Hometown Heroes: Town Themes Arranged Comments from album director Emery Monzerol (DaMonz) & ReMixers Album freely available at http://hometown.ocremix.org Once again, I was very lucky to work with the talented and passionate members of the OCR community. Hometown Heroes offers a neat little package of emotions, most of which are nice and warm and comforting. Being home, missing home, and returning home are recurring themes that create a nice range of feelings as explored by the different contributors to this project. Even though the concept of the project is restrictive to town themes, the multiple interpretations still make it a nice, varied experience. Every individual piece brings something different to the table. As a contributor, which is how I started with this project, Hometown Heroes has been an interesting change of pace for me. Usually, my music-making tendencies are a bit on the crazy side of things, with occasional exceptions. This is one of those exceptions, and it's good to take a deep breath and to make things with a BPM slower than 160 once in a while. - Emery Monzerol (DaMonz) -------------------------------------------------- 01. Lemonectric - "A Bag Full of Kinstones" Sources: Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap - "Hyrule Town," "Picori Festival" Original Composer: Mitsuhiko Takano DaMonz: To start things up, Lemonectric (formerly known as Hylian Lemon) gets the ball rolling with a cheerful, chippy, groovy piece of awesomeness. The minimalist (and deliciously quirky) sound design used by Ben for this track and the simple (but clever and very effective) arrangement are, in my opinion, extremely fitting for setting the mood of the album. It sets expectations to be just where they should be: this album offers a comfortable listen, but it's not all about being, as djp put it, "serene and pastoral." It's also about having fun. Truly great work by Ben, as always! 02. djpretzel - "A Town That's Right for Me" Source: Phantasy Star III - "Town" Original Composer: Izuho Takeuchi djpretzel: So, which town is right? Why, Funkytown, of course! I took the concept of Hometown Heroes in a specific direction: I wanted to make a mix where I felt comfortable & completely free of expectation. Unconditional, if you will. There's a pattern/tradition with town or village themes, especially when it's the hero or heroine's hometown, to make the music very serene and pastoral. I wanted to subvert that a bit because to me, when I think of home, I think of more than just serenity & tranquility. I think of silliness, of laughter, and really of all manner of things -- even things like disagreements or sadness. I think more of family, I suppose, when I think of returning home, and my concept of family isn't fully captured by serene and pastoral. So, I chose a game that was near and dear to me -- Phantasy Star III. This was a game I escaped into while my parents were going through a divorce, growing up. It's not regarded as the high point of the series, but I loved it, and I loved the music. The town theme is mostly peaceful, but it has a unique twist to a starker, less intimate progression that is characterized by trills/oscillations. It's a little weird, but that's good for my purposes. And then, well, yeah... if I'm doing whatever I want, I'm probably going to throw in some funk. And why not an old-school beat with a mile-wide kick? And I happen to love electric pianos, so two of those (Spectrasonics Keyscape)... and a clavinet (ditto)... and just the squishiest, moistest synth funk bass I could manage (Trillian) -- somebody get it a towel. Style-wise, this is something like "Broadway Synth Funkstep" and there are glitch FX and risers, and sequenced pitch FX, and a leading EP that operates in a mostly-quantized realm until it's freed up (i.e. played live) for the breakdown... where a choir comes in, with the sound of leaves. This is also the first ReMix I've finished in Ableton Live, which I now love. So, it's musical passing images from different moments/aspects of family life, but it's also a consciously-indulgent chimera of things I thought would be fun. Props to DaMonz for resurrecting this unique effort and for a talented team of arrangers & a skilled visual artist for bringing it together in its best form, a worthy tribute to a specific archetype within the world of video game music! 03. DaMonz - "Where It All Began" Source: Golden Sun - "Vale & Vault" Original Composer: Motoi Sakuraba DaMonz: When I first met my high school friends, Golden Sun was at the center of what brought the four of us together. Even though it's a single-player game and we never played together, we loved the game so much that we kept talking about it together. We kept sharing our experiences with each other, talking about differents ways to play, different strategies, digging for all the little secrets the game had to offer. We invented stories based on its lore. We challenged each other to recall specific details of the game. To this day, we even still have customized matching shirts depicting the four elemental Djinn, and we wear them when we meet. I made this arrangement with all of that in mind. The town of Vale is where Isaac and Garet initiate their grand journey, but for me, it is also where the Four Horsemen (the self-proclaimed title of our small group) began our own silly stampede through life. I wanted the arrangement to feel quite close to the original, but I threw in a few extra spoonfuls of contemplative nostalgia in remembrance of those simpler times with my friends. 04. Jamphibious - "Bossa de Moga" Source: Monster Hunter Tri - "Village on the Sea, Moga" Original Composer: Tadayoshi Makino Jamphibious: Monster Hunter may not be the most traditional RPG, but I've enjoyed it on many levels and felt it could fit the theme of the album. My first game in the series was Monster Hunter Tri on the Wii, and, while I would never consider myself a pro at the games, I've always enjoyed the thrill of the hunt. I decided to remix the hometown from that game, Moga Village. I spent mant hours in the quaint little hub village, and it has some lovely melodies and chord progressions that I felt I could do something with. I initially started this mix quite some time ago, and I'm not really sure if I nailed the bossa style, but I really enjoyed putting it together and paying tribute to the game that sparked my interest in this fantastic series! 05. Jorito feat. Furilas, Chris | Amaterasu, XPRTNovice - "Feelings of Hometownishness" Sources: Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes - "Town" Original Composers: Mieko Ishikawa, Masaaki Kawai Jorito: This mix was almost a year in the making. Originally, it started out as an experiment with Bitwig, a new DAW that I just got. I started messing around with Bitwig, refound this track (ooh, the nostalgia! I vividly remember playing this game!) and, soon enough, I got a decent version of the remix going with a nice, soothing, comfy vibe while learning how to use Bitwig at the same time. After a bit more work, I liked the track so much that I thought I'd offer it to the Hometown Heroes album project here on OCR. Of course, my MIDI parts (especially the blues harp!) wouldn't give the best impression, so I went scouting for people willing to collaborate with me on this track. Finding somebody to play the harp seemed to be the hardest, but I stumbled upon Mac who could help out and who really brought my MIDI part to life with some extra twists and dynamics. I never worked with live violin before, and Chris was nice enough to take a gamble with me and he did a great job in his parts (even though he found my MIDI parts to be already pretty realistic). Trumpet, finally, was provided by Joe, with some changes needed to the original parts because they were out of range. The only other lead instrument is the hollowbody guitar, courtesy of ISW Archtop. I just acquired it, and it seems to fit the track very, very well. I'm pleased to share the track with you for your enjoyment. Hope it evokes the same calm, relaxed, homely feelings of belonging and better days in you as it's stirring in me. :) Or, as Furilas succinctly puts it: "It made my heart feel nostalgic, my brain feel activated, and my lips feel oddly aroused." You gotta give it to the man, he has a flair with words. 06. Eino Keskitalo - "Pale Ale from Bale" Source: Legend of Dragoon - "Royal Capital" Original Composer: Dennis Martin Eino Keskitalo: This track has taken the long way around. Originally, I made it for the Meat 'n Potatoes competition, round #22 back in 2014 to be specific. Big props right here for HoboKa hosting the compo, hey! Blaine picked this track as the source. One of the things about MnP is that you should aim to capture the spirit of the original track, so the source usage is somewhat straightforward in my arrangement. I wanted to do something quick and simple, so I fired up Renoise, put a C64 drum loop on, figured out an easy, somewhat droning guitar riff off of the source and built from there with a bunch of synth samples. The structure is simple and repeating, but I tried to put in a lot of small-scale variation, especially when continuing the work after the competition. The guitar recording quality is a bit poor, I'm afraid, but I'm into pretty lo-fi stuff anyway.. After the competition, I joined the Hometown Heroes project and continued to work on the track. That time, Hometown Heroes died out, and I moved this to another, PSX-focused project and sent the track in for OCR evaluation. I got some excellent feedback, and did a lot of chiseling and sanding away on the mix and some general darling-killing to make parts different from each other, and introduced the marimba instrument into the arrangement. By this time, the PSX project had died, and Hometown Heroes was back up... so, here we are in that regard! Originally, I didn't address the ending, even though it was a sticking point for all three judges, hoping that changing what went before would make it work better, but since the project director DaMonz felt the unresolved chord at the end was a bit strange, I figured it wasn't doing what I wanted it to do and had it resolve. Even though responding to the feedback meant a lot of work, in the end it's a good way to learn. I'm much more pleased with the outcome and I hope to apply what I've learned into future arrangements... in an earlier stage of the process. Thanks also to Pirjo and Jorito for input! Quite fun to see this track come out after so much time. 07. XPRTNovice - "Wedding Day" Source: Xenogears - "My Village Is Number One" Original Composer: Yasunori Mitsuda XPRTNovice: Xenogears is probably one of my favorite games of all time. The village theme for Xenogears is also one of my favorite village themes, but the plot of the game occurs in such a way that the village isn't exactly a very happy place. I wanted to take the theme and translate it into something that reflected the tragedy of wedding day. I wanted to keep it morose and depressing, and I also wanted it to be fairly simple. 08. Earth Kid - "Dream 'til Tomorrow" Source: Final Fantasy VI - "Kids Run Through the City" Original Composer: Nobuo Uematsu Earth Kid: "Kids Run Through the City" from Final Fantasy VI has always felt like it should be a lullaby to me, especially after hearing Risa Ohki sing it on the Final Fantasy Vocal Collections I: Pray arrangement album many years ago. For my rendition, I decided to go for a more bare, subdued arrangement using harp, piano, a couple vocal layers, and a little tenor recorder. I sang, wrote the lyrics, and performed all the instruments myself. The source has a lot of personal meaning to me -- I sang this melody to my son every night when he was a baby. (Until, of course, he turned 2-going-on-20 and decided he didn't want to be sung to at bedtime anymore!) I wrote the first draft of lyrics and initial concept of my arrangement in 2016, and then I recently had an opportunity to bring it to life for the Hometown Heroes album. The two years in between initial concept and completion gave me additional perspective and parenting experience, inspiring me to refine the lyrics to their current state. Final Fantasy VI has another relevant element to it that I feel many other games don't have: one of its main characters finds love and happiness in the role of a mother. So, as I wrote the lyrics, I also imagined this being something that Terra Branford would sing to her children in Mobliz. In making this arrangement, I wanted to pay homage to one of my all-time favorite video games while also composing a personal message to my child that I hope other parents or parental figures may find relatable. Enjoy! 09. Jorito feat. Earth Kid - "Home Again" Source: Suikoden III - "Cheerful Farm Village (Chisha Village BGM)" Original Composers: Takashi Yoshida, Masahiko Kimura, Keiko Fukami Jorito: When Hometown Heroes got its inception many moons ago, I immediately jumped in, since I am a sucker for RPGs and their music. Sadly, the album got a few false starts, and the 2 tracks I originally wrote for it (an arrangement of Ys 3 "Town of Redmont" and one of Dragon Slayer 6's "Town") got repurposed since, ending up on OCR and on another album. However, when DaMonz pinged me in May 2018 that he would restart the album, to make an EP with a short release cycle, I was immediately intrigued again. It also meant that I had to find another track to remix, since my original tracks were already released. After some deliberation, I thought it would be great to pay homage to the Suikoden series again, an -- in my opinion -- underrated RPG series with great (and different) music. I stumbled upon the Chisha town theme early on and felt it would be a good tune to turn into a chill-out electronic track with vocals -- quite heavily inspired by La Félix's track "Take the Night" and some zircon tracks. The catchy, repetitive main part got repurposed for the chorus, while the second violin part (which starts at 1:07 in the source track) made for the main verse parts, as well as the calmer bridge part (where it plays at half speed). Because the lead material from the source is quite busy and hard to fit in a slower track like this, I opted to essentially split it in 2 parts; the first part (the call) as a vocal, and the second part (the response) in the flutes. Combined with the song structure (which has quite some breaks and transitions in there), I think it turned out rather well. As in basically any other track, not being a good singer, I had to find somebody to collab with. Fortunately, I've worked with Earth Kid a few times before, and she was totally up for it. She did the bulk of the lyrics and the vocals, with me making suggestions and additions in the background for both lyrics and vocals. All in all, I am really pleased with how it turned out, and I'm glad I managed to find enough time to actually make it and contribute to the album. Hope it feels like home again. 10. Jorito feat. Gamer of the Winds, prophetik music - "Take It Easy" Source: Legend of Heroes V - "A Peaceful Time" Original Composers: Hirofumi Matsuoka, Atsushi Shirakawa, Masaru Nakajima, Hayato Sonoda, Hirokazu Matsumura, Wataru Ishibashi Jorito: I finished my first contribution to album fairly quickly, and despite a crazy busy schedule, I couldn't help but do another track, simply because I like the concept so much. The aforementioned crazy schedule made a simpler track a necessity, and I've always wanted to try my hand at some bossa nova, for the simple reason of not having made a bossa nova track before. Genre settled, I browsed YouTube for a suitable source track. I stumbled upon the first village track from Falcom's Legend of Heroes 3: Song of the Ocean, a game I played a lot on my PSP. Since the game music was catchy and I'm a long time fan of Falcom's music (going back to early 90s, yikes!), it was an easy choice and the arrangement came together quickly. I always knew I wanted live performances for the lead instruments in this track. I quickly settled on flute to take the lead in this track, but I also wanted another lead instrument, something that could interplay with and complement the flute part. After some deliberation, I felt a saxophone would fit the bill just perfectly and would work great in the overall soundscape. As luck would have it, I knew exactly who would be able to deliver a great performance and on short notice. After reaching out to Gregory (Gamer of the Winds) and BRAD (prophetik music; and, don't look at me, he signs his messages like that) to see if they would be game, they immediately liked the concept and were on board. They both delivered great performances, and their parts really shine in the otherwise sparse track. It was also a great excuse to record myself on kalimba and shakers, because live recordings are better and more fun than MIDI. All in all, I really like how it came out, despite it being a pretty simple song (just 10 tracks rather than the usual 50+!). Can't help but chill out after listening to it, and to me it definitely invokes the warm, fuzzy, relaxed feelings of home. prophetik music: I got to know Jorito a bit during our work on the Chrono Cross project, and I really enjoyed his eye for detail, his interesting adaptations of themes that I'd not have expected, and his work ethic and speed of response. He contacted me recently to record the second lead for this song, and I immediately said yes once I heard the WIP. I've always enjoyed the bossa nova style as a saxophonist -- Woody Herman and Stan Getz are some of my favorite musicians! -- so this was right in my wheelhouse. Jorrith sent over a version with live flute from Gamer of the Winds, and, within a few hours of me sending over my parts, he had a solid demo that was pretty close to done. I hope everyone enjoys it! 11. DDRKirby(ISQ) - "Me and My Game Boy" Source: Brave Fencer Musashi - "A White Cloud in the Sky" Original Composer: Tsuyoshi Sekito DDRKirby(ISQ): Wow, I didn't realize this until now, but it's been *16 years* since Beatdrop's "Diet Thirstquencher" remix and the Brave Fencer Musashi OST still hasn't gotten any love! Well, I'm here to change that! This mix comes at the behest of DaMonz, who recruited me to write a track for the Hometown Heroes project. I settled on the town theme for Brave Fencer Musashi because... well, it's really got such a great "town music" vibe! Peaceful and fun, with a hint of nostalgia... you can really just imagine yourself strolling through the village and visiting all of the townsfolk. Definitely one of the highlights of the OST. When setting out to do a rearrangement, I often try to start with some key directions in which I'll try to differentiate from the original source, as that helps me avoid auto-piloting into just doing a straight cover. For this mix, I wanted to first and foremost translate the song into chiptune instrumentation, but also wanted to play around with a swung rhythm, as I felt like that could be fun (spoiler alert: it works really well!). I actually ended up going back and forth between swing and straight rhythms in the different sections of the remix, as I liked what both styles had to offer. For the instrumentation, I really wanted to roll with the nostalgia vibe that I associate with this song and tried to evoke an image of "the good ol' days" of just carrying around a Game Boy and jamming out to some chiptunes without a care in the world. Most of the arrangement is done in my usual lush "9-bit" style, but I also wanted to have some sections where I dialed things back a bit and made it sound more like a traditional 8-bit arrangement to specifically evoke the Game Boy imagery. For example, the little rhythmic "blips" at 1:32-1:50 along with the "confirm sounds" are supposed to be like sound effects from text boxes in an old RPG. This was a fun one for sure! 12. DaMonz feat. Christine Giguère, Denis Bluteau - "Sweet Dreams, Koholint" Sources: Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening - "Mabe Village," "Ghost House" Original Composers: Minako Hamano, Kozue Ishikawa, Kazumi Totaka DaMonz: This one has a fairly simple story to it. I am a huge fan of the Zelda franchise, and Link's Awakening is one of my favorites of the series. So, during the development of the Hometown Heroes project, I randomly had the whole concept idea of this arrangement. My mother Christine Giguère provided the cello performance, and Denis Bluteau, one of our family's closest friends, provided the flute performance. The recordings happened in none other than Sébastien "Trainbeat" Dufour's studio. Sébastien also happens to be my mother's husband, so this entire endeavor ended up being a nice family effort. I'm very happy with the end result, and I'm very grateful for everyone's contribution!