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. ► / 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 #ScarletForest #Orchestrated