ReMix: The Legend of Zelda 'Legend of Zelda Overture'

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So, some recent news bears mentioning here simply for emphasis: We've announced our first official competition, a music video contest for (surprise!) Final Fantasy VII: Voices of the Lifestream. I'm really psyched to see what folks are able to come up with in each of the three categories, and hopefully we'll be adding more prizes for additional incentive soon. We've also enabled browsing by album, which presents a variety of album info in one place but also links off to official album websites, etc., for more details and downloads. On October 2nd we upgraded our database to MySQL 5, following our previous upgrade to PHP 5 back on August 6th. Though we haven't yet recoded anything to take advantage of new features, each upgrade involved a lot of effort simply getting existing code to work properly. Also, hoodies are back in stock (!!) at eStarland, and when that stock runs out, there's more in reserve, so before things get cold and fall segues into winter, get some OCR on you and represent, warmly and comfortably. With all this work, both visible and behind-the-scenes, it's admittedly been hard to keep up with posting and judging; we haven't been posting less due to any raising of the bar, and in fact have something of a backlog at this moment of EXCELLENT music yet to be posted, but trying to improve the site while at the same time maintaining it is truly a challenge. We ask for your patience - I believe the end result will be well worth it!

Newcomer Evan Arnett has some professional credits to his name - check out www.evanarnett.com for more details. He's been working on this Zelda orchestral mix for a bit, getting some solid feedback from our WIP forums, and the result - especially for an overture/medley that incorporates multiple themes - is very cohesive. The ReMixer writes:

"I've always been a huge Zelda fan, and decided to create an orchestral arrangement. It's conceived as a piece of dramatic concert music that could be performed by a real orchestra. Rather than being based on one single Zelda tune, I took a few of my favorite themes, developed and combined them. So the point was more to communicate an overall feeling of "Zelda" with my own musical fingerprint, hence the label "overture". I got some really helpful advice from the folks on the forums and made some revisions accordingly. I hope you enjoy it!"

Enjoy it I did; there are certainly portions here that would be relatively obvious to someone with orchestral arrangement experience, but there are also more subtle, important decisions about transitions and layering that represent creative thinking and deliberation. Production is solid, and there's a good variety of legato sections sans percussion and rolling, enthusiastic marches. Strings are definitely dominant, with brass and winds often relegated to supporting parts, and while that works, I'd have liked a little more sharing of the spotlight... my history as a Euphonium in concert band perhaps clouds this wish, but I still think variety is important, regardless. Overall, though, anyone looking for an orchestral Zelda mix can hardly go wrong, and Evan's got a great first mix on his hands. I did want to specifically mention the mix title: it's not particularly inventive, and usually we insist on more creative titles, or will retitle a mix ourselves if the standards weren't followed. For overtures, however, it does make a bit more sense, since the common classical methodology for titling such pieces usually follows this convention. However, we certainly hope for more submissions from Mr. Arnett in the future, and will expect a more creative mix title at that time. He's certainly got the rest of the elements in place; good stuff.

― djpretzel