Cactuar Collections - Disc One (FFVII)

This is the first in a series of albums I’ve made covering and remaking music from the PlayStation 1 trilogy of FF games!

Available on Spotify, Bandcamp & Youtube:

Spotify: open.spotify.com/album/7iahr0s2WZ…AcTmGdCe5nCjqkEA

Bandcamp: joshtrinnaman.bandcamp.com/album/cactu…c-one-ffvii

Youtube: youtu.be/-X3q1cMTO-U?feature=shared

I absolutely love these games, they were a big part of my childhood growing up and I still play them every couple of years. I've always loved the music from them and since I've been making music, I've always had the idea to try something like this in the back of my mind.

This is a concept album of a way I’ve imagined playing tracks specifically from the PS1 versions of FFVII, VIII and IX - with a live band, using a range of genres to re-imagine the MIDI-instrumental scores of some of the awesome music Nobuo Uematsu composed for these games.

I've recorded, sequenced and synthesised every sound and instrument from the ground up, and this remains an on-going Behemoth of a personal home recording project for me.

I'd love to turn this into a real live band and exclusive 90 minute-long show in the reasonable future, and this is kind of like a proof-of-concept of this dream idea.

Disc One would be the ideal first half or 45 mins of this show, focused on music from VII. The 2nd half would feature music from VIII & IX.

For certain key sounds, I’ve tried to find out exactly what gear Nobuo Uematsu used to compose these scores and found conflicting info, but I happen to own one thing he supposedly used by chance; the EMU Proteus 2000.

I’ve combed every preset on this, managed to find certain identical percussion and instrument sounds used on the original scores and have re-recorded them directly from the unit to use in these versions.

If you like what you hear, I’m excited to share more soon from Disc Two (FFVIII) and Disc Three (IX), which contain some of my personal favourites. I’ll be posting updates and news on my socials on the progress of all this, so keep an eye out for more soon!