Arrangement of the Week: Tal Tal Heights – Orchestral Remix

Today’s Arrangement of the Week features music from one of my favorite handheld titles, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. The music from the game, composed by Yoshiaki Koizumi and Kensuke Tanabe, has had a fair share of remixes and arrangements. Today we will be focussing on an orchestral arrangement of “Tal Tal Heights,” easily one of the game’s most well known themes.

The artist for this arrangement is Raymusicification, aka Imco de Gier, who has been cranking out orchestral arrangements of game tunes for the past few years on YouTube and Soundcloud. A good chunk of them cover music from the Rayman, Super Mario, and Legend of Zelda series. But today, I’ll be taking a look at the arrangement simply titled “Tal Tal Heights – Orchestral Remix.”

As with many of the orchestral arrangements that are covered in this series, this one is produced with the use of sample libraries, rather than live instruments. A full set of orchestral instruments are used in this piece. A healthy dose of strings, brass, percussion, and woodwinds are featured throughout the mix, helping evoke a sense of adventure and grandeur in the tune. I actually like that the strings take on an accompaniment role in this piece, letting the woodwinds and harp handle a majority the melodic material.

What made this arrangement stick out to me was that it’s a very light arrangement. It’s not bogged down with a heavy string and brass presence that plagues so many modern orchestral pieces. This is helped by the brass and percussion being very low key, merely helping punctuate the rhythm. The fact that instruments like the harp and xylophone often become the melodic focus on the track helps keep the piece light hearted and upbeat. Overall a pleasant and fun arrangement to listen to.

Have any favorite arrangements, remixes, or covers of music from The Legend of Zelda series? Let us know in the comments below. You can check out Raymusicification’s “Tal Tal Heights – Orchestral Remix” on Soundcloud and on YouTube.