Smash Ultimate's main vocal theme sure has a lot of SPIRIT! Insaneintherainmusic's video game jazz saxophone cover of Lifelight from Smash Ultimate (feat. Zabrina Hay & Spiro Dussias).
I wasnt thrilled when I first heard the theme for Smash Ultimate. Brawl has always had my favorite opening theme of any Smash game, and I thought it would be hard to top. After Lifelight during the last Smash Direct, everything changed for me. In the trend of songs like Jump Up Superstar, Nintendo has been doing an excellent job of creating incredible vocal tracks that encapsulate the spirit of their respective games so well. I cried when I first heard Lifelight, and listening to it still gives me chills. I knew I had to create something with this masterpiece.
This arrangement was very challenging to pull off. I struggled with arrangement concepts for a long time, toying with different potential styles and interpretations. My Berklee friends Sammy (guitar on Big Blue, Fossil Falls & Route 225) and Zabrina (backing vocals on Can You Feel the Sunshine) hit me up and said they were very interested in working on a version of this tune! I immediately obliged, and settled on a Dirty Loops extreme reharmonization style. Doing this drastic amount of reharm can be very problematic if not used carefully - Ive heard many renditions of songs where the original intent is completely lost in favor of stretching the reharm (weird flex, but okay), and I did my best to avoid that in this arrangement! To me, the added reharmonization creates an extra degree of tension and uncertainty, something that relates to the plot of World of Light quite well.
Ive also experimented with the video style quite a bit! Ive seen videos from creators like Platina Jazz and Peter Hollens use interesting moving split screen techniques like this, and I thought itd be fun to challenge myself with an edit like this. This video edit clocked in a lot more time than usual, since achieving the video motion that I was going for took a lot of specific key framing and curve adjusting. I discovered partway through the process of editing this video that Premiere has a keyframe curve editor just like After Effects does, so playing around with Bezier curve settings was a lot of fun for me! Okay, video nerd out over.
I hope you enjoy this last video of 2018! More interesting things will be coming your way in 2019 :D
Lifelight\" from Smash Ultimate\" composed by Hideki Sakamoto ( )
