The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild "Sidon's Serenade" 4:29

Cool! I actually didn't know until now that Breath of the Wild had any classic Zelda theme reprises, so welcome me to the party, as late as I am. :-D So now that I, as an old, realize that Breath of the Wild's not JUST minimalist stuff & new themes, let's unveil evil judge collabers Chimpazilla & Emunator further chilling out "Zora's Domain"! Before we get going with their tribute to the Zora's scion Sidon, let's first wish a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Chimpazilla, who kicked off the arrangement for the eventual Emu handoff:

"Once again, I think Wes and I have created something magical. "Sidon's Serenade" began as my WIP; I laid out the arrangement structure with the intention of collabing with Wes, and he loved it and ran with it. The style was intended to be lo-fi to match some of his more recent arrangements, but I think the lo-fi effect was lost as we went along. (That is my fault, I'm not sure I'm good at lo-fi!) The result is a gorgeous halftime chillout song full of glassy synths, organic bells and instruments, shimmery pads, and tons of ear candy. Wes and I improved our collab protocols even further with this arrangement, and I think the result is extremely beautiful and cohesive. We hope you enjoy it!"

A beaut indeed, and they make it look easy. Pretty relaxing mix, and I appreciated hearing this always enjoyable theme have more of a bassline presense (even though it's subtle). Nice lil' escalation in the energy at 2:51 with those weird vocals or whatever that sound was. Who knows where some of these instrumentation ideas are coming from? What I do know though is that having an effective working relationship means you can get exploratory with the sound choices, and, even if you get your signals crossed in other ways, it all can work out in the end, ain't that right, Emunator? :-)

"Another week, another Chimp+Emu collab, it seems! We need to officially form a band. This is sort of a sister track to our Super Mario World "Apparitions" arrangement, but in reverse. This time, it was one of Kris's old demos from years back that I pulled out from storage and decided to finish off. "Zora's Domain", regardless of the iteration, is a tremendous piece of music that contains so many lovely riffs that can be arranged in an endless number of ways, but I ended up mainly sticking with Kris's original arrangement structure. The only totally new section I added was the guitar-led outro at 3:37. The rest of my contributions involved layering a TON of sounds and textures and spicing up the transitions. That said, I'm also pretty proud of the "Fairy Fountain" cameo that I played on keys at 1:20 - that was entirely a happy accident that "Fairy Fountain" worked over the "Zora" chord progression!

Kris alluded to some workflow collab improvements that stemmed from this piece, so I'll take a moment to elaborate there. There was a period of time where we were seemingly at odds about how the song should be mixed, and had a bit of a communication gap that we didn't immediately pick up on. Turns out, I was pulling my inspiration from the Ocarina of Time version of "Zora's Domain", which features a lead guitar motif present at :45 and 3:48 in our remix that, unbeknownst to me, wasn't present in the Breath of the Wild version that she was referencing, so she had no idea it was supposed to be a lead melody. Moral of the story - make sure you and your collab partner both know which song you're supposed to be remixing! All that said, I couldn't be happier with how this turned out and with the experience working with Kris. See y'all again next week... probably! :)"

Well, we've posted a collab between these two at least once a month this year, so at the very least, we'll likely catch these prolific peeps next month. :-) This is quite a cool treatment with lots of lush sounds, and the final minute only continues adding to that cool factor with the guitar and lots of acoustic sounds. Judge Hemophiliac's got playlisting on the mind with this one, saying "I want to put this on a chill-out station and loop it for 10 hours. It's perfect for work or just relaxation." Nice job, y'all, this one's a sound designer's dream!