighter and louder in this section and it's fun to hear everyone doing their thing here after how light some of the earlier arrangement was handled. there's a final flourish and it's done.

this is an interesting idea for what's essentially a melody-less remix. i think this definitely hits the mark. it's more backing track for a las vegas montage than it is standalone track, but i think that's fine given the goal here. nice job realizing the underlying potential in such an odd place."

Light-hearted jazzy disco funk is the order of the day from TSori, Flake, and crew, who felt like they channeled some of Satoru Iwata's best traits: fun, upbeat, exploratory, ambitious, and accessible. What a wonderful way to invoke Brain Age, a project Iwata's vision directly made possible, from one of 16 great ReMixes on a project TSori & Lucas's vision made possible, The Impact of Iwata! :-)