insaneintherainmusic | Pokémon DPPt: Opening Movie Orchestral Arrangement @insaneintherainmusic | Uploaded May 2020 | Updated October 2024, 2 days ago.
The theme music to one of the greatest adventures out there! The Year of Sinnoh continues!

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This song / sequence means a lot to me. This was the first song I ever heard from Pokémon DPPt, and it singlehandedly introduced me to what would later become my favorite video game soundtrack of all time. I've long wanted to arrange this to relive the nostalgia, but it was only I was able to work with a variety of extremely talented string and brass players that I was able to make it happen! (The string and brass parts were recorded in December of 2019 before social distancing measures were enacted in the United States.) Since this is pretty much a 1:1 remastering of the original track, I decided to include footage of the opening movie in the video as well, since this piece of music functions as an underscore to the visuals, rather than a piece of background music for the player.

Putting together this arrangement was really crazy! After doing some digging on the internet, I dug up some of the original MIDI files for Pokémon DPPT, and these were SO useful in transcribing and arranging this song. This song is incredibly complex, with tons of layers and instruments running at once - so much so that attempting to transcribe this song solely by ear would have been enormously difficult. Thankfully, using the MIDI files and the original DPPt soundfont, I was able to listen to the opening sequence one instrument at a time, which really helped with nailing the transcription process. I was shocked at how technically difficult some of these parts were - the string writing for this 90 second piece is INSANE, and took a lot of work by these incredibly skilled string players to be able to pull off. The brass parts are quite challenging as well!

One section of the arrangement that I really enjoyed arranging was the last 30 seconds - the atmospheric music that pays under the title screen (very reminiscent of the Hall of Origin!). I have so much nostalgia for this song that I knew I had to do it justice! Having access to live strings and harp here were super helpful, since that allowed me to dip my foot a bit into contemporary techniques to make the arrangement even cooler. I ended up utilizing some strange techniques like random, fast, atonal pizzicato on the violins, using a cloth to mute the harp strings to recreate the "bubbling" sounds played in the intro, and also a solo violin playing atonal screechy high notes to simulate some of the screechy SFX that the intro uses.

So grateful to have been able to tackle this project, finally. This video upload date (May 9th, 2020) is actually pretty special for me as well - today is the day I graduate from the Berklee College of Music! It's been a long time coming, and it's certainly a weird time to be graduating from college, considering in-person ceremonies are out of the question right now, but releasing this piece of music today gives me a bit of solace. It's sort of like coming full circle - I release my arrangement of the opening theme from my favorite game soundtrack on the day that I graduate from music school... seems fitting. Anyway, more great Sinnoh music coming your way soon! I've got an album to finish!

Trumpet - Bastien Rieser, Richard Stanmeyer
Trombone - Auden Durant

Violin 1 - Brandon Jackson, Jody Miller, Luna Ramos, Andrea Brun
Violin 2 - Brian Urra, Lia Davies, Dori Holly, Claudia Lee Horna
Viola - Cecilia Vacanti, Cecelia Cook, Noah Leong
Cello - Aaron Sinclair Hauser, Zachary Foster, Amit Cachman
Double Bass - Luis Celis
Piano - Yoko Suzuki
Harp - Charles Overton

Recording Engineer - Joel Edinberg
Mixing & Mastering - Carlos Eiene
Lighting & Videography - Kevin Greene
Video Editing - Carlos Eiene
Everything else - Carlos Eiene

♫ "Opening Movie" from "Pokémon Diamond / Pearl / Platinum" composed by Junichi Masuda & Go Ichinose, arranged by Go Ichinose

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