Final Fantasy VII "Plus Musici, Plus Victoriae" 7:38

Alright... so, uhh... dayum. This is quite a number of collaborators here. So many that we even leaned on the ultra-rare "various artists" in the MP3 metadata. :-) From DoD's Super Smash Bros. Month, resident moonshot man ZackParrish cooked up an epic doozy of a "One-Winged Angel" arrangement with a metric megaton of live performers:

• Arrangement, Production: ZackParrish
• Vocal Arrangement: colorado weeks
• Percussion Arrangement: paradiddlesjosh
• Guitar Arrangement: pixelseph

• Mixing, Mastering: Ridley Snipes
• Editing: Ridley Snipes, ZackParrish
• Editing (vocals): prophetik music
• Lyrics: colorado weeks
• Sound Design: Emunator

Orchestra:

• Violin (lead): Shea's Violin
• Violin, Viola: KestrelGirl
• Cello: Chromatic Apparatus
• Contrabass: Travis Kindred
• Trumpet: TSori
• French Horn: JohnStacy
• Trombone: Xaleph
• Flute: Gamer of the Winds
• Oboe: Pearl Pixel
• Bassoon: Andrew Gossett
• Saxophones: prophetik music
• Harp: Nicole Chang
• Percussion (programmed): paradiddlesjosh
• Percussion (performed): Mel Decision

Band:

• Lead Guitar: pixelseph
• Rhythm Guitar: pixelseph, Jabo
• Bass: Jabo
• Drums (programmed): paradiddlesjosh

Choir:

• Soprano: colorado weeks, Earth Kid, KestrelGirl, Linnea Burr, Nicole Chang
• Alto: colorado weeks, Earth Kid, KestrelGirl, Sirenstar
• Tenor: Aeroprism, Andrew Gossett, Lucas Guimaraes, paradiddlesjosh, pixelseph, Xaleph
• Bass: Andrew Gossett, Cyril the Wolf, Hemophiliac, Lucas Guimaraes, paradiddlesjosh, prophetik music

This unreal credits list just filled up an entire screen, so let's leave the floor to fearless leader ZackParrish, who tracked this stacked, out-of-whack (not-so-serious) art attack:

"When I first set out to work on this project, I had no ambitions to make it the size and scope that it became. I originally reached out to the dynamic duo, Pixels & Paradiddles, and was going to just do your typical rock opera, less the vocals, with the three of us. We were going to tick off doing "OWA" on our bucket lists and that was that. Over the course of about... 2 days, the team for the track grew to about 10 as I maxed out the group chat limit very quickly by adding people. Why? Emunator and I decided to have a direct competition with each other (which he ended up beating me on, but we were also on each other's tracks at the end so it didn't really make any difference at that point). Essentially, once we challenged each other to a duel for Dwelling of Duels, I tapped on every person I considered a great asset at the time. People I regularly use for cases where I need the best. There were, of course, a couple of new faces involved early on as well that I had never collabed with, namely Hemophiliac and Kirina. But the rest of the crew was familiar with my shenanigans and knew the assignment right out of the gate. Go big or go home. And thus it... multiplied how many people were involved because I realized having a handful of vocalists wasn't going to cut it, and if I'm doing orchestra... why not find an entire orchestra?

So I had to create an entire Discord server to dedicate to this project. I sketched out the gist of the structure of the piece and started working on a rough draft with orchestral samples, without any guitars, vocals, etc. I decided this time around I'm going to spread the responsibility of the different components to people that I feel were much stronger in these respective areas than I... so I tapped paradiddlesjosh for all things percussion (writing, coordination, programming, performance, etc.), pixelseph for all things guitar/bass-related, colorado weeks for all things vocals, and then Ridley Snipes was a late addition to handle the mixing/mastering of the stems for everything. With that, we set on our way over a few weeks of throwing ideas out there in a slew of channels on the server dedicated to each section.

Meanwhile, I kept adding more and more people, some of which were referred to me by others that had joined already... to increase not only the size of our choir but the size of our orchestra. At one point, we started jesting about trying to recruit all of the judges at OCR at the time. It was a brief thought at the time, but we clearly didn't go through with it. It was later revealed by prophetik that the rule doesn't actually exist and that it is more of a principle of theirs not to vote on their own tracks. Honorable to say the least.

Eventually, I had... I don't even know how many people anymore signed up to perform parts covering almost the entirety of the wind and string portions of the ensemble, 2 guitarists (also covering electric bass), 2 drummers (one programmed, the other performed), full-on chamber choir that proph took the helm on syncing up the stems and pre-mixing so Ridley didn't have as much of an undertaking, and well... that's that. I tried to have Emunator more involved, but he was tied up on his own track pretty heavily, so his involvement was mostly around sound design. As the parts rolled in for each respective section, the track started to come alive and doing test renders of everything were more and more exciting. Was this a bad idea to try and do something so ambitious while also in the 2nd month of my new job? Absolutely. I am still recovering from it mentally, but the journey to completion was a fun one. Witnessing everybody that was involved getting so excited to be a part of the project, have fun crafting the end result, and then experience the joy of hearing the final mix as we launched it into the DoD sun... had its own rewards.

They all brought their A-game and, despite some comments that would suggest otherwise, I truly feel like they all came together to create a great rendition of the theme. It's a theme I've wanted to tackle for over a decade and they gave me the opportunity to do it with gusto. It was an honor to work with all of them and, even though I may never do something to this scale again, they are all on my radar to work with again in the future."

Judge Chimpazilla summarizes our Sephiroth battle short and sweet:

"Wow, this is insane indeed, and it is giving me Trans-Siberian Orchestra vibes in the best possible way. What an impressive list of artists contributing to this, and the mix sounds so professional. [...]

This is absolutely astounding."

It took a village, so give it up to colorado weeks, Pixels & Paradiddles, Ridley Snipes, prophetik music, and alllllll of Zack's performers that brought an astonishing, ambitious seven-minute FF7 vision to fruition!