Aqua Rock | Orchestral Cover

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You voted, and the winner is - "Aqua Rock" from Golden Sun! So here's an orchestral arrangement of it!

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➤ Analysis:

As opposed to "Magma Rock", which is fiery and aggressive with thick brass and heavy percussion, "Aqua Rock" is calm and twinkling with bright percussion and generally high melodies.

There was a lot of "Sakuraba echoes" in the original, and I've kept them all (and even added some in the harp and celesta at 0:50).

Sakuraba employs some post-tonal harmonic techniques, for example, the "Neo-Riemannian Tonnetz" commonly used in film scoring to instantly modulate from one key to another via a related pitch (e.g. B Major to F# Minor at 0:55).

At the risk of drowning out a middle melodic line at 0:28, I moved it down a few octaves into the bassoon and clarinet so that it would be audible and not further congest the upper frequencies. I think it worked rather well.

The time signature was tricky to decide; whether it should be 3/4 or 6/4, or even 6/8. I eventually rested on 6/4 as the long, stretching melodies in the violins creates longer phrasing (0:06), and so I felt it better to use 6/4 to reflect this (otherwise there would be a lot of tied notes, interrupting the look of the melody on the score).

To add a little more interest, I "hocketed" the bright percussion, having it play both in straight crotchets, but also in compound dotted crotchets, creating a 2-against-3 pattern, again reinforcing Sakuraba's echoing.

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The score was created in Sibelius 7.5, and the audio was created in Cubase using the brilliant EastWest sample libraries.

★Game: Golden Sun: The Lost Age
★Developer: Camelot Software Planning
★Publisher: Nintendo
★Composer(s): Motoi Sakuraba

★Software: Sibelius 7.5, Cubase Elements 7, Adobe Premiere Elements 15, EastWest Sample Libraries

★Tags: Golden Sun, Golden, Sun, The Lost Age, Golden Sun The Lost Age, TLA, GS, Golden Sun Orchestra, Golden Sun Cover, Golden Sun Remix, Golden Sun Arrangement, Aqua Rock, Golden Sun Aqua Rock

#GoldenSun
#Orchestra
#TheLostAge