About time for another SNES song, this is the Forest of Monsters theme from Super Castlevania 4, otherwise known as the Stage 2 theme! This is a classic, moody piece that's one of several standouts on Castlevania 4, featuring a memorable bass line, eerie keyboard parts, and drums that feature an unusual amount of distortion and gated reverb!
For tracking, I used a number of stock sounds on the Yamaha PSR-282, which for a sub-professional keyboard, actually sound pretty good with a minor amount of reverb and delay added. The church organ part was the most difficult to learn, requiring about 3 weeks to get the various patterns internalized. The bass was also surprisingly difficult on this song, some of the fills particularly in the turn around section were quite difficult to get up to tempo. Lastly, the main drum fill in the song (the one that begins the song), is simply not an easy pattern and also took quite a bit of repetition to get to tempo. Finally, I added a guitar part that mainly doubles a few of the main keyboard parts in the song, and used it in lieu of the solo in the turn around section. I think I probably could have learned this solo on keyboard, but I wanted something in the arrangement to differ from the SNES soundtrack a little. The guitar is double tracked, as well as the bass. I double tracked the bass to get just a little more attack on a few of the fills that got lost in the mix in my initial take.
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