Never thought that the theme song for a fight and foot-loving hairy guy would be the thing to bring me back to YouTube!
Well, here I am again. After announcing my retirement from YouTube at the beginning of 2022, subsequently “un-retiring” a year and a half later (sort of), and then proceeding to upload next to nothing after said announcement… I find myself back here on YouTube making a good, old cover. All I can say really is that I’m happy to be here!
I absolutely loved playing through Expedition 33 in 2025, it was my personal Game of the Year even before it won all the awards that it did. The game was nearly perfect for me on nearly every front, which of course, includes the music. Lorien Testard’s score for this game is so great. To me, it strikes a fantastic balance between a modern atmospheric score and the classic melody-first game scores from the “retro” era (although, what even is retro now?) Several of the themes from the game are permanently lodged into my musical memory, with this one being no exception! Monoco’s theme is certainly quite different from nearly everything else in the game, but it’s definitely right up my alley. This theme was actually introduction to Expedition 33, as a few friends of mine showed this track to me before I had even played the game, and I was like “…okay I should probably play this game if it has a theme like this in it.”
Arranging this song was so much fun! Obviously, this is a very saxophone-focused theme, which is the main reason I even felt the need to cover this track to begin with… but I didn’t want to do a straight cover where I just play the melody part on saxophone and nothing else. So I decided to expand the instrumentation to a 5-part saxophone section! Originally I was thinking I would do a big band version of this, but then I went “that sounds like a lot of work. Maybe the 5 saxophones will do just fine or even be better?” I am very glad I did that! The first 2:30-ish of this arrangement is pretty similar to the original track - I even transcribed and included the original saxophone solo from the OST version of this track to pay homage to that part! But then, the track kinda goes off the rails and into my own solo section. And man… I’m quite proud of how that solo section came out! The final solo you hear in this video is actually quite a few different solo takes comped together. Gosh, I must have spent like… an hour just getting this solo right? As time has gone on, and as I’ve spent more time working on game music professionally, I’ve realized that I really approach improvisation like being a composer. Because of that, when I’m in a studio environment, I get really particular about how my improvised solos fit the song, so I end up spending a lot of time getting things exactly right. Definitely different from how I’d do it live!
Oh, and I also just want to point out that the instrument used on the “bow wow-wow” part is a talk box! I knew that I absolutely HAD to incorporate the iconic intro bit into this song, and I thought the talk box was the perfect instrument. I’ve used it in a few of my videos before, but if you’re not aware of what a talk box is, basically it’s a pedal that you send a simple synthesizer signal through, and then the pedal has a little speaker in it that routes that synth sound through a vinyl tube that you hold in your mouth, effectively replacing your vocal cords. You can then shape your mouth in the same way you’d talk / sing to get a really cool robot voice effect. It’s different than a vocoder, which can also be used to achieve a very similar effect (I’m not sure if the original recording uses a vocoder or not…!) The talk box really excels at “wow-wow” type effects, so it was the PERFECT tool for this. So glad I could break it out again!
Lastly: Funny enough, despite this theme being released recently, this song has a weird sense of nostalgia to me, since it actually reminds me of my old YouTube videos! Back in the days before I got into playing too many different instruments like brass and other non-saxophone woodwinds, I had so many arrangements that were just rhythm section + layers of saxophone, and the cascading sixteenth note part that has (I think) 4 layers of tenor sax in the original track just really reminded me that. In a way, covering this song feels like a full circle moment to me, sort of harkening back to my old days of making covers consistently on here. I’ve come a long way since then, but I’m mostly just glad to still have my passion for game music and being able to share my work with you all when I can!
🎷 insaneintherainmusic Signature SYOS Tenor Saxophone Mouthpiece https://www.syos.co/en/artists/carlos...
♫ "Monoco" from "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" composed by Lorien Testard
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