Bonds of Sea and Fire
Xenogears was one of my favorite games growing up, and Yasunori Mitsuda is a truly epic composer. I wanted to do something a bit easier this time, so I chose a simpler sounding song with less moving parts.
For the most part, this worked out. Huge parts of the song were easy to transcribe, and I got 80% of it up and running quickly. The challenge was in that last 20% — where the song features tightly fitted harmonies.
Here’s the final transcription:
None of this makes any sense?
I have at this point completely abandoned traditional music theory as a means to understand music. I’ll be using my own OP Music Theory system. Most of what I’ll be saying can be understood in context, but if you wish to know the details, you can read about OP Music Theory here:
Simple is Beautiful
The chorus to this song is beautiful and evocative. It’s also wonderfully simple. After plunking out a few of the notes, it became clear the entire chorus is in the key of d.
The bass line is playing a very low a (seemingly for eternity), and the rest of the notes play around a TPQ model. From the instrumentation (flute and strings), you might expect a generic “town theme”, but the TPQ model gives it that air of longing or sadness.
For the harmony, Mitsuda spices up this simple model by playing with the stereo. One harmony plays on the left, while another harmony plays on the right. The right harmony ping-pongs to the left on a short delay (1/4 of a beat).
This stereo widening of the sound makes it feel vast and epic— appropriate for a game where you start out running errands and end up killing god.
The Arpeggios Return
The bridge is where things get tricky. While not as fast as the last song, it features arpeggios in the harmony, and I had a hard time transcribing them accurately. I’m consistently impressed by how easy it is to convince myself two notes are the same — and be completely wrong.
Luckily the bass and the synth strings were always on different notes, so that gave me two structured notes to start with — the end of the arpeggio being the third. Looking at it this way, the first two bridge models are TOQ and SUP.
The third model was tricky, since I could only lock down two consistent notes, the f and a. I eventually just accepted that and called it a PT model. This more open structure provides room for the constantly moving notes within these measures.
The distance from f to a is also 7 notes, which on the guitar would typically be called a power chord. Power chords are sometimes also used for this purpose — giving the rest of the band more room to play in while maintaining a solid foundation.
And that’s it?
Well I’m not sure. While the power chord solution sounds nice, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something else going on musically in the PT and QU models. I’ll keep this in mind for later and come back to it after learning more.
Mitsuda’s Style
This song packs the maximum amount of artistry into something deceptively simple. I was particularly impressed by the use of stereo — to the point where this song will never sound the same to me now that I hear what’s going on. We’ll definitely be coming back to more of his music.
Onward
This was a simpler song, and I primarily used it as an easier test case for OP Music Theory. Next up, I think I’ll be tackling something outside of the RPG space. Thank you for reading~
Notes: These are disorganized and inaccurate, but will be shown here to document my process for anyone interested~
