Mercury Lighthouse | Golden Sun Orchestral Arrangement

🎼 Sheet Music: https://musescore.com/user/87883075/scores/34053566
🔵 Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/luckycat718.bsky.social
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After a pretty long wait, me lazing about and being behind my own schedule (I legit do not have an excuse for that), here is this week's track from the original Golden Sun! Mercury Lighthouse, one of the first major dungeon in the franchise alongside the other lighthouses (and perhaps Sol Sanctum if we're talking lore-wise).

As for the delay, like I said prior, I just was too lazy, I'm currently working on multiple projects at once while also balancing school, it's definitely difficult but I'm holding up decently well! (if we ignore the fact I'm writing this at 12AM on a school night...)
I'm still trying to figure out how to make the portamento work properly with EW's stuff, I thought I got it at some point but this just proved to me that I was very much wrong...

Guarded by the Mia of the Mercury Clan, this lighthouse in the northern part of Angara near Imil, it houses many water related puzzles and monsters. A drastic contrast from the typical depictions of water in media, being calm and serene, this one is dark and unstable. This makes me think of natural disasters such as tsunamis or floods where water itself is the threat. As for the arrangement itself, some elements were inspired by TandA's version such as the brass stabs in the opening material, as always, go check out his amazing rendition of the piece!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fguler9Ht0

Lastly, the following Golden Sun tracks should be the next 3 lighthouses, I already finished orchestrating Venus and Mars and have already made the audio for Jupiter but I want to release them in order so stay tuned for one of, if not the most popular Golden Sun Track in the coming weeks!
(funny thing, I've made Jupiter Lighthouse's audio in like March or something and it has been left in the dust ever since, I am not gonna lie it's like my least favorite lighthouse both in terms of music but also in the game, it's always taking forever compared to the others personally, the only thing I like about it is that we get to fight Agatio and Karst at the end...)
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Analyzing this piece is rather tricky... At first we get what seems to be an E Minor tonality [E - G - B] but this is soon thrown out the window with C, C#, A and A# but also Eb and E natural. (0:03)
This section is played a second time with added horns and muted trumpets.

Arriving to the next part of the piece, (0:28) tonality is no longer present with both tritones and semitonal clashes. (see Bassoons, Tuba, Celli and Basses against Horns, Vibraphone, Synthesizer and higher strings)
Alongside this chaos we have a chromatic flute melody echoing through the walls of the lighthouse which is later doubled by the Piccolo and Xylophone.

The Violins chromatically ascend towards our next part (0:40), we modulate from 6/8 to 10/8 where the tension increases further with more chromaticism and tritones in the bass [D + Ab], this one again is played twice with a new counter melody that's rather hard to hear in the original (See Horns and Vibraphone, 0:46)

Our final part approaches as we climb closer to the aerie of the lighthouse, (0:51) now we have a great unison across most instruments that seems to start in G Minor [G - B - D] but without the 3rd (B) but this then moves down a half step... This pattern is then repeated until we loop the piece. Eventually a new melody emerges from the (still echoing) Flutes, Piccolo, Xylophone, Trumpet and Synth. (1:04)

Right before the loop of the piece, I've added similar to TandA's version a fast chromatic descent in the woodwinds and strings as if the piece was falling back in place to loop correctly.
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Material: Musescore 4.6 and beta 4.7, Cubase Elements 14, EastWest Symphonic Orchestra, Vital, Ample Sound Ample Bass P Lite II, Steinberg HALion Sonic
Thumbnail was made in Procreate.

tags:
#music #orchestra #goldensun #goldensunthelostage #nintendo (i started including literally any tags at that point...
side note, this is like the longest description I ever wrote, like hello? how is that like almost 4200 characters?? thats crazy)

Видео Mercury Lighthouse | Golden Sun Orchestral Arrangement канала Lucky ☆