× Comments for 1-06 - Through the Flames

Nutritious

This track is really special to me as a musician, because it was a song that I felt proved to myself that I could do my own music arrangement and succeed. Disclaimer: incoming TL;DR back-story.

This album project started way back in early 2007, which is around the time I started attempting music creation & composition as a serious hobby. I've always loved the music from Mario 64. I took an interest in joining the project later that year, but the only available song at the time was "Lethal Lava Land." While this definitely wasn't my favorite track from the game and wouldn't normally be my first choice to remix, I saw that the track was open on the project and had some sudden inspiration that pushed me forward. It's not the most accessible source by any means, but I came up with an idea for an orchestral take on the theme and was able to claim the track. The fact that I now had a project commitment and that my music was recognized as being a high-enough quality for an album pushed me to go ahead and invest in purchasing music software to really commit to the hobby.

Once completed, I submitted the track to OC ReMix and it passed the judges panel, making it my first accepted remix. Ironically, due to the fact of it being on this project, which was delayed for so long, up until now it has remained unreleased despite my having many other songs released through the website.

Due to the original song having a progressive, almost aimless style arrangement, I chose to focus on specific melody parts and expand upon them. The original track doesn't seem to have any normal time signature or natural progression to the song, but instead sounds like a collection of instruments playing (seemingly) random notes around a general theme. An Indian coworker of mine pointed out that it's a type of classical Indian music (though I forget the name of the genre). Anyway, because of this, it was a very difficult song to remix and the themes used might not be readily apparent.

I aimed for a movie score feel for my song, putting out my best effort though utilizing free sample sets at the time. While the song certainly shows its age and doesn't reflect my currently ability level, I remain quite proud of it as my first real music arrangement achievement.