Final Fantasy VI Orchestrated - The Magic House (Jidoor Town)

MP3 and FLAC available for Patrons. ►   / thesecondnarrator   Final Fantasy VI is my favorite FF game, with my favorite soundtrack of all time. Nobuo Uematsu's genius is on full display here. I am extremely cautious about approaching any of the songs from this game, as I respect the music too much to tarnish it with my crazy ideas. I first encountered this game as a kid at my friend's house. He had just entered the town of Jidoor and was visiting the auction house as well as Owzer's House. Up till now my perception of games was that it was just running around and fighting/shooting stuff. For a game to have the player do random stuff like bid on a relic, enter a person's dream, or sing at an opera...it opened my eyes to see games as works of art. The Jidoor town theme is very classy. I can imagine this track serving as background music for fancy parties. This is straight up baroque/renaissance era music, with a little bit of Mozart's Rondo alla turca thrown in. My only experience comes from Bach's Two-Part Inventions and Well-Tempered Clavier. Since the instrument palette at the time had less dynamics, composers had to rely on other techniques to make their music stand out. You have melodies that travel up and down, woven among multiple instruments, ostinatos and arpeggios everywhere keep the rhythm of the piece going, and also that trademark harpsichord sound. While analyzing this piece, I came to the conclusion that early 8bit music shares a lot of similarities. With less range to work with, composers likewise had to do tons of tricks with the couple tones they had to make their tunes catchy. Pretty cool. In my reverence of this piece, I arranged it without deviating from the original structure. The big challenge for this piece was that since it involved a simple chamber orchestra setup, each individual instrument was a lot more noticeable and I had to tweak every single note so the articulation would stand up to closer scrutiny. If I close my eyes, I can picture all the musicians huddled in a corner, playing away while the auction took place. As for the third act of the piece, I wanted to build off the piece with a new second melody that sat right on top of the original. If Nobuo Uematsu had access to better hardware, he would probably have been able to incorporate more of the Baroque music techniques that you can hear in this section. Altogether, this was a pretty fun track to do, and a good break between all the loud, epic, emotional tracks I've been arranging. Arrangement and fan art by Jeremiah Sun Original song composed by Nobuo Uematsu You can buy this game for iOS, Android and Steam