Koopa Bros. Fortress - Paper Mario: Reorchestrated

Paper Mario: Reorchestrated seeks to remake the entire soundtrack of Paper Mario 64 to be as realistic and/or quality-sounding as possible while maintaining or enhancing the feel of the original. The goal of this project is to further my skills in composition and orchestration by doing a deep analysis and reconstruction of the music in Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64, and show my appreciation of this soundtrack which has been super influential to my journey as a composer. For more information on this project, check out this document: https://shorturl.at/sDHIR 05/11/2023 – Koopa Bros. Fortress Quite a dreary and mellow piece this is! The Koopa Bros. themselves attempt to be stylish deviants, but they make their home in a dark, crumbling, and even somewhat depressing fortress – probably an homage to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that they are a parody of, who similarly make their home in the gross, decaying areas of society. The music reflects this too, containing small hints of the Koopa Bros’ personality in the synth bass and some sparse organ usage, but it’s all set against a backdrop of a minimalistic and insipid soundscape. Before the synth bass, the bottom instrument that’s used is a bassoon playing notes that are well below its range (thus I decided to use a contrabassoon). The melody appears to be played by a bass clarinet – between this song and the “Goomba Bros. Defeated” song, my eyes are really being opened to how unique and effective the bass clarinet can be at holding down the melody. Funny story about the melody – though the melody of the bass clarinet largely repeats a “G-D-Eb-D” pattern, for whatever reason, I distinctly remember that melody to actually be up an octave and a half. I, like (presumably) most kids and adolescents who played this game, would not have listened to this game’s audio through a cutting edge sound system, but through the speakers of an old CRT TV. Perhaps, for some reason, my TV’s speakers strongly emphasized the overtones of the melody far more than the fundamentals? It’s an interesting phenomenon, and I couldn’t help but slighty boost those particular overtones with an EQ as a small homage to this past experience of mine. Interested in hiring one of my services as a composer, mixing engineer, or mastering engineer? Check out the services page of my website here: https://shorturl.at/ktzX7 Please feel free to use any of these remixes for your videos! If you do, just provide credit and/or a link to the remix that you use. Transcribing, orchestration, rearranging, recording, mixing, and mastering was done by Drew Anthony Nyquist. Album art was created by Jason McFarland. The music of Paper Mario was composed by Yuka Tsujiyoko and Taisha Senda, and also uses some classic Mario motifs which were composed by Koji Kondo. Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64 was created by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo.