F-Zero: Maximum Velocity ~ Intro & Bianca City

for YM2612 + SN76489

by MetallicOrwell

I have been playing F-Zero: Maximum Velocity a lot lately (I just beat one of the cups on master mode for the first time), so I've had its music in my brain for a while now. This isn't the first time I've considered covering it, however. In fact, when I did Fire Field from the original F-Zero back in November of last year, I considered combining it with Bianca City from Maximum Velocity, but abandoned that plan because it wasn't really working. Today I probably would've extended Fire Field instead, like I did with Fullmetal Fighter from Musha Aleste a few months ago, but that's neither here nor there.

Getting back on topic, the problem with Bianca City, for me, is that it's a very simple piece of music: it uses the same riff pretty much all the time and the drum patterns couldn't possibly be any simpler. It's fine for what it is, and it does its job of pumping you up for a session of brutal, futuristic racing. But alone, it is a little anemic for the MetallicOrwell experience as it is nowadays (as self-aggrandizing as that sounds), so it needed something extra. Extending and expanding it was one option, of course, but its simple nature doesn't lend itself well to that kind of thing (or maybe I just couldn't figure out how to do it). In the end I decided to combine it with the game's intro theme. I seem to have a tendency to make pieces that include an orchestral-ish intro as a prelude to a main metal part, and it works well enough.

The intro is comprised mainly of some chords played on a rock organ/string ensemble over a snare drum march and a synth bass, and of course there are some melodies as well. It's quite similar to the intro theme from the original F-Zero (and it's obviously intended to feel like a callback), but it sounds more serious, which makes sense because it's in a minor key rather than major. When adapting it to the Mega Drive, I decided against the rock organ instrument and instead used my custom Orwell strings here to play the chords, as well as one of the square wave channels for support with some vibrato. I used a softened version of the fingered bass instument I pilfered from SilverRIFF a while back, and the PSG arpeggios from the original are done, well, on the two remaining square wave channels. Unlike the Game Boy's APU (which was obviously included in the Game Boy Advance), the version of the SN76489 included in the Mega Drive doesn't have any stereo capabilities, so that is lost, sadly.

The snare drum I used here is a combination of one of the Timbres of Heaven power snares with another one from the MT Power Drum Kit. If one snare is too bright and the other too dull, mix them together and you get the best of both worlds without needing to use EQ--another cool trick learned. As for the melodies, the guitar one is played using several variants of my Orwell Lead to avoid shrillness, as well as some effects to control the level of feedback. The square waves were useful here, because I used them to play the same notes as the guitar, but one octave lower. This also helps to give the melody a fatter bottom and make it less piercing. In the original version, the melody from the next verse is played on the square waves, but here I used my trusty "trumpet synth" instead for a more sophisticated timbre.

In order to transition from the intro theme to Bianca City, I repeated the first section and then had it fade out into four hi-hats, which signal the beginning of the metal part. We get the very simple main riff with some accented drum hits, and after that the song proper begins. If the rhythm guitar sounds kind of like my cover of Battery, that's intentional: same Orwell R. Guitar, TF4 Intro Synth and E. Bass 70 to create that massive tone. When the guitar harmonies come in, I have to do away with the supporting synths to make room, but you don't notice too much. Now, since I still have my module for the unfinished version of Bianca City I did last year, I mostly just copied and pasted the notes from one module to another, though of course I tweaked things, fixed some incorrect notes and so on. The drum patterns are more complex than in the original version, and they complement the rhythm guitar better. I included some fills to make it a little bit more interesting, as well.

Other than that, the metal part feels a lot like "vintage MetallicOrwell", I suppose, mostly because I used an older version of my Orwell Lead here. I also didn't include any detuned echoes because it made everything sound excessively muddy. I think the main reason, though, is the simplicity of the song. Again, Bianca City is a good tune, but I tend to compose or cover far more complex heavy metal music these days, so this feels like a step back in some ways. I didn't even compose a proper ending, I just had the song loop instead, which feels kind of cheap. Oh well, I still think it turned out pretty good, and adding the sound effect from the game's intro right at the beginning is a nice touch.

See you around.

 

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