FF Music Songs similar to the Prelude

[PhilsPhindings]

Greetings fellow game music lovers,

after browsing through my post history, I cannot remember whether I posted this here or not.

It's about the Prelude, one of the most iconic songs in the franchise and pretty much present in every game, at least the main franchise.

According to the legend, Uematsu composed this in 30 minutes after Sakaguchi instructed him to:

Final Fantasy legend Nobuo Uematsu's 9 greatest musical moments

A look back at 30+ years of killer soundtracks.

www.pcgamer.com

Nevertheless, despite the alleged simplicity of the tune, it is far from being abundant in music productions. Thus, I made it somewhat of a hobby of collecting samples comparable to the sequence. So far I'm aware of the following occurences of comparable melodies:

Moody Blues - "The Other Side of Life" (1986)
Pete Townshend - "Let My Love Open The Door" (1980)
Francis Rimbert - "Voices of Paradise" (1979)
Quicksilver - "Fire Brothers" (1971)

plus some minor ones.

For your personal convenince, VGML now has a video that puts all the samples in one place so you don't have to look them up individually:

Do you know of potential samples that I might not be aware of?

Happy discussion!

 

[Molosev]

Hi Phil,

it's always a pleasure to listen to your phindings!

I try to play the piano from time to time and had started to learn the Prelude some time ago. As usual I haven't finished the score but I found the piece very enjoyable to play. It is also interesting to grasp the concept of transposition.

Musically I find the resemblance to Pete Townshend's track striking. But maybe I'm more influenced by the name of the artist which reminds me of Evan Townshend the hero of the book FInal Fantasy VII The Kids Are Alright. Dionysos pointed out to me recently that the name of the book was probably inspired by a song by The Who, but I didn't know that the band's frontman was also called Townshend!

Anyway, thanks for your research, looking forward to hearing the next ones.

 

[Dionysos]

Yep! Pete Townshend was in The Who, and as Molosev says, The Who has a special relationship with Final Fantasy. Kazushige Nojima's FFVII novel The Kids Are Alright: A Turks Sidestory is filled with references. The novel's title is a reference to the name of a track on the album My Generation, but even the chapter headings are inspired by The Who. The first part of the novel is called See Me, Feel Me (sharing its name with a track on the album Tommy) and the second part is called Who Are You? (the name of one of their most famous tracks and albums). In this light, the name of the protagonist Evan Townshend most definitely appears to be a deliberate reference to Pete Townshend.

I find it quite awesome that the Prelude theme closely resembles a Pete Townshend track because he himself would inspire the name of a character in the franchise. It's pretty cool. I wonder if he knows...

The comparisons in the post and video are great. I can definitely hear it and agree with all of those. I'm not sure off the top of my head if I can think of any other tracks that are as close to Prelude as the ones you cite. When I was younger my mind would always hear Prelude in Muse's Bliss. But that track a) isn't as close to Prelude as your examples, and b) was released much too late. But I was discovering Muse at about the same time as I was becoming more and more engrossed in Final Fantasy, so when I listened to songs like Bliss I was often imagining Final Fantasy scenes in my head.

It's both astonishing and funny that Nobuo composed one of the franchise's most iconic tunes within thirty minutes. Its simplicity really works in cementing it in our minds and making it easily recognisable. And it also has a nice purity to it, which is also appropriate since it is also often used as the 'Crystal Theme'.

 

[Molosev]

I often started Final Fantasy VII without finishing it. Maybe it was that sound that called to me.
Generally speaking, I love to linger over the beginning of games, but it was certainly this game that kept me on its doorstep the longest.
To this day that prelude is one of the few triggers that allows me to relive the joy of my first game. A brief glimpse of the screen before my young self eyes and then the emotion is lost.