♫MAGICAL SOUND SHOWER (Out Run) SNES Arrangement - NintendoComplete
210This is an arrangement of "Magical Sound Shower," a theme by Hiroshi Kawaguchi for Sega's 1986 arcade game Out Run. I have arranged the song for native playback on SNES hardware, and the audio was recorded directly from a launch-model SNES deck.
I love Magical Sound Shower. It sounds like a dumb name for a song, but after you hear it, it's hard to imagine a more appropriate title. The Out Run soundtrack is pretty freaking awesome, and it's one of the few games that I know of from the time (before pre-recorded music tracks in video games, that is) that went all in with its almost-salsa Latin style. I wanted to keep that feeling in the arrangement, so expect lots of clave, timbale, guiro, and trumpet. There's even a lengthy marimba solo!
Because it struck me as a good stylistic fit, I also decided to recreate the famous opening to the Jerry Rivera song Amores Como el Nuestro as an introduction for Magical Sound Shower. I wanted to see how close I could come to matching the original sound within the limits of the Super Nintendo hardware. It still sounds obviously synthesized, but it came out a lot closer than I had expected.
I did a cover of this song a long time ago, but I thought that I could do a much better job if I took another stab at it with the things I've picked up over the past few years. This is that stab. The arrangement is pretty similar, but the sample quality is substantially higher, and I think I've gotten a lot better at shaping instrument sounds and at mixing on the SNES hardware since the midrange isn't a muddled mess this time around.
The video clip was pulled from my playthrough of the Sega Saturn version of the game. (It's actually a full playthrough of the game. Yes, it's that short!) You can find that at https://youtu.be/ntQzQNls0ag
And finally, if you'd like to check out any of my other arrangements, you can find them all in this playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3gSj_kh1fHueSujqQR8xQQ84DWIjrU4F
Thanks for taking the time to listen. I hope you enjoy it!