#tunedlink

Okay, so Septemberposting may be over - but in the process of looking for other Earth, Wind & Fire songs to use for the posts earlier in the week, I rediscovered an absolute gem. A gem by, of course, none other than the legend toonlink himself - arguably the best ripper of them all in the early seasons of the channel.

That proficiency alone almost guarantees any rip he works on is one for the playlists, yet we've got something else to discuss here: Driftveil City from Pokémon Black and White. In all the years Pokémon games have been releasing, its hard to find one city theme that is as unanimously beloved as Driftveil City - its vibe and beat is simply unmatched, and several YouTube uploads of the theme have view counts in the millions. Its a theme whose sheer groove and quality transcends just Pokémon fans and unites people all over to sit down and jam.

Which, too, is what DRIFTVEIL CITY JUST GOT A TON MORE GROOVIER does to SiIvaGunner viewers - arranging Earth, Wind & Fire's Let's Groove into the tune of the theme. Its a perfect match for the city's original soundscape, and uses both instruments from the original track as well as ones from the Driftveil City Gym in Pokémon Black 2 and White 2. The grooviness of both pieces are channelled into every part of the rip, from the percussion, lead and background instruments, and the intro still channelling Driftveil City's original intro.

Look, its obviously unfair to imply that any one person "carried" Season 1 of SiIva - it was a huge, experimental group project, featuring rips of basically entirely unregulated quality and from both veterans and newbies alike. Tons of the channel's most popular rips come from Season 1 due to just how much ground it broke, yet when I'm going down the list of prominent creators during those early days, one name just can't help but stick out as a titan of quality: toonlink.

At nearly 900K views on SiIva and over 2 million views on toonlink's own channel, Dr. Soulja is an absolute legend of a rip on SiIva, and is in many ways absolutely ideal as an introduction to the channel. Both songs used are highly recognizable yet very far apart in association, and with the infamous Crank That intro at the start, it prepares listeners for an absolute treat to the ears. And, yeah! Dr. Soulja has held up tremendously well overtime as an excellent example of how effective even simple ideas can be in execution.

Ah, Super Mario 64 and toonlink...what better icons of early SiIvaGunner are there? I've talked plenty about the absolute flexibility of Super Mario 64's soundscape, be it with Slider rips like WA-HOO DISCO or more out-there arrangements like Super Mario 64 Submarine Ending. Its a game with an iconic and immediately recognizable set of samples and instruments, and one that's just as malleable, letting rippers do practically anything they can put their mind to with it. It should come as no surprise that Top of the Looping Steps is as good as it is despite how early into the channel's rip it was released.

Yet even back then, I remember feeling as if Top of the Looping Steps was a, pardon the pun, step above so much else. Looping Steps in Super Mario 64 isn't so much a song as it is a looping Shepard tone - a series of notes that trick your brain into thinking its escalating in pitch, whilst in reality going nowhere at all. Much of SiIvaGunner back in Season 1 was still built around the idea of the pure bait-and-switch: the idea of iterating upon an already existing song, be it through covers like Can't Say Goodbye to Yesterday - as performed by Bob Dylan, through mashups like Door into a Hundred Summers, or through rearrangements in the original song's style like Earth, Wind & Bombs. I distinctly recall Top of the Looping Steps sticking out for how much of a creative endeavor it was - it still *felt* like the original Looping Steps, yet it was far more its own thing, using every part of the game's soundscape to recreate the instrumental backing of Top of the Stairs by Skee-Lo.

Sorry for running so late - but bonus points to you if you could call today's rip ahead of time! For 22/08, we're covering the world renowned duology of Route 228 Collabs, The 2:28 Collab and The 2:28 Collab -The Sequel-.

Its always been really fascinating to me that SiIva's larger-scale projects aren't always pushed to the forefront. These days in particular, Fusion Collabs get tons of buildup and special attention leading up to and following their release, but other kinds of collabs often simply get uploaded and left to the whims of the YouTube audience to discover. Its really interesting to see how the original The 2:28 Collab was still able to land with so many people and, in at least my eyes, become one of the most cherished rips by the SiIva diehard such as myself - it and its sequels represent such a genuine, wholehearted love for the art of music creation and VGM as a whole. The original Route 228 theme is a tune beloved by Pokémon's Gen 4 diehard fans - a lategame tune from games over 15 years old by now, yet it and DPPt's sound is still so fondly remembered.

December!! Christmas times!! The holidays!! Wahoo!!

There's of course always a lot of excitement in the air during December, even if its...largely manufactured by big companies. Yet ever since 2016, I've had far more of a personal attachment to the month - the end of SiIvaGunner Season 1, and the beginning of Season 2, was some of the most engrossed I've ever been engrossed with a piece of media - and it was all punctuated with the Patched Plains Fusion Collab.

It may be hard to truly convey to newer SiIva viewers just how suspenseful and strange the month of October was during 2016. For all intents and purposes, the channel appeared to have truly ENDED with Epic Flintstones, and everything that led up to its release just further cemented that. We'd gotten behind-the-scenes reveals of unresolved content, some of the channel's biggest projects and collaborations up to that point, a huge amount of new albums within such a short amount of time...there was very little to suggest that SiIva wouldn't actually be ending. Yet viewers paying attention would be able to connect the dots, these small little hints dropped during the finale, all connected to "Wood Man" - and mind you, this was before he was even established as a character on the channel!

Just a few days after the official ending, as SiIva had gone to sleep and the channel had been avoiding uploads for so long - uploads suddenly returned, as this "Wood Man" character became the new host at the start of November. This wasn't the first time a story event had been happening on SiIva, yet it was one that left us as viewers confused and in the dark of what was truly happening, due to the lack of a proper narrator. After just two weeks and an album release, halfway through the month, uploads suddenly ceased and the channel went dark. So...was the channel actually dead? Was this just a little bonus Halloween thing, to let the team play around with Wood Man as a character in an epilogue to the actual channel?

Turns out, it was all build-up to December - to the Christmas Comeback Crisis. The channel ending, the virus in his computer, the Voice Inside Your Head, Wood Man - it was all revealed to be part of this all new ongoing storyline, presented to us in full-on episodes during the month of December. Like a light switch turned on, the confusion and uncertainty of November turned into full-on celebration of SiIva's seemingly-now-confirmed return to regular uploading. This was the start of Season 2 - and it was, in my eyes, an absolutely perfect premiere.

I really want to go more in-depth on this someday, but I'll circle back to Patched Plains Fusion Collab to round the story out - because really, it was this rip that really cemented Season 2 as having officially begun, halfway through December 2016. It had been a month since Wood Man's sudden leave from the channel, and out of nowhere we're given an animated prologue to this all-new Christmas-themed storyline, directly based on Kirby: Planet Robobot from earlier that year. And after that sudden gut punch, we're treated to an absolute feast for the ears - a red-carpet introduction to the sort of quality we were about to experience. Kirby: Planet Robobot already had a heavy presence on SiIva due to The Reboot, and so starting this big new story event off with another rip from that same game felt like a sort of reassurance - this wasn't a bit, or a side story, or anything of the sort, but the full next step of the SiIvaGunner channel.

As a rip, it's frankly excellent - it has all the quality of the average Fusion Collab on the channel condensed down to just two minutes, covering everything from different genres of music, different games, different time signatures, and everything inbetween - a remix collaboration in the purest sense of the word, and an absolute treat to listen to. A big benefit to fusion collabs of this nature is that you're able to very clearly identify who is responsible for what parts of the rip - Princess Sylvyspirit's involvement is immediately noticeable as soon as the Touhou segment begins, Chaze's affection for MOTHER 3 is expressed through his part in the collaboration, and so on!

The last post made me nostalgic for Season 1’s ending, so fuck it, here’s another rip from back then - the File Select Fusion Collab, a rip with close to 20 creators involved. What a “Fusion Collab” entails has changed quite a fair bit over the years, as the collaborations have grown larger in size with each year. Nowadays, they now tend to focus on individual artists rendering a specific track in their own style across a longer video, such as with Season 2’s Wood Man Fusion Collab. But with Season 1, the meaning was a lot more nebulous - they were almost all made under the direction of toonlink (otherwise goes by “tunedlink” and “toonlinkirl”), and were made more in the style of YTPMVs, having a base song to build off of with an everchanging barrage of styles and sources intermingling at once.

These were released every now and then over the course of Season 1 and were always appreciated, yet today’s choice in particular stands out among them. Being released during what was effectively presented as the ending of the channel, it has a unique kind of emotional baggage to it, it leans into celebrating the entire legacy of the channel and all of its inside jokes. The full-circle moment of getting Joel Vinesauce himself to narrate a section in the middle of the track was perfect - the person whose joke got the entire channel started, now gets invited to formally close it out, with a speech still very much rooted in that niche joke culture SiIva itself thrives in. And it just keeps going in that direction - the rip builds in a congratulatory, yet bittersweet way to truly signal that the channel is about to end, a giant thank-you letter to the entire community that had been fostered over the channel’s small 9-month lifespan.