ReMix:Final Fantasy IV "Mountain of Light" 3:07

The time has come for the queen to take her place on the throne. :-D RebeccaETripp has finally scaled the mountain to officially take the #1 spot as the OC ReMixer with the most featured ReMixes on the site. With her 83rd successful mixpost here (and several more in the hopper), it's going to be VERY difficult to displace her flag from the summit. There's no better way to celebrate her climb to the top of OCR than sharing Rebecca Tripp's whimsical orchestration of Final Fantasy IV's "Mt. Ordeals"! Rebecca elaborates on the source tune's special place in her heart and her vision for it:

"The original song, composed by Nobuo Uematsu, is not only one of my favourite tracks from FF4 OST, but also one of my absolute favourite songs of all time! I've been wanting to create an arrangement of this theme for many years, but felt I couldn't really do it justice. I feel like working on this song put my mind through a kaleidoscope.

The Mt. Ordeals segment of the game is extremely important to me -- I would go as far as to say that it was an extremely formative experience for me. There's a strange, yet beautiful feeling associated with that mountain, and, to a lesser extent, Mt. Hobbs, that I struggle to put into words.

In this remix, I tried to create a sense of lurking powers, both good and evil. Magic and mystery, courage and challenge. I wanted to make it sound like the mountain is alive with spirits, magics, and histories, and as though the heroes are marching towards the summit. I also tried to include something of a "Lunarian" presence towards the end, for obvious reasons."

The panel agreed that the brass could have been richer along with other smaller critiques, so along those lines judge DarkSim had a balanced perspective in his vote while echoing the panel's sentiment of this being a lovely listen:

"I enjoyed the use of stereo space in the beginning to create a wide, expansive atmosphere. Would have much preferred the low brass be centrally-panned though, and the track is lacking in low-mid presence for a long while. Delicate use of percussion is a nod to the march-like source, and was handled well.

As the soundscape fills out the frequency spectrum more at 1:30, the track comes alive. It's really nicely orchestrated, and I think some of the samples are getting better treatment here, particularly the flute. The left-panned harp at 1:40 (and others) has a lot of resonance on it that's quite odd to my ear. Paring that back a bit would be better - it sounds a lot nicer at 2:22-2:26, for example.

Outside of the intro, the panning seems to have been left on autopilot, and as the track gets busier, you begin to notice imbalances. Most of the high frequency content feels like it's in the left ear (glock, flute, harp), and there's only the xylophone in the right to balance it out.

Overall though, a very pleasant remix."

Not only pleasent to listen to, this piece is also an intimate orchestral arrangement approach with beautiful personalization, further colored in via Tripp's vivid imagery. Rebecca's percussion ornamentations in particular (bells, chimes, tambourines, and more) are always strong and add a lot of character to her textures. With fellow judge MindWanderer describing Rebecca's handling of the melody at :37 as "balletic", you're surely in for a treat with Rebecca's refined rendition of "Mt. Ordeals". I'm so proud of Rebecca's contributions to OCR, and it's our privilege to feature someone both so productive and driven at honoring video game music as an art form. She's a creative force to be reckoned with, and showcasing this ReMix is a wonderful way to crown our new queen of the mountain! :-)