The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword Soundtrack is now uploaded. Wow, did I underestimated how long it would take to get this thing finished.. Granted, I broke one of my rules(don't start multiple projects at once) but once I was completely focused on Skyward Sword, it progressed smoothly. It was a little tricky extracting the rest of the music I needed from the WZSound file but once that part was done, the most time consuming part remained - editing and tagged. I used BrawlBox to tag the tracks, which works but I wanted a more detailed description. So, once I had a temporary tag such as "BossAppear" I'd changed it to "Pyroclastic Fiend Scaldera Appears" or "Abyssal Leviathan Tentalus Appears" depending on the boss and another reason it took a while is I basically played through Skyward Sword again to find titles that better describe the event such as "The Ceremonial Race" instead of just "BirdRace" or "Mini-Boss Battle (Stalfos, Moldarach Rematch)" instead of just "Middle Boss". Vague track titles always bothered me so at least this way - by playing through the game - I could use dialogue text to tag the corresponding track.

I began with something like 350 tracks but after all of the editing, merging and weeding out the sound effects, I ultimately ended up with 273. I was thorough editing the tracks, such as eliminating long silences in the beginning of some and removing audio "pops" in others. Virtually all of the tracks were high quality so I didn't need to do much refining or amplification. If the track was short (45 seconds or so) I looped them once or twice, excluding the fanfare cues. I also did the usual, added fade out and silence to the end of the tracks.

There seemed to be a fair amount of duplicate tracks, such as for the Skyview Temple, where the only difference in the tracks was that one would contain a 12 second intro where the other would not. Rather than have tracks that are 100% identical, with the exception of a short intro, I left a few of them out of the soundtrack. I want to do my best to make the soundtrack presentable or as close to an official soundtrack as I can and to be honest, It just looks more organized and cleaner that way.

I'm surprised Skyward Sword has as many tracks as it does but a good portion of them were just variations of sorts(i.e. low health, time running out, timestone version, ect.). Because of that, I blended most of those variations together with the original. Some of the tracks I thought sounded unnatural blended together so I left them as separate tracks. The Imprisoned Battle for example, even though you hear it transition from one track to another during the game, when The Imprisoned turns invincible, I just wasn't satisfied with how it blends. Other tracks, such as The Goddess Harp, Koloktos Battle Phases, Links Freefall, Skipper's Retreat Shack, Pirates Stronghold (Inside & Outside), Sandship(Inside & Outside), Fire Sanctuary, The Ghirahim Battle Phases, Stealth Music, and Demise Battle Phases blended together seamlessly(just as in the game). It's actually very similar to what I did for the Super Mario Sunshine Soundtrack with the Yoshi variations when the tempo would change.

I also included a fair amount of the item cues and fanfares as well, I placed them at the end of the soundtrack just as I have for the Metroid soundtracks.

One last thing worth mentioning is crediting the composers. Koji Kondo only composed one original music piece personally for Skyward Sword(The Opening Prologue) and Shiho Fujii composed the Battle Themes and Environmental tracks but as for the other composers: Hajime Wakai, Mahito Yokota, & Takeshi Hama. I wasn't able to find good, solid information regarding who exactly composed which track so I credited all of them for the remaining tracks.

I think the last project I did with so many tracks was SSBB a couple years back.. but now thankfully the next couple soundtracks I'm doing are much smaller so they shouldn't take too long.

You'll find Skyward Sword in the archive. Enjoy!