for YM2612 + SN76489

by MetallicOrwell

Hello and welcome back to another cover. Contra 4 was an excellent entry in the series, even if it was held back by the whole dual screen gimmick. To my knowledge, it was the first Contra to be made as a throwback to the old days, and it shows because they reused the Jungle and Waterfall levels, which were the most popular from the 1987 original. What interests us most, of course, is the music, which was handled by one Jake Kaufman, and this guy doesn't mess around. When I did Steel of Destiny [Fate Mix], I reflected on the expansion VS reimagining approaches to video game music, and Kaufman's take on Waterfall of Bloodshed is an absolutely masterful example of the latter. It's constructed so perfectly, and sequenced so precisely, that it's hard to believe it wasn't done by an unhinged madman. Yeah, I like this guy. Let's take this apart.

So, what are we working with? We have arcade (YM2151) and NES versions to take inspiration from, and to me it feels like Kaufman favored the first (mostly because of the tempo), but it could go either way, as they are quite similar. They have an intro, an A section that repeats once, and then a B section--that's it, barely 40 seconds of music, and not all of it unique. Kaufman's version, on the other hand, is almost one minute and fifty seconds long, and he seems allergic to repetition, because there's barely any of it. He'll expand and modify the melodies, and then add completely new sections that flow perfectly from one to the next. I almost want to say he gives Saitama Saisyu Heiki a run for his money, but that's dangerously close to apostasy, so I won't.

What's really diabolical is how complex the patterns are. For one thing, the bass guitar is consistently nuts throughout the whole thing, with basslines that jump from octave to octave, do quick starts and stops, and play all kinds of notes in erratic ways. It generally just does anything except what you'd expect a bass to do, which is to be polite, stay still and fill the low frequencies without sounding like a crackhead having a seizure. If this version of Waterfall is ever played live by a band, they'd have to hire John Myung to play bass or something. To be fair, I do understand the need to use every instrument to fill out the sound of the song as much as possible--if you're using the NES, that is. On the Nintendo DS you're utterly spoiled for polyphony, so there's no reason to go this hard unless you just want to because you're a lunatic. Either that, or you're trying to preserve the spirit of the original while expanding upon it, suppose. Just download the .vgm for this song, play it on MD Player muting everything except channel FM 1, and you'll see.

Of course Kaufman wouldn't stop at just the bass, oh no. In some sections he uses syncopated, dissonant brass stabs (I almost sound like I know what I'm talking about). To explain a little bit, Waterfall is in A Dorian, and to my knowledge, the original version is very diatonic, with maybe an F natural borrowed from regular A minor here and there. Kaufman, on the other hand, uses lots of chromatic dissonance to make the song sound even more tense, especially when transitioning from one section to the next, and definitely in those brass stabs. I'm not very confident in my understanding of syncopation, but I think the part at the nineteen-second mark is exactly what that is: accents placed on weak beats. If I'm wrong, I'm happy to be corrected. Now, not only that, but those brass chords play off the main melody like counterpoint, which makes it even more complicated. I had to combine both to fit my limited set-up, but I think it works. Oh, and of course the guitar does something completely unique which just barely agrees with the bass, and it somehow makes sense. The drums are unhinged, too. I swear this guy is allergic to repetition like some people are allergic to pollen, because he is constantly changing it up--at least every 4 bars, sometimes sooner, and then he hits you with triplets on the toms. There's also whatever the hell he's doing with the kick drum in the final section, which combined with the bass guitar, makes it sound like a prog rock / metal band decided to cover a Contra song from 1987. I really didn't expect this arrangement to blow my mind like this, but like I've said before, you never truly appreciate a piece of music until you take it apart and build it back up with your own hands--boy, is that ever true.

But the most unhinged part is that almost every single note has an irregular duration, and not just the triplets. Normally, in sequenced music, you'd expect just about every note to snap to the grid nicely so that, you know, the whole thing makes sense to look at. Here, not even the drums are spared. Let's say you have a series of kick and snare notes: sometimes one kick note is just slightly longer or shorter than the previous one, or the splash cymbals above them have irregular durations as well for no apparent reason. Was Kaufman really so crazy that in addition to expanding the song in such an impressive manner, he had to have total control of every note at such a micro level that absolutely no one would notice? And then the funniest part of all: the mixing in the DS version is so bad that almost all of the subtleties I've described in this write-up so far are buried beneath the excessively loud drums. It's like one big joke.

Well then, let's adapt Kaufman's joke to the Mega Drive, shall we?

I could've made this sound just like my recent Rusty cover and the result would've been great, but I wanted Waterfall to have a more distinct sound, so I used a different set of instruments. First of all, if I'm going to have a rhythm guitar in a piece, it's important to me that it plays both a note and its fifth, because otherwise it doesn't sound full enough. My custom Orwell R. Guitar is designed to take up two FM channels (panned to each side), so it can obviously do it that way, but that only works well in a full-on metal context. If I want more subtlety and texture, it's better that the rhythm guitar take up only one channel, which leads us to the Battle Mania Daiginjou guitar. It sounds like it plays a note and its fifth, and looking at the tuner function on Furnace, the frequencies seem to indicate just that. I'm so glad my ear is improving. Best of all, it doesn't need to be used on Extended channel 3! I modified it a bit so the modulation fizzles out, but otherwise it's the same as in the game.

A lot of the other instruments are what you'd expect in a MetallicOrwell cover: the chunky E. Bass 70 instrument, my trumpet synth, custom string ensemble, modified Sakimoto brass, custom Orwell Lead, Batman Orchestra Hits, etc. As for the drum samples, we have the snare from X Japan's Art of Life, the kick and kick + crash from the Arachno Soundfont, and three toms from the Yamaha MU-2000. It's always fun to find the snare sample that goes best with the bass and guitar instruments. Some of the drum patterns had to be simplified a bit; there are no splash, ride cymbals or anything like that in my cover. When it comes to melodic stuff, though, not a lot was sacrificed, honestly. I think Kaufman was trying to preserve the counterpoint feel of the original (and there is a lot of that) instead of just filling it with constant chords, which is probably what I would've done. I'm definitely taking notes.

I'm probably the only person who has ever bothered to analyze a 2007 cover/expansion of a classic Contra song this deeply and then ported it to the Mega Drive. Yeah, this is what the MetallicOrwell experience is all about: massively nerdy deep dives into VGM esoterica. If you expected normalcy, you're in the wrong neighborhood. I kinda like it here, though.

See you around.

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