I just read all five of your OoT posts after stumbling upon them on Google (I don’t even remember what I was looking for), and they’re great! I never realized how well-put-together those simple ocarina warp songs were. As another videogame/music enthusiast, I’m definitely looking forward to your next one about the Gerudo Valley theme, which is one of my favorites..

As a random/trivial side note, I think measure 5 of your Hyrule Castle Courtyard background and/or Zelda’s Lullaby transcription (from Part 2) should be iii7 instead of IV. (You had the Bm7, so you probably just overlooked this.)

Anyway, keep ‘em coming!

I feel your pain regarding the guitar — or rather, I felt it, as now I don’t have quite so much of a problem. It does get better eventually!

Wow… gotta think about that one for a bit…

Years ago, I heard a conference paper on the piano music of Galina Ustvolskaya, the main point of which was that her music inflicts pain on the performer. Maybe there’s a parallel here? :)

Regardless, your point about video games concealing impossibility is well taken, though. Once you’ve adapted to a game’s rules, it’s hard to bring your mind back out — there’s nothing more disappointing than watching the X Games after playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. :-)

Regarding the progression: Kakariko Village is indeed I-vi-ii-V (I have the exact chord qualities listed underneath each system in the transcription), but many consider that a variation of the more common doo-wop progression I-vi-IV-V. They’re effectively the same changes, though.

Well, maybe that’s a stretch!

P.S. Wouldn’t the progression be I-vi-ii-V?

I’m still unsure to what extent the arrangement was influenced by the nature of the guitar; the arpeggios were largely the same when it was a string orchestra patch in A Link to the Past, so it’s certainly possible that it’s just a coincidence.

A better test would be the Gerudo Valley theme, since that also uses Ocarina’s guitar patch but is a newly composed piece. I’ll be looking at that one next.

It is an interesting issue isn’t it - non instrumentalists composing for synthesised instruments and not needing to make it ‘physically’ playable in the normal ‘human’ sense. I once read a short section of a book about drum sequencers, and the authors point was basically that it’s up to the composer to decide if they want to be ‘authentic’ to simulating a drum performance or whether they want to compose for synthetic drum performance - the proverbial drummer with seven arms, as it were.

I personally have very little ‘authentic’ musicianship, with all my skills and training based in the realm of the digital, so I can totally appreciate and understand Kondo’s motivation here. I also appreciate the fact that he probably tried to give it some ring of authentic performance - as you said he splits the bass notes out form the rest of the chord, which seems like a deliberate choice probably motivated by knowledge of real world guitars and guitar playing. It is another Koji Kondo piece isn’t it?

His (and others more generally) application of the knowledge of how guitars are played seems to pay off because unless you are one you’d probably not pick up on the impossible difficulty of some of the chord shapes! (The crafty devil snuck it by me, after all) But I do think that a larger number of people would likely pick up on it sounding ‘wrong’ if he didn’t do the bass/chord spreading. Interesting…

Again, great post - and thanks for getting me thinking.