Sugiyama has things he does very well like overworlds and town music and sad music. There are things he does NOT do well , like battle music.
I think he’s got some good ones. I really love the combat music from DW3 and DW4. I think DW7’s boss music is really good.
I didn’t like DQ7 as a game, but the music was good, especially the Symphonic Suite.
The symphonic suites are always pretty good.
Re: battle music: throw enough shit at the wall and something will stick. Sure , occasionally the music is decent, but that’s more the exception and if I were to compare his decent battle tracks to other composers, he does not rank high.
I think that might be more of staying within the determined style than him actually being bad at writing intense themes.
What?
I think SG is saying that sometimes themes suck as standalone songs because they have to fit within the tone of the game. Listen to the fight themes from Radiata Stories. Most of them would be awful in any other place, but they make sense in context. Sometimes, even if a composer is really really good (Noriyuki Iwadare), a really great standalone song just can’t be written for a particular game (RS).
Not even just context, but Dragon Warrior establishes a very specific musical STYLE, too. Like (not that anyone doesn’t know this), but not all Orchestral music is the same. There’s baroque, classical, romantic, impressionism, avant-garde, neo-classicism, minimalism, and a whole bunch of other shit. Sugiyama remains within very specific genres of orchestral music, and with orchestral music genres, there are a lot more restrictions on what’s appropriate when writing music…like, VERY specific rules.
That’s a very interesting point and I obviously do not have the musical theory knowledge you have to challenge anything you might have to say about it. Taking that into account, I can see how doing certain things like this can be very difficult. But does that make listenable? I don’t think so.
No argument there. Sometimes, music just sucks to listen to unless you’re listening to it in a purely analytical perspective. That’s not only valid, but very important for a composer of music to remember.
SG, have you heard <a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdLoTPUNtD0”>this song</a> before? I tell people I like classical music because of songs like this, but at the same time I’m just not a big fan of most classical composers. What subgenre would this be under? I wouldn’t mind finding more songs like it. It reminds me of WC2. Does it still even count as classical? The composer is not THAT old.
Hmm, that’s a weird song, but not necessarily in a bad way. It’s…romantic, but it isn’t. It has a lot of stylistic similarities to Romantic music (which it should - 1875 is the late romantic era), but it’s also very static, which is unusual for a romantic era piece. If you want to check out composers of that era you might like, I would suggest pianists like maybe Frederic Chopin or Franz Liszt. It still has a similar enough musical sound, in my opinion, but it’s more dynamic in emotion.
This Franz Liszt guy has chops.
Franz Liszt is a fucking nut. Not only is he super talented, but he had super huge hands that allowed him to do crazy shit that normal people can’t do. For example, if you go to a piano and see the farthest interval you can play from your thumb to your pinky, it probably isn’t much more than an octave. Lizst could play parallel 12ths, which means that if he played C with his thumb, he could reach the F key that was a whole octave up. That’s…just retarded. Awesome, but retarded.
Personally, I like Chopin better, but most people i talk to seem to prefer Liszt. I just think some of Chopin’s music just reminds me of Castlevania, lol. 
Wouldn’t it be G? I’m only pointing that out because that’s even more retarded
I’m not even sure I could reach an octave. I have small hands for a guy, and last time I touched a piano, I think I remember having to reach pretty far just to play triads But I guess I’d have a bit more reach without having to use my middle finger.
I want to get a piano. There’s so much more you can do on it than guitar. Guitar’s still one of the better polyphonic instruments, but it’s sure not piano.
And I like Chopin’s sound better too. My last post was made before listening to him. Liszt still has chops though
Ahh, yeah, I guess it is G. I always do the math wrong after the first octave
Still, yeah, the composer you showed me is an oddity. Romantic composers (as I’m guessing you’re noticing by listening to Liszt and Chopin) are a lot more emotionally dynamic with their pieces. Although that Saint Saens piece in that, while the musical aspects of it sound romantic, it’s more like a Baroque piece in that it sticks to just ONE emotion for the entirety of the piece. That’s not a bad thing, in my opinion - as a vocalist, my specialty is Baroque aria - but there was a large movement to break away from that in the Classical era, saying that it didn’t accurately reflect the human condition to be emotionally static like that.
Maybe not for long periods of time, but I think changing key every 30 seconds sounds jumpy and incoherent. The varied emotions you find in one or two different keys are enough for a single song. These romantic compositions sound like they’re making the opposite mistake. They try way too hard to be radically emotional, and accomplish much less than a song with a more defined direction like the one I showed you. I want to be moved, but I don’t want to be jerked around like a ball-in-a-cup. They’re both good, but I like Saint-Saens’ dynamic intensity more than Chopin’s dynamic emotions.
You really nailed it with the Castlevania comment, too. I like really gothic sounding compositions on piano. I think they balance out the piano’s naturally mellow tone.
You might try Classical (the era) music, then. Classical music was the first movement that was like “This static emotion stuff is bullshit”, whereas Romantic came right after Classical, and that was more like “Classical doesn’t explore musically enough, and it doesn’t capture the intensity enough.” Classical has that emotional dynamism, but it’s a lot more refined.
Personally, though, I don’t like Classical because it’s TOO refined - other than the best of the best, a lot of the compositions get old really quickly. Maybe you might like Romantic composers from earlier in the era, like Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Clara Wieck, or Hector Berlioz. Schubert and Schumann do a lot of vocal music, though, so if you don’t care for listening to vocal music in foreign languages, a lot of their music probably won’t do the trick for you.
I haven’t heard any of his vocal stuff, but so far this Schubert guy is spot-on.
Here’s some of Schubert’s most famous vocal works:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOiMVPSzr7E <-- Der Erlkonig
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvTLlP6LnLs <-- Gretchen am Spinnrade
Or, anything from the song cycle Winterreise:
Here’s my favorite song from Winterreise, though:
Oh, and for shits and giggles, here’s “Die Allmacht”, the only Schubert song in my vocal repertoire (it’s really, really FUCKING hard):