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Orchestral

Deltarune

Hello, I was always iffy about arranging this track because the melody sounded too fast for an orchestra. My basic self from earlier usually just hands off fast melodies to the violins or some kind of keys instruments and they would just carry the whole thing. That felt wrong for this particular orchestration and wouldn't add much from the original. So my biggest challenge in this arrangement was to preserve the melody in its original form, while being able to hand it off to nearly all the instrument families of the orchestra. It wouldn't be too ridiculous sounding for any section, including brass to have a burst of speed and dexterity right?

In this last year, my master class professor has basically been the Final Fantasy VII Remake soundtrack. The team of composers have arranged 10+ versions of the iconic battle theme, tweaked into many different styles to suit the different locations and contexts of the battles that take place. I kept this in mind and imagined in the full Deltarune game, perhaps there would be many variations of the battle theme. I wasn't going to do 10+ versions of this, so I only explored each of my ideas for a couple measures, then moved on to the next idea. The final track may sound decently cohesive, but the way I utilize the instruments changes from section to section. For example, in one section I may want the piano to support with the syncopated rhythm, and in other places I want it to play like it's baroque period Bach, and have other instruments follow suit or even fight it off.

My orchestral libraries have been able to handle roughly 80% of all articulations, but doing the fast melody while still leaving room for expression really challenged me here. I've always been lazy with the woodwind and brass side, so here I forced myself to utilize samples from 2-3 other libraries for brass and woodwinds, to make them discernable at such high mph, making more use of solo instruments for clarity. I settled at 133 bpm speed for the song (vs 140 in the original track) that I felt is a realistic speed for an orchestra to play that doesn't sound like it's tripping over itself.

The inherent silliness of the arrangement adds to the comedy of the battles that at many times feel more like slapstick hijinks, or even tender character moments. I wanted the instruments to feel like they're goofing off, with none of the intensity of the boss battle tracks I've previously done.

Deltarune Orchestrated will be available on iTunes/Spotify upon completion of the album.

MP3 and FLAC available for Patrons. ► https://www.patreon.com/thesecondnarrator

Arrangement by Jeremiah Sun
Original Theme by toby fox

DELTARUNE Chapter 01 is currently free to download on PC and the Nintendo Switch!

Deltarune Orchestrated

DELTARUNE Orchestrated - Rude Buster

Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata but it's ATTACK ON TITAN STYLE (Rumbling Sonata)

OUT ON ALL PLATFORMS: https://lnk.to/aquatic-ambience

aquatic ambience

Deltarune - 2 Calm Hours in Scarlet Forest (Atmospheric Ambient Orchestral Cover)

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Deltarune - Dark Sanctuary [Orchestral Remix by NyxTheShield]

"Best-of" des pistes du CD que j'ai présenté a la Japan Expo 2011 !

Doll Judgement - Alice Margatroid Medley (Stage + Theme)

Yoko Shimomura - Somnus Orchestra (Final Fantasy XV)

Alternative Age OST - Circus Reverie

I finally managed to arrange my most frequent request. This one was really tough for me to figure out. I a version that I did that sounded pretty awful, so I had to scrap everything and restart from zero. One reason this took me a long time to figure out was because I was unable to understand the flow of the track. The track builds up to a climax early on and then kind of drifts a bit before ending. Luckily, I found a sound that I liked and went with it.

The opening of the fight scene has Asgore treating the player with compassion, offering the player multiple opportunities to step away, because he is reluctant to do battle. We can see the pain from his past experiences that caused him to take the path that he chose. The music reflects this by being less a "boss theme." It is somber, yet resolute.

The big showcase of my orchestration is the thunderous percussion. The majority of my time was spent picking out the various drums I wanted to use, and then coming up with an assortment of rhythms and loops to use in the track. In the original track, the drum beat never changes, and the melodic phrases repeat a lot. As those familiar with my style, I never want to repeat a phrase in identical fashion. The result is what I would call a chaotic but beautiful mess. I don't even know what kind of style my arrangement should be labeled as. There's some Eastern Asian influence, a bit of medieval folklore, and some "Hams Zimmer" and "Hiroyuki Sawano," sensibilities. There is a lot of energy and excitement in my version, which may spoil you from enjoying the original track!

MP3 and FLAC available for Patrons. ► www.patreon.com/thesecondnarrator

Original Song composed by toby fox
Arrangement by Jeremiah Sun

Undertale is available on Steam

Resurrected Memories

Undertale Orchestrated - Bergentrückung & ASGORE

This was the first piece I wanted to arrange, along with Field of Hopes and Dreams (I haven't figured out how to approach that one yet!). What's really exciting here is that I got to build further on techniques and instrumentation I developed from pretty much all my previous Undertale arrangements. Plus I spent a considerable amount of time balancing every instrument, EQ'ing every track to get it sounding good.

My takeaway from the original track and the context of the boss fight is a mix of shock, terror, and some mischief. You know while ascending the palace that the king is not going to grant you access to the fountain, but what surprises you is his disapproval of his son. Not only does he show such disdain, he even relishes in his villainy. This creates a strong motivation to the player to abandon the pacifist method and go all genocide on him.

Hopefully you can tell from listening to my arrangement that I had so much fun with the percussion. After doing the I Am Setsuna track, No Turning Back, I had an itch to make another track with percussion that is intense but still quick on its toes. Nearly all of toby fox's original rhythm is preserved, and I merely layered on top of that.

For others wondering how to orchestrate music, think of it as remastering a game. You don't just copy the same notes and substitute orchestral instruments. That's like slapping on some high-res textures and calling it a day. Does anyone enjoy playing the Final Fantasy games ported to mobile with the smoothed out graphics? You have to remodel everything from scratch with more detail. So for percussion, a trick I use is to subdivide the original rhythm, and then cut it up and distribute it among a bunch of instruments. Give the big booming drums the down beat, and the higher frequency instruments the syncopated and faster 16th note beats. Here are all the percussion patches I used in this song.

Spitfire HZ01 Percussion - Boobams, Paper Djuns
Spitfire HZ02 - Sony Stage Drums
Soundiron Clacks - Bamboo Pole
Cinesamples CinePerc - Taikos, Concert Toms, Tambourines, Tubular Bells, Crash Cymbals, Ensemble Claps + Snaps
QL Stormdrum - Ambient Largeness, Lord of Toms Ensemble, Clacks (Taiko), Spring Drums

I used to only use the stage mic versions of the patches because I naively thought that was the best when trying to recreate the sound of a full orchestra. Here, I experimented a lot with close mic versions, and I discovered that with the right control I can really get the punchy sound of the drums out without having to raise the volume out. This extended to the melodic instruments too, and allowed me to give the cello the same percussive rhythm.

I repeated the first half of the song because it's my favorite part. I had a lot of ideas that I wanted to explore without repeating the entire track. I didn't want to rush into the more intense variation right away because it deserves a build up. If you listen closely, the percussion rhythm in the first run-through is inverted before being restored at the repeat at 1:35. Another first for me in this track is pairing up instruments from different families. I used to keep the woodwinds, strings, and brass separate in their motifs, but here I had them all make friends and do parts solos together, so you'll hear match-ups like Harpischord/Horns, Piccolo/Trumpet, String/Percussion, Brass/Choir. Hope you guys enjoy this!

MP3 and FLAC available for Patrons. ► https://www.patreon.com/thesecondnarrator

Arrangement by Jeremiah Sun

Original Song composed by toby fox
DELTARUNE Chapter 01 is currently free to download

DELTARUNE Orchestrated - Chaos King

Apologies for the long wait. I worked on this track for the entire eight months since last my last update and it was stuck in some serious writers block. First, I am not a big fan of the original track. The harsh strings setting the rhythm in the original, the revolving round, and the reuse of the main theme just made everything feel too repetitive. I decided to just not bother with the last section. Second, I decided not to use any gimmicky instruments, and just stick with the traditional orchestra setup. No piano either. By dealing with a softer, at times slower piece, I needed to spend exponentially more time getting each note nuance to sound right, as they would be under much more scrutiny to a listener. I basically took away the usual tricks I use to mask the imperfections of my orchestral samples, and this was such a headache to deal with. On black friday I went online and bought a ridiculous amount of new orchestral libraries that I anticipate will make my life easier in the future (they are not featured in this track).

My two big reference tracks to draw from for this were the Distant Worlds orchestration of Final Fantasy VI Phantom Forest, and Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker. Phantom Forest in particular I feel does such a good job of evoking the mood of a mysterious forest, and if you close your eyes, you can kind of picture when each instrument flies in and leaves, are like all the lush vegetation stretching to infinity and animals running around everywhere. Pizzicato strings sound much better for the rhythm, and can be pulled back more to give space for the rest of the instruments. The nutcracker shared a similar instrumentation, and I especially like how groups of instruments would just swell in and then leave. Everywhere is just teeming with life. If you were to explore a dense forest on your own, you can look choose where to turn your head, where to approach, where to focus your attention on, see something completely unique. So to imitate that, which toby fox has also accomplished with the round, is you can in the same way focus your ears on listening to a particular instrument, and they are playing their own melody or motif. I try at times to have either a counter-melody, or just basic riffs and chord progressions that if you were to isolate, could sound good on their own. A lot of times I've mixed them all the way down, to the point where you might not really hear it clearly at all, but the knowledge that they're there is satisfying to me.

I guess another big change I should talk about is the overall melancholic and sorrowful tone in my version that's way more pronounced. The sad strings and bright flutes were basically the two things in toby fox's original that I did enjoy, and just speaking musically, I just didn't like that it got more cheerful when it transitioned to the main theme at the end. To fit the scarlet forest better, he probably should have made the strings a bit more happier and mischievous, but he didn't and so I took them and ran with it in the opposite direction. I altered the notation a bit in my version, expanded the middle, and wrote a new ending that just makes you want to cry. It's great!

Deltarune Orchestrated will be available on iTunes/Spotify upon completion of the album.

MP3 and FLAC available for Patrons. ► https://www.patreon.com/thesecondnarrator

Arrangement by Jeremiah Sun

Original Theme by toby fox
DELTARUNE Chapter 01 is currently free to download on PC and the Nintendo Switch

Deltarune - 2 Calm Hours in Scarlet Forest (Atmospheric Ambient Orchestral Cover)

anotha one