Shovel Knight (Nintendo Wii U) - Main Theme (Namco C30 WSG Cover)
Channel: Andrew Ambrose
Date: 2023-06-02

FOR SHOVELRY!
2014 was a landmark year for indie games, and one prime example of this was Yacht Club Games' critically-acclaimed action-platforming game Shovel Knight, originally released that year for the Nintendo 3DS, the Nintendo Wii U, and Windows. While I have not yet played the game for myself, I have already heard some of its fantastic music, which was originally composed for the Famicom's 2A03 and the Konami VRC6's sound expansion by Jake Kaufman (with two songs contributed by Mega Man composer Manami Matsumae). The main theme of the game is particularly a banger composition, with its intricate note patterns and and energetic attitude. I knew that I had to do that song justice with the Namco C30 WSG chip using the amazing Furnace tracker from tildearrow. Luckily for me, there's a link to the NSF file of the music (which is basically the code for a Famicom/NES game's music in a playable format) on the Bandcamp page for the game's soundtrack (https://virt.bandcamp.com/album/shovel-knight-original-soundtrack), which meant I could convert it to a FamiTracker module and properly analyze each sound channel and attempt to recreate them with the Namco C30 (which I did). It's a good thing I had that advantage, because this cover was still a tad difficult to make since some parts are much quieter than the lead melody, and I had to do my best that the whole thing wasn't too quiet while also balancing the volume of the channels. Plus, I forgot about the part near the end of the loop that changes the beat count when I was setting up the tempo settings at the start of this project, meaning I had to try to fit a lot of triplets in a funky manner. I probably should've went back and retimed all the notes to fit both 4/4 and 6/8, but it would've been a pain in the ass to go back and fix everything. Speaking of which, that last part at the end with the quick echoed arpeggios took me so much time to do. Despite these shortcomings, I think this still turned out very good, and I hope you all enjoy it. ^w^

Here are the downloads for this song: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1B18JDFodyT0mVTX6DBCq7e4AsHQqihoj?usp=sharing

Composed by: Jake Kaufman
Namco C30 WSG Arrangement by: Andrew Ambrose



Patreon Shout-outs:
Austin Kaiser
Holly
Andyana
Eric M Ambrose

Be sure to share this cover if you enjoyed it, and consider supporting me on Patreon (100% optional): https://www.patreon.com/AndrewAmbrose