Platforms: SNES
Year: 2024
Published by: Mathew Valente
Number of Files: 72
Total Filesize: 265 MB (MP3), 917 MB (FLAC)
Date Added: Oct 15th, 2025
Album type: Arrangement
Uploaded by: admiraltennek
PREAMBLE
We’re back! This is the 5th release of my Synthetic Origins series. Super Mario RPG is on the menu today,
and yes, mostly inspired by the Remake’s trailer release. Once the trailer came out, I was hard at work
making Remasters to the original songs.
To reiterate what was said in the previous albums, I’ve always wondered what Final Fantasy music would
have sounded like if they used their original instrumentation before they were edited down to Super
Nintendo-edited samples. I saw a video on YouTube once where FF6 was doing this, playing back from a
Roland Sound Canvas player, and it blew me away. So, about 7 years ago I went on a rompler hunt and
started learning the sources of a lot of games’ samples. I found out that there was a community on Discord
for people like me named the VGM & Other Instrument Sources where people would post not only the
sources of some games’ instruments, but where to find those samples as well.
And thus, Synthetic Origins was born.
The first edition came out about six years ago for Final Fantasy IV. Once FF5 and FF6 were completed, then
Chrono Trigger/Radical Dreamers.
Super Mario RPG has a lot of great examples of Yoko Shimomura playing her original concept songs from
the actual romplers she designed them on (example: search up V-Jump and Jump Greatest Club videos and
you’ll hear what I mean).
What even IS an “uncompressed” version? Well, much like the multiple iterations before this Synthetic
Origins, I had a very hard time deciding which full instrumental patches and which samples I would pluck
from those patches.
A “restoration” using original samples edited the same way as the SNES is not interesting to me. It’s just like,
playing an SPC file at 44.1KHz. So this soundtrack will utilize a mixture of both. There are some samples in
the patches that some have commented on my YouTube channel videos as “dissonant”. An example is the
Acoustic Bass had a full instrument patch but because it was sampled from a high pitch sound in the SNES,
I decided to record just one sound from that patch and use it in the instrument so it would sound more
familiar.
You might notice the song titles are a little different than what you’re used to. I chose to utilize the Nintendo
Switch Super Mario RPG Remake official translation for the song titles, as there was no official English
translation for the tracks from the SNES soundtrack (from what I can find)
I hope you all enjoy this one, I initially wanted to release this in November of 2023 but it’s now March 2024. I
hope the extra time I spent on it shows that I put a lot into this whole album!
THE SYNTHESIZERS/ROMPLERS USED
-Roland JV880
-Roland JV1080 (I used it for higher quality versions of some sounds)
-Roland SC55 and SC88
-Roland Rhythm Section (While some / most Roland drum machine sounds were probably taken from the
SC88, this library has higher quality versions of it all)
-Kurzweil K2000 Orchestral ROM (Shimomura probably used the K2500 version)
-Korg 01/W
-Alesis DM5
-Akai CD3000 Sound Library
-EastWest Bob Clearmountain Drums 2
-EastWest Bob Clearmountain Percussion and Bass
-InVision Lightware 1 Stratus
-Masterbits Climax Collection Vol. 2 Classic
-Zero-G Datafile 2 (Track 01 and Track 10 mixed)
There were a few samples that I could never find so I improvised. As far as I knew, the only unfound
samples were:
-Crash Cymbal – I was not sure as Shimomura may have gotten this from either the Alesis DM5 or the
Roland JV880, though the pitch and the tone don’t really match on the Roland, they kind of do with the
Alesis. So I chose this
-Distortion Guitar – I went through everything. I could not find it so I used the one in the SC88
-Percussive sound in Bowser’s battle theme – I cheated. The sound was elusive, I couldn’t find it. I found
something similar on the Korg 01W so I used it in the Bowser battle theme, but in other songs the sample
was in, I used the game sound.