Papers Please Main Theme Orchestral

[Outworld Sorceress]

Hi everyone! Like a lot of you I found the main theme to Papers Please highly addictive. When I was asked to arrange it as part of a collaborative fan project I was so excited to put my own spin on the piece. My background is classic music so I decided to expand the orchestration with more brass, perc, etc.

My arrangment can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QToPRy5Vw3U

I hope you enjoy and thank you to Lucas Pope for creating a great piece for me to work with!

There's also a pretty great metal arrangement that I found a few pages back on this forum and people should check that out too. :D

[Barking Sands]

I enjoyed this version as well as the metal one; I asked Mailman to provide an .ogg version so it could work in the game and it was awesome. So I'm asking you to do the same thing for us. :D

I tried converting from .mp3 to .ogg with ffmpeg but it retained the flac codec and didn't work in-game.

[Glory to Arstotzka]

*salutes*

[Outworld Sorceress]

I'm glad you enjoyed it! I've got an .ogg version and an .mp3 version up on my website now. But for some reason it keeps blocking it saying that the link is spam? I'll include a link on my youtube page so people can get at it. Otherwise I think my website is on my steam profile page as well.

[Barking Sands]

Nice, thanks. Too bad the .ogg version doesn't keep in tempo with the Papers, Please logo bouncing on the screen, but it's pleasant to listen to and it fits the game's tone nonetheless.

[Amber]

quite liked it but doesn't just quite beat the metal version for me. I think its cos the first instrument doing the main tune is quite high (jjust liket he original) but it seems a bit out of place in an orchestral setting.

that being siad, its a billion times better than anything ic uld make :D

[Outworld Sorceress]

Ooops, I guess I forgot to check to see how it lined up with the logo. Oh well, I'm glad it worked at least.

Amber you're right the main tune is played by a Marxophone which is not traditionally used in an orchestral setting. I wanted something that sounded like it could be similar to a Eastern European folk instrument but wasn't associated with any particular nation in Europe. This way it could represent 'the voice' of Arstotzka. In some ways I felt that instrument represents the old traditional ways fighting against the new ways that Communism enforced. Since I happened to have a Marxophone VST (the Marxophone being a US instrument invented around the 1900s) which has sort of a folk instrument sound, I went with that.

[Sora Rumalda]

Awesome!

[gregolego gaming ඞ]

what are the instruments used in the original?

[RBlackbird]

What DAW did you use to arrange and mix it?

(I'd like to put my own spin on it as well but don't have the source files to use as a template)

[Outworld Sorceress]

I'd have to go back and relisten to the original to tell you the instrumentation. It's been a while since I listened to it that intently. I believe it's mostly horns and strings. I tried to keep the instrumentation similar but added in extra moving lines and a little more percussion.

Blackbird--I ended up using FL Studio either 11 or 10? I think they were on 11 by the time I finished this. In terms of source files, I just looped the main theme on youtube and transcribed the whole thing into Finale by hand before porting it over to FL Studio as a midi file. Then I used that raw midi to tweak some of the realism manually.