"Prelude to the Champion" (Champion Cynthia) [Part II] Jazz Metal Arrangement (feat. TRG Musicians)

To fight the Champion, you'll probably want a team of 6 strong Pokémon. To play the Champion's music... you'll probably want a team of 6 amazing musicians, and that's exactly what this arrangement is!

Vocals - @adrisaurus
Alto Sax - @Sab Irene
Lead Guitar - @FamilyJules
Rhythm Guitar - @ToxicxEternity
Drums - @The8BitDrummer

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As I said in the video to Part I of Prelude to the Champion, Cynthia is my all-time favorite Pokémon Champion! She’s both mysterious, and a complete bad-ass - Part I was the mysterious and introspective depiction of Cynthia, so Part II is the bad-ass part! Cynthia is probably the most difficult Pokémon champion to face off against - lots of people mention their “PTSD” fighting Cynthia, and have horrific memories of her Garchomp, so I thought I’d reignite some of those feelings with this particular arrangement!

I initially arranged this crazy piece of music to perform with the Sinnoh Fusion Ensemble at PAX this year. I knew that Jules, Adri, and Sab would be in town for PAX, so I thought it’d be fun to write a piece of music that’s more in the vein of progressive metal, a style of music that I’m liking more and more and getting more knowledgable about! We debuted it live at PAX in February, and finally got together to record a YouTube version of the arrangement! This piece of music is ridiculously difficult to play, so I’m very fortunate to have friends who are willing to tolerate my insane part-writing, haha!

I’ve always liked how prog metal albums sometimes have tracks that flow into one each other on albums - sort of like how Beethoven’s 5th 3rd movement flows right into the 4th movement - that’s such a cool concept to me! I knew that I wanted to do something similar with the arrangement of Prelude to the Champion. Initially, I had planned to put both of these recordings in the same video, but I soon realized that the styles of music presented here are so drastically different that I don’t think it would have made sense to combine both pieces into one video - at least! On the eventual Year of Sinnoh album, these songs will be separate tracks, but the audio will flow together seamlessly 🙂 I took a lot of influence from Dream Theater’s “Dance of Eternity” when writing this part, especially with some of the synth parts and time signature changes. One of the absolute silliest parts of this arrangement is at 1:08 - which is written in 21/8 time. Before you read that and freak out, let me explain - 21/8 is just 7/4 in triplets. In the same way that we use 12/8 to make reading groups of triplets in 4/4 easier, we can use 21/8 to make groups of triplets in 7/4 easier. 21/8 just looks really complicated, but it isn’t that bad, haha.

I want to thank all my wonderful musician friends who appear in this video once more for pulling off this ridiculous collab and arrangement with me! Especially in times like these, I’m very lucky to have all of them in my life :)

♫ "Champion Cynthia" from "Pokémon Diamond / Pearl / Platinum" composed by Go Ichinose

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