We continue the Year of Sinnoh with the Bidoof Nation National Anthem... Insaneintherainmusic's jazz cover / remix of "Route 201" from Pokémon Diamond and Pearl.

🎶 Available on my Pokémon DPPt album Sinnohvation! • • • https://album.link/xmprhz5rwbj3j
🎼 Sheet Music • • • https://bit.ly/3wfx9MZ

The Year of Sinnoh continues! I figured since we started with the first town theme, we might as well continue with the first route them? I can promise that this pattern will not continue after this video, so enjoy it while it lasts, haha! Route 201 is one of the best “first route” themes in any Pokémon game - it’s short, sweet, and has enough variety to keep looping over and over again without getting too annoying or sounding childish (like some other first route themes do, in my opinion. However, since this song’s original loop time is somewhere between 30 and 40 seconds, that really doesn’t give me a lot of material to play with arranging this song, which turned out to be quite the challenge!

I knew that I wanted to introduce some level of change to this song, while still maintaining the original innocence and childlike feelings that the theme originally had. With this vision, I decided to approach the song with a bit more of a mature perspective, perhaps the perspective you’d have as a current player of Pokémon in 2019 looking back at your experiences playing Pokémon Diamond and Pearl when they came out in 2006 and reminiscing on those experiences. There are some harmonic and formal changes in this cover that I think make it sound a bit more mature, while also striking the balance with keeping the original melodies front and center! I hope that comes across to you, would love to know your thoughts on that.

The biggest change I made was a harmonic superimposition of the Ionian melody over a Mixolydian tonic. Route 201’s main melody is the classic simple major key (Ionian) childlike melody with lots of scalar motion and short notes, so I knew it was going to be a challenge to adapt this to my vision of a more mature version of this song. I figured out how to achieve this by superimposing that melody over a C7sus voicing in the left hand of the piano. Ionian and Mixolydian are very very similar modes, with the only discrepancy occurring between the major 7 and the flat 7th in each mode, respectively. These intervals clash in this cover here and there, which was intentionally done to give the listener a more “distanced” perspective from the super happy major section. I kept the B section that walks down from an F major chord to a C pretty standard, with the help of some Vulfpeck-influenced piano parts, and fun flute lines. I had a loooot of fun reharmonizing the C section of the melody! This was done to provide some much-needed harmonic contrast from the rest of the tune, which has fairly simple harmony throughout.

This cover also is the debut of my new bass clarinet! It’s a Low C model from Kessler, and I absolutely love playing it. I wasn’t expecting to have it in my possession when I arranged this video, so the sheet music was actually written for bari sax! However, I think the bass clarinet adds a really unique color to this particular arrangement, so I was very happy to have it. I’m going to be using it in a lot of cool stuff soon!

♫ "Route 201" from "Pokémon Diamond & Pearl" composed by Hitomi Sato

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