The rock cup
This is a race. This is a goron race. Say no more, It is just a matter of bringing back the horse race cue and plaster goron instruments everywhere, replacing the hillbilly sensibilities with the percussion characteristic of Goron City no matter how ridiculous it might sound; the team ends up having fun and the player recognizes the connection between the concepts of a race competition and Goron. Koji Kondo just improvises a little with the cuica and calls it a day. You can picture the developers having a laugh when the track was delivered.
Musical Analysis
Structure: Section 0 / Section 1 / Section 2 / Section 3 (Goron Race Goal)
Time Signature: 4/4
Tempo: 155 (fermata at the end of Section 0 to 100)
Melodic and Harmonic Profiles: F Ionian/Major
On this track:
The upright bass or double bass from the original is replaced by the conga glissando that used to establish the main beat in Goron Village. Since the conga glissando sample is not given enough time to decay, it ends up sounding mostly like normal congas with different pitches or just another marimba, creating the bass line of the piece. Kondo also uses the same sample to create the harmony melody that the fiddle used to play on the original ‘Horse Race’ cue.
Surprisingly, the nylon guitar is replaced by a conga slap sound that can’t even sound chords, It’s like Kondo wasn’t even trying, he just interchanged the two instruments and deemed that it sounded good enough. In fact, in a stroke of either luck or pure genius, the conga slap now sounds as if the goron watching the races are clapping along with the music.
The bass marimba, lead instrument of the goron race (literally), takes the spot of the lead fiddle, with the other marimba replacing the banjo; they play the same notes from the original for all intents and purposes, adding just some articulations particular to the marimba.
Only Section 2 is significantly altered from the original, where instead of the harmonica solo we get an improvisation of cuica.
Of course the goron also have their own victory cue for when the race has finished and it receives the same treatment of replacing the instruments from the original with the aboriginal percussion of the goron tribe.
A track that probably took Kondo no more than ten minutes to make and ended up being fun, amusing and perfectly matched to the scene, maintaining the precious consistency Kondo always aims for and bridging the Goron tribe with the race mini game music already established in Ocarina of Time. Now it is time to go back once again into the wild west of the United States for a whole cowboy saga; this time, however, the American missions will go on to include unapologetically sci-fi elements that only a Zelda game like Majora’s Mask would dare to touch.
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