Longing of the Wind instumentation

[Calldwr]

Hello, forum members. In the first sixteen bars of Longing of the Wind from Chrono Trigger (1995), what are the instruments used? I'm certain of a double bass in the bass line, but what of the strange upper voices? Is it a sampled instrument? There's a percussive component at the attack.

[ZeaLitY]

http://chronofan.com/Black/Other/CTInstrumentBank.rar

Welcome tot he party. That has all the samples. However, a real effort to identify them, or the libraries they belong to, hasn't taken place yet, apart from a single sample:

https://www.chronocompendium.com/Forums/index.php?topic=7115.0
https://www.chronocompendium.com/Forums/index.php?topic=2545.0

[Toreadore]

Sounds like pizzicato strings. Not sure of the actual stringed instrument though.

[Calldwr]

My sense of Mitsuda's work is that he prefers real instruments, rather than electronic ones. Of course, he uses electronic instruments, but he bases them on real ones. So I'm mostly comfortable calling the upper voices a piano. I did consider pizzicato violin & viola, but that sound decays rapidly, whereas I'm hearing a struck string sound. (The Triforce Quartet recorded the tune on Ultima Phantasia, for comparison).

[Reld]

It's definitely pizzicato strings. More specifically it's apparently a Kurzweil K1200 Pro II sample.

EDIT: This document attempts to... document... the source of samples used in a bunch of SNES games. There are a bunch of Chrono Trigger samples identified in there.

[Calldwr]

Wow, that document's huge! Thanks for posting! Mathew Valente's video is fuzzy, but I guess my query has been solved.

[ZeaLitY]

Damn. Someone ought to pull off something similar to the DKC Remaster, and try using MIDIs and replacing the instruments with the original samples in high fidelity.

[Reld]

Mathew Valente has some videos on his youtube channel where he does basically exactly that. He calls it "uncompressing" the songs.

Mathew was the composer for Chrono Resurrection, by the way. He has some videos about that as well where he plays through what existed of the old demo.