If you've not been up to date with this week's news, it's imperative on my part to remind our reading audience about the nearing closure of the CreoFUGA.net website, one that is sure to drag behind all the music and artist comments of all the music pieces that have been shared along the years. The 'on my part' bit, of course, concerns the Taiko side of the deal, as with that are also going away quite the share of trivia about the few CF-spawn songs that are going to disappear, come June's end.
Before all of this walks the way of the old Taiko Team blog website, the double feature you're going to see in the coming weeks are all the constest-inspired ones, so that we can salvage those bits of trivia on the Internet in some shape or form. Starting off today is a couple of songs from the same composer!
Kaze no Kuni no Ryuu to Kishi (風の国の龍と騎士)| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x4 (137) | x5 (248) | x7 (405) | x8 (624) |
Taiko 0.5, Taiko PSP DX, Taiko Wii U2, Taiko +, CD CC-2
160
none
ryukisHailing from the very first, PSP-centric song contest comes Kaze no Kuni no Ryuu to Kishi (lit. 'Country of the Wind, the Knight and the Dragon'), one of three contest-winning tracks that have been made by Ryuitti/Ryuwitty (リューイッティ). Ever since we've features one of the composer's tracks under these lines (link), there has been not a single social media-related corner of the Internet belonging to the artist, so the best we can do on the trivia side of things about this and the following track is work on their surroundings, and good thing there's a bit to talk about, too!
While the first CreoFUGA contest wouldn't allow for any of the inputed entries to delve on the song's creation or some other insight from either the judges or the very same author, some of the winning tracks have come out with different titles, which has also been the case for this full-instrumental piece, originally submitted under the title of 'Mukashi Mukashi, Toki Kumi no Oosama Wa' (昔むかし、遠き国の王様は, lit. 'Once Upon a Time, the King of a Distant Country'), way different from what ended up being the official title but still bearing that fairytale-ish spin to itself. As an additional piece of trivia that wasn't made public at the time of our former SotW look at Ryuitti's work, the artist was contacted by Bandai Namco at the time of the World Championship 2016 tourney in order to commission him the creation of an original song that would have been released alongside MOES, Harunaba and Kaneko Chiharu's works for the same event. Due to personal circumstances, however, Ryuitti had to decline the generous offer, which at the time was also the choice of a 5th former CreoFUGA winner that was contacted for the same reason: Bona Inoue (Koi no Shohousen/Uso-uso Doki).
Thanks to City Collection's 8-album cycle of Taiko no Tatsujin tunes, we nowadays know that this song's tracking (and RAGE v.self's) was operated by Soichi Terada (寺田創一), a DJ most commonly known in the videogaming sphere as the key composer of several Sony-related titles, including the Ape Escape games and Fantavision. In music gaming, Soichi is also credited as the programmer and keyboard player for a couple of songs in the last console-exclusive installment of the beatmania series: A.O.R. and mambotango no.5.
With repeating note stanzas in the song's first half as well as a barrage of closely-chained 1/16 clusters, you can tell how this song was charted in the middle-ground period between the numbered-Taiko arcades and the multiu-colored-firmwares '0' generation, with the portable console game bridging the gap within generations as its first home alongside the other winners of the very first Taiko-fueled song contest.
Juukinzoku Fugitive (重金属フューギティブ) Ryuitti feat. GUMI| Version | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | x4 (128) | x6 (249) | x7 (383) | x10 (653) |
Taiko 0 S, Taiko 3DS 2, Taiko Switch, CD CC-3 140-260 none gumijkRyuitti's second Taiko-approved song is a Vocaloid song with GUMI, and the first one for said digital singer to reach the 10th Oni rating star at that! The title is translatable to 'Heavy Metal Fugitive', but according to Ryuitti himself on the song's description on CreoFUGA, the artist drew influence to anything but metal genre tropes, with a mixture of glitch/drum 'n' bass/gothic in mind instead.
Up until this song's creation, Ryuitti limited himself to GUMI's voice peak setting to E4, but due to random listeners' feedback and the overwhoelming popularity of 'that one very popular Vocaloid song' (unnamed in the description) that peaks at C#5, he switched to GUMI's maximum vocal range in his works -G#4- as a researched effort to fully exploit the execptionally high vocal range, dubbed by him as the digital voice banks' greatest point of strength. The song's lyrics were penned as to give voice to 'a bed-ridden person' who gained self-consciousness about its own person but cannot speak, frantically holding those thoughts strong in mind while effectively being reduced as a 'living statue'. Made with CUBASE, this song sports irregular timing compositions all throughout, from the 7/8 intro to the 3/4 chorus with some minor hybridations in-between.
While repeating note patterns are also a trend of this song's Oni mode, when an over-250 BPM value is commonplace, everything can be easily source of errors for the players, especially for those note formations that are played slightly off-paced with the rest of the near ended note stanza! When the notecount is also this low, ending on a Fail quota by the number of mistakes made is deceivingly easier than expectable.
