ReMix: Final Fantasy VI 'Locke's Theme for Brass Quintet'

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VHD wins our latest incarnation of the most-intuitive-mix-title ever award. The ReMixer writes:

"This--as the title indicates--is an arrangement of "Locke's Theme" from Final Fantasy 6 for a brass quintet consisting of 2 trumpets, french horn, trombone and tuba."

WYSIWYG, indeed. I'm a former low brass player (euphonium, represent) who also played trumpet for a bit, and one of my sisters played the french horn (the other went the dark path of "woodwind" with the clarinet), so let me just say that it's great to see ensemble arranging for brass hit OverClocked ReMix in such style. If you've ever seen Canadian Brass live, or similarly awe-inspiring ensembles, you know just how vast a range of style, dynamic, and tone all-brass instrumentation can achieve. To fully appreciate the scope of what VHD's doing here, though, you need to fully understand how all the nuance, articulation, and tonality of a brass instrument is inevitably lost to varying extents when emulated using samples, no matter the quality. In this case the samples are pretty high quality, but moreover, the ReMixer uses a wide variety of articulations and velocities, not trying to mask limitations of samples by compromising his arrangement... and it still sounds damn good. Nearly all the judges touched on this topic in their decisions, and in this case the believability of the sounds used is inextricably tied to the high quality arrangement. While not wildly diverting from the original thematically, Mr. Barnaba arranges for brass ensemble in a way that sounds absolutely natural and professional. The conviction, confidence, and authenticity of the individual parts shines through, and production gracefully separates each instrument with a separate panning point and consistent ambience. Waleed writes:

"sequenced brass is the bane of the world, i know - but come on, this ain't that bad! i just listened to some of the fakest brass you can possibly have about two songs before this one and honestly, this is alright. arrangement is on point. it does not venture too far as it does not really need to. afterall this is now being performed as a brass quintent and that's really all the validation it needs as far as that. i think the original parts are very intelligently incorporated into the main body. very nice work on smoothing out the whole thing to being so coherent. the ending is not so abrupt really - its perfect. the build up is moving, the climax is a couple of brass hits and the fade is classic."

Nice synopsis. Something orchestral but very different in nature from VHD which takes some risks in terms of difficulty factor but achieves something singular and refreshing as a result.

― djpretzel