Mother (Famicom) - Mother Earth (PC Engine HuC6280 Cover)

It's been a while since I did something with the PC Engine, hasn't it?
Mother 3 got added to the Japanese Game Boy Advance library for the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack yesterday, and it got me thinking of how I've been meaning to cover a song from the Mother series for quite some time now. In fact, my best friend Bant, who is a big fan of the Mother games (especially Mother 2/Earthbound), has wanted me to do so as well. I figured I'd finally take a crack at it with Furnace, and I chose the title theme of the first Mother, Mother Earth. Since I didn't want to do anything too extravagant with the Namco C30 WSG or the Konami SCC, I figured I'd use the PC Engine's HuC6280 since the PC Engine was a huge hit in Japan when Mother was released for the Famicom in 1989. This fairly simple yet unapologetically beautiful song sets an emotional tone for the game and the series as a whole, fitting the game's tagline "Don't cry until you reach the ending." I've always loved the song ever since I first heard it after buying the game for my brother on the Wii U Virtual Console back when Nintendo finally released the cancelled English NES prototype on there as Earthbound Beginnings in 2015 (though the title screen just says Earthbound). Even if I've only played a tiny amount of that game, not even touching Mother 2 or 3, I definitely have a lot of respect for Mother's music, as well as Mother 2 and 3's music to an extent. Anyway, the cover itself took me only a few hours to make since Mother's music only used the 2A03 (and the song Mother Earth doesn't do anything particularly crazy with the notes and whatnot), and this meant I also ended up using only four wavetables. In fact, one of these wavetables is one used extensively by Nintendo on the Famicom Disk System back in the day (in fact, Pax Softnica did plenty of games for the FDS before they developed Mother with Shigesato Itoi's development studio Ape and Nintendo, so it works out quite well). Getting the volume changes on the melody was a bit tricky, but I think I managed quite well overall. I really like how this turned out, and I hope you all enjoy it. ^w^

Here are the downloads for this song: https://drive.google.com/drive/folder...

Composed by: Keiichi Suzuki and/or Hirokazu Tanaka
PC Engine Arrangement by: Andrew Ambrose



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Eric M Ambrose
Kerokoid

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