According to an interview in the latest NP, Toru Minegishi is responsible for all the field and dungeon music in Twilight Princess.  Minegishi previously worked on sound effects for various Nintendo games including Super Mario Sunshine as well as a music for Majora's Mask and Wind Waker.

That's great. Tooru Minegishi had some great battle music in Majora. Unfortunately, there's no info on what tracks in WW were his. Nevertheless, I think he will do a nice job.

^ Yeah, Minegishi contributed three great battle themes to Majora's Mask.  I don't know who did the battle themes for Wind Waker, but they were pretty weak.  Especially "Gohdan"... which was just terrible.  I think Hajime Wakai was responsible for the boss themes in that game.  Assuming it was him, I'm suprised at his weak showing, 'cause he's extremely talented.

Having had read that article earlier in the week, I don't recall much from it except one word:  melancholy.  Too bad they didn't use another word I was looking for:  orchestrated.  Even so, I'm looking forward to hearing the music almost as much as playing the game.  I'm curious if Minegishi was responsible for the Twilight Princess trailer music that was released last year, and who is working on the Phantom Hourglass music.

I thought someone on the project had announced some time ago that it would feature live orchestration.

I think there will be some orchestrated pieces, but I highly doubt the whole thing will be orchestrated.

Someone stated that certain scenes would have orchestrated tunes and everything else is synth all the way.

Well, it'll be higher quality than WW and Four Swords, at least.

Hope so. Wind Waker's synth was mostly dull. Or am I confusing it for the soundtrack? Oh well, they're both mostly dull.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody has confirmed anything in terms of what's orchestrated and what's not.  We only have Kondo's word that they would orchestrate as much as was financially reasonable or whatever.

From what I've heard, Twilight Princess uses the same sound library as Wind Waker.

Personal note here:  aside from the somewhat shaky battle themes (which I admit weren't as good as the ones in Majora's Mask and Ocarina of Time--although a couple of them toward the end were quite well done), I found WindWaker to be a fairly decent soundtrack.  Perhaps a little bit below OoT and MM, but nowhere near unbearable.

I'm hoping that TP has a bit more variety in the sound library department than the same old MIDI samples, but hopefully the orchestrated tunes will give it some punch.  And if not, well, maybe the quality of the compositions will save the day.  But we'll find out when (and if!) the game ever gets released.

-Jon T.

Sucks that Kondo isn't writing any music for the game.  All the other composers will certainly arrange selections from the plethora of musical pieces that rests in his Zelda music archive... but it's not the same.

Uh, Kondo *is* the composer for Twilight Princess?

Not really; he seems to be the "supervising composer", from what I read of that NP interview.

-Jon T.

Yeah I liked it too, the experimental style of the dungeon songs was unique and went well with the game's artistic direction.

Of course it'll get released, it's too big of a project to just up and cancel

Interesting thing I found out:  Twilight Princess for GC is not going to be released in one, but two different versions.  Apparently there's going to be another for the Nintendo Revolution (now called "Wii", or whatever the heck it is), and it'll be released simultaneously with the GC release.  I wonder how this will affect the game soundtrack release?  This is something that Nintendo has never done before--releasing two different versions of a title on different consoles simultaneously.  I'm curious to see how this will turn out.

-Jon T.

Either there'll be two separate ost releases as well (doubtful), the Wii version's soundtrack will only be released (that's if it even has better synth, remember how OoT on the Cube sounded exactly the same as the N64 ver.?),
or Scitron will just go the 'Castlevania Chronicles ost' route..

Well that's the tricky thing. You have to remember that the Wii uses a full DVD not the half sized mini DVDs the Cube uses. This COULD mean they'd have room for more high quality orchestral pieces. At the same time though, hardware wise, the Wii is just a slightly beefed up Gamecube, not being all that different, so I doubt the synth would be better.

I'm willing to bet that both versions will sound exactly the same.

OoT on the GC was emulated, it didn't use any of the GC synth (which is technically actually the best in this generation, but many GC games skip it and just stream the music. N64 had no synth and forced games to do all sound mixing in software).

Can you give me an example of a few games that used GC synth?  Wind Waker, maybe?

Hm, a couple ones I know about are Luigi's Mansion, Starfox Adventure, Tales of Symphonia... I didn't look at Wind Waker yet. halleyscometsoftware was a good resource for such information but it's currently down.