Chrono Trigger "Eschala Them" 5:01

Chrono Trigger's 30 years old today! While we recently had Mel Decision mesh "Schala" and "Terra", Rockos now arrives with a musical DnB birthday cake just for Princess Schala! This one's been baking in the oven so long, we might need a time machine to revisit its origins. Or we could just ask Rockos, sure...:

"This is remix started in 2012 for the original version. At that time, I wasn't ready to produce proper drum & bass but I would periodically try my best. I never finished the song but I still liked it for a while. I pretty much don't remember anything precise about inspiration from that year.

Fast-forward today, I fired up the project in late 2023 to replace all the drum sound with my new knowledge of how drum & bass works and how to compress drums properly. I was still on the edge with this one, so I completely removed the drumstep bridge in the middle to redo it and cut the last repeat of the song since it was repeating the first verse with nearly no variation. I got my electric guitar and started jamming on the newly-written drumstep part. I also used my new favorite plug-in, Rift, to add some flavour to my synth and expand the soundscape. Also, this added various elements you would find in psytrance. After that, I went back to the intro, added some more psytrance elements and wrote a second bridge that bridges the first bridge and the last part (yes, 2 bridges before the comeback). And this version sat on my drive for a while.

Fast-forward again to July-August 2024. I picked my guitar and added those crunchy riffs all along and now I was satisfied with the result. Went back and forth in the Workshop for some fresh listening of other people and applied the correction needed to this final version. This remix took a while but the wait made this a really polished song compared to what it was 12 years ago.

Never too late to finish a project! I hope you enjoy as much as I do. (By the way, master is loud.)"

Rockos? Loud? Never! Too late to revisit an old project? NEVER! Judge prophetik music's not a drum-and-bass guy, but he can relate as a Mitsuda fan who knows all about phat beats:

"the added guitar work here is nice and the bass has some fun slides on it. there's a nice break with some really cool resonance artifacts in there at 1:47. right after we get a big half-time original section that feels good and mean for a bit, before another break with some more sound design going on until 2:50 kind of gets back to the driving beat. i like the idea of having the bass on sixteenths but the drums on half-time. this whole middle two minutes of chopping back and forth is a great energy driver and feels great from a build perspective.

and then we get the payoff at 3:33, and it's hair-raising, just what you wanted after all that up and down. it's really hard not to bob your head in this section."

See, proph can't resist a good groove, and neither could then-judge Flexstyle, who was the target demo for this one when it hit the panel:

"I do love me a good DnB track, especially with electric guitars added in. This one hits all my happy points: memorable source? Check. Good interpretation of that source? Check. Simple-yet-effective genre execution? Check. Guitars and EDM combined? Check. Loud but tight master? Check.

also bonus points for the lazy anagram name, I approve."

OMG, tell me about it... I mean, Rockos DID get a quasi-wordplay title going on here. Maybe we should ALL tweak one letter in the source tune's name and see what happens. :-D While the tinkering was much more about the music than the arrangement title, from 1:46-onward Rockos really sealed the deal, taking an already shimmering & mutating genre adaptation in even more distinct directions while also using dynamic shifts and original writing to really put his stamp on things.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to a legendary game, the most-arranged title on OCR by far, and arguably the Western VGM arrangement scene's most inspirational title as well! Don't blow out those candles yet though... we've hung with Schala, but we've still got to visit Schala's kingdom...! ;-)