Simply amazing! Tbh Anxious Heart is arguably my favorite soundtrack in FFVII, so can't really have enough of it in the story and now even in a boss fight! Wish we had more sections with it in the game, rather than very few bits here and there, as in the original you could hear it a bit everywhere during the story.
I saw a comment somewhere that Anxious heart is the true main theme of FF7 and I kind of agree. A bit shocking how little it's used in Remake but the versions that did make it to the new OST are fantastic. this metal version is just a fun project but I might try to take some of those official versions and see where else they fit
Commenting back now as I am itching for another FFVII remake playthrough soon, but yeah, Anxious Heart is criminally underused indeed, and am genuinely curious toward any other fun project or ways you might fit official music back akin to the original game feel.
I already loved to bits your lore music restorations/rearrangements, such as Mako Reactor re-score, Wall Market background music and Barret theme for Sector 7 and can't deny I'd love to see more Anxious heart sprayed a bit all around the remake in a fresh/renewed way, and/or any other fantastic idea you might have to enhance the nostalgic feel of the game further ^^
That's almost all of them, so I appreciate that! I do have a few ideas left, which I work on when I'm not working on my own OST gigs. I'll see if I can push something to completion soon
It sounds like you are using sample based Guitars in this recording, if not ignore this. (As sometimes it can actually be hard to tell). But if you are, and you are interested I would love to try and record some real live Guitar for you for this track.
yeah I did record my own guitars, not samples. I used a Jackson Juggernaut ET7 for the chords, an Ibanez RGA732 for the leads, an Agile Septor 827 for the chugs, and a Dingwall NG-2 for the bass. It might sound sampled because I did a lot of punch-in/out recordings since I didn't want to memorize the sequence of weird chord shapes lol. All the non-guitar stuff is samples/sampled virtual instruments
Sounds good either way. Though I do feel like the guitars don't quite cut through the mix as much by just a small amount. (Perhaps just a small boost to the high mids with automation during the intro before the lead kicks in. Or rather, bring the strings back up a bit more as well here) I think that contributes to that feeling. Mixing guitars with other instruments can be pretty difficult to do while retaining the punch and character of all instruments since distorted guitars just hammer the frequency spectrum with so much noise. I know a thing or two about punch ins, I remember about a decade ago working on a song that required me to record just a few bars at a time, stop re-tune the terrible Bass Guitar I had, record a few more bars, repeat. And then still afterwards needing to cut up slices of notes to pitch correct bad intonation hahaha. (Song link here actually)It can be easy to make a guitar sound robotic and all cut up if you aren't careful, but with a bit of leg work no one will tell the difference.
Either way, glad to know this is using real guitars and I love the overall arrangement. Your work continues to makes me feel like the people working on this "Remake" were sadly misguided. Anxious Heart is iconic to the Train Graveyard, and making it into a battle theme like you did could've worked so well. I think I would've chosen to double the leading tone of the original string chords down on to the low E(or B ;p) once the double bass kicks in but that's the only thing I would do different.
The guitars do sit back a bit more than they would on a metal record but I guess I was just influenced by the media I was scoring to (I had some no-music footage of the boss battle synced up to my session). I originally intended for the ensemble to just be the instrumental metal band, but the farther I progressed the more 'cinematic' I had to make it for it to fit the scene to my ear. I went through a bunch of automation passes so I guess towards the end, I was steering a bit more towards de-emphasizing guitar during the blast beats but I can't remember at this point whether it was exactly intentional.
Great work as always! I thought the original battle music for this boss was pretty boring compared to the other great tracks in the game, and this re-score makes the fight way more exciting. Death metal suits it perfectly, and the double bass is insane! Thanks!
Appreciate it! yeah the original music is just a variation on the train graveyard's regular battle music, which is a lot less than what a chapter-ending boss battle deserves in my opinion.
11 comments
this is the good stuff right here.
I already loved to bits your lore music restorations/rearrangements, such as Mako Reactor re-score, Wall Market background music and Barret theme for Sector 7 and can't deny I'd love to see more Anxious heart sprayed a bit all around the remake in a fresh/renewed way, and/or any other fantastic idea you might have to enhance the nostalgic feel of the game further ^^
But if you are, and you are interested I would love to try and record some real live Guitar for you for this track.
I know a thing or two about punch ins, I remember about a decade ago working on a song that required me to record just a few bars at a time, stop re-tune the terrible Bass Guitar I had, record a few more bars, repeat. And then still afterwards needing to cut up slices of notes to pitch correct bad intonation hahaha. (Song link here actually)It can be easy to make a guitar sound robotic and all cut up if you aren't careful, but with a bit of leg work no one will tell the difference.
Either way, glad to know this is using real guitars and I love the overall arrangement. Your work continues to makes me feel like the people working on this "Remake" were sadly misguided. Anxious Heart is iconic to the Train Graveyard, and making it into a battle theme like you did could've worked so well.
I think I would've chosen to double the leading tone of the original string chords down on to the low E(or B ;p) once the double bass kicks in but that's the only thing I would do different.