Soundtrack/Commentary/Yanato Planting Song -Festival-

**Spoiler Warning**This page contains spoilers for the main story of Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin. Proceed carefully.

## Yanato Planting Song -Festival-

The theme of the 32nd instalment of the "Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin" music commentary is "Yanato Planting Song -Festival-", a dengaku festival version of the Yanato Planting Song.

In the middle of the festival, the mountain erupts again, and the evil dragon Omizuchi is finally resurrected. In front of the gods gathered at the festival, Sakuna issues a proclamation and heads off to the final battle. In order to honor and encourage Sakuna, the humans surprise her by singing a dengaku version of the rice planting song, which sends her off with a strong message. This is the song that plays in the touching scene that builds up emotion toward the end.

At the beginning of the story, they were constantly bickering with each other, and singing the original rendition of the Yanato Planting Song to drown out the frustration of the hard work of planting rice, but at the end of the story, their hearts unite and the song turns into a song of thanks to the harvest goddess. The way the story was put together and the use of music was very well thought out. The synergy between the story and the songs left a strong impression on me, and I was impressed by the skilful way it was put together.

I wrote about the lyrics and song structure in the seventh article, but the part of the lyrics that says "only the rice-planting version" is the first part of this song, and what I have referred to as the second theme of the rice-planting song in previous articles. The addition of the lyrics to this part of the song, which could be called the chorus in pop music terms, changes it from a labour song to a song in praise of the harvest goddess. As I wrote in part 7, this melody was used in various scenes in different forms, and I realized that everything was connected to the rice planting.

Since this is the main theme that forms the basis of the game, the arrangement instructions were very detailed, and the development team sent us a document on "instruments that can be used in dengaku (rice planting songs). It seems that they listened to a lot of rice planting songs from each region when writing the lyrics, and I could feel their extraordinary dedication.

In accordance with the materials, I used unique percussion instruments such as binzasara, naruko, kagura suzu, kane, and chappa, wind instruments such as ryuteki, sho, and shakuhachi, and big and small drums. In terms of playing, there is no sound source for the rare instruments, so we have to find a similar sound and substitute it, but there is one incident about it that left a great impression on me.

In February 2018, I took a trip to Shizuoka Prefecture with some of my music friends for two days and one night. It was an interesting itinerary, including a visit to a piano factory in Kakegawa, and I was lucky enough to stop by the Hamamatsu Museum of Musical Instruments, which had some rare instruments on display, such as the binzasara, that I had only imagined. The video of the performance was also shown, and it was very useful for me to realize how the structure of the sound was produced. The other exhibits were also very interesting, and if you like folk instruments, you could spend all day there.

This rhythm was created from the information I received and what I actually saw and heard, and since I couldn't reproduce it with MIDI, I prepared an MP3.

(See the attached audio file in the article.)

It was the first time for me to make a rice-planting song and the first time for me to arrange it in the style of dengaku, but it was interesting to learn again about the music closely related to farming, such as binzasara, which imitates the sound of rice ears swaying in the wind, and naruko, which is used to drive away sparrows. I am currently working on an arranged album of Sakuna's background music with a theme of live performance, and if there are people who have inherited dengaku today, I would love to hear them perform this music live.

In the next article, I'll introduce the last dungeon song, "Winding Roots".