Aquatic Ambience (Donkey Kong Country) Live Synth Cover

GLASYS

"Aquatic Ambience from Donkey Kong Country for SNES has always been one of my favorite video game underwater themes. Here is my live synthesizer arrangement of the song. All sounds performed simultaneously without any backing tracks or overdubs.

Get a download of this track on Patreon:
http://www.patreon.com/glasys

Technical details:

This song was pretty tricky to arrange in my style even though it's pretty downtempo / chill. I wanted to stay quite close to the original arrangement by the fantastic David Wise, and there were a lot of different sounds to recreate and figure out how to do in one go.

I ended up creating a bunch of new percussion samples and mapping them to the arcade buttons as well as layering some of them with the bass. For example, the snare that comes in the second half is unmuted with an expression pedal and layered with the bass notes that I play with my pinky.
I enjoy finding solutions for this stuff, it's like a puzzle game. :)

The bass sound itself is the Boomstar 4075 through Polyverse Gatekeeper (for the arpeggiated effect).

For my right hand, I split the Prophet XL into two sounds: The bottom half is a pitch shifting string and the top half is that "guitar feedback" type of sound. The split point is set up in a way that lets me trigger both sounds with one chord at a certain point. Those dreamy arpeggios are played on the Prophet 6 (Valhalla's free plugin "SuperMassive" is the awesome reverb) and the main melody is an Arturia MicroBrute through a few pedals (Red Panda Tensor and MWFX Judder). The piano is Spectrasonics Keyscape, flute is SWAM Flute (both those sounds are played on the Korg MicroKey).

Phew, I think that covers it! :)
Drop a comment below and let me know what you'd like to see on this channel."