ReMix: Star Fox 64 'V to the X Power'

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DZComposer, aka Adan Leal, had his first mix posted back in September of last year, and it didn't fail to impress, especially on the arrangement front, with very energetic, latin-infused coverage of the ill-fated Starfox 2. He now provides the site with another Starfox first, this time taking on McCloud and co.'s Nintendo 64 outing. Starfox 64 was a great example of why the N64's audio hardware really didn't seem like an improvement over the SNES - not to be overly harsh, as it had some good tunes, but at the time Nintendo were hyping the console's "better than CD-quality audio" and for my money SNES soundtracks on the average both sounded better and had more elaborate instrumentation. But I digress - Adan's mix, whose algebraic title triggers my latent mathophobia, employs subtler motifs this go round, with an emphasis on understated orchestral instrumentation focusing on chromatic percussion. The ReMixer writes:

"The V stands for Vibraphone! This piece is a Vibraphone feature (bowed vibes included!). The X stands for Sector X. I've always loved the vibraphone. The metallic, vibratic sound that can be so mysterious, happy, or swingish! This piece doesn't go into swing though. The reason for the psuedo-minimalism is to convey the mysterious feeling from the Sector X level. You arrive at Sector X to destroy an enemy base to find that someone beat you there and destroyed it first! So, you search the area looking for signs of what happened."

And you thought V was for Vendetta... once again, DZC's arrangement is extremely creative, capitalizing on dynamics and the almost inherently spooky/spacey nature of the vibraphone well. At some points the dynamic contrast may be a little too extreme for my taste, as the majority of the mix is rather soft, punctuated intermittently by brash brass flourishes and percussion; I might have either bumped the vibes up a notch or EQ'd their treble higher so they cut through a bit more. This is actually the type of track a BBE Sonic Maximizer could work wonders on - I've started using one again on my more recent mixes; it has a unique ability to add treble presence without butchering the rest of a mix. Larry writes:

"The arrangement here was pretty sharp, doing a lot of creative, interpretive things with the "Sector X" variations, making use of a lot of good instrument combinations, and developing well over its 5+ minutes. On that level, this piece gets the job done. It sizzles, but it doesn't suck."

Adan's definitely spending time on these arrangemets, thinking them through and plotting them out so they both flow and elaborate intelligently on their source material. It's additionally impressive to go from his initial latin mix to this more minimalist classical composition without waning on either of those criteria. Good stuff.

― djpretzel