The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - Boss Battle (Anger of the Guardians) [Revision]

Don't you just love the alternate aLttP track title names? No clue where they came from initially. Much like my Tal Tal Heights revision from earlier this year, today's arrangement follows in similar footsteps: the structure of the original arrangement remains mostly the same, but the instruments are given a much needed update. Here's a brief breakdown:

0:00 - Over time my arrangements have been getting much, much closer in terms of space. A lot of my old covers try to mimic large washed out concert halls, but that's just a style I don't care for as much anymore. You can hear that quite a bit in the intro here, with close mic'd strings and brass making the lead melody crystal clear. 

0:14 - Back in 2020 I had to rely on one-shot samples for string runs, but nowadays samples can mimic them a bit easier.  Pretty happy with how they turned out!

0:25 - You can hear a bit of bass guitar pretty clearly in this section. Might be controversial for an orchestral arrangement, but I like having my lower frequencies pretty evenly down the middle of a mix. In my experience, If you rely on your contrabasses and celli to carry your bass frequencies it can start to sound a bit irritating (In average orchestra seating they are panned pretty hard to the right, and many sample libraries imitate this!) Might be more realistic to have panned string basses, but I like this setup more. Bass guitar just boosts that low end forward a bit! I'll include this in my "weird orchestra opinions" dossier right next to "trumpet should be above horn in score order."  

0:46 - Absent from my original cover, I decided to throw in the obligatory TND reference to the Legend of Zelda theme. That theme'll fit anywhere!

0:57 - It's barely audible, but right here the xylophone is playing the bassline from the aLttP Ganon battle. :)

1:07 - Part of what makes this song so fun to cover is how adaptable it is. It mostly sticks around one tonal center so you can fit in pretty much whatever musical idea you'd like! In this case, Ganon's theme. 

1:18 - At this point in the original I looped back to the beginning, but this time I included the ending portion in both loops because it just sounds so cool! Listen to those strings. 

2:53 - Stick around for the end to hear the "Great Victory" theme, which so naturally accompanies this boss theme. This has got to be one of my favorite victory themes in all of gaming. Koji Kondo's so good at triumphant music. (Honorable mentions to the Spiritual Stone and Medallion Get themes from OoT). 

3:00 - My hope is that the "So-Fi-So-Do" line in the horn makes everyone's soul leave their body. 

That does it for the breakdown! Thank you all so much for listening as always, and I hope you have many happy holidays ahead! If you have any questions about this piece let me know in the comments! <3