♫STUDY (Castlevania: AoS) SNES Arrangement - NintendoComplete
116This is an arrangement of "Study," a theme from Konami’s 2003 Game Boy Advance game Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. I have arranged the song for native playback on SNES hardware, and the audio was recorded directly from a launch-model SNES deck.
Here's a fun bit of Castlevania orchestral flair that I thought would suit the SNES's sound capabilities nicely. I totally axed the random cymbals and snare brushes from the original so that I could throw as many resources as possible to the quality of the strings. I didn't like them much to begin with, anyway.
I also stumbled onto a a neat trick while working on this - by keeping the instruments' attack a bit soft and slowly ramping up the volume on every note longer than a quarter, I was able to create a pretty nice vibrato effect (and without any memory-sucking special commands!) by emphasizing the loop point of the samples. I got the idea from playing the original arcade version of Daytona USA. Remember how Mitsuyoshi's vibrato was just a rough loop of the "aaah" at the end of the word Daytona? Funny stuff.
Anyways, I have been working on this one for a while. I used a ridiculous number of carefully timed envelopes to control the note lengths and volumes that took forever to make, but it's finally done, and since the Castlevania GBA collection just came out a few days ago, this seemed like a good time to post it.
If you'd like to see any of my other arrangments (including tonnes more Konami stuff), you can find my playlist right here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3gSj_kh1fHueSujqQR8xQQ84DWIjrU4F
Thanks for listening!
_____________
NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!