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We’ve reached the checkpoint: closing out this year’s May Madness (in June, as is tradition) is the last remake of the year (for now), and the #1 most requested remake for the year: Stickerbush Symphony from Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest!

This one managed to place first in the 2021 May Madness ballot by a single vote, barely edging out FF6 Decisive Battle.

I first covered this song way back in 2010. It was the first ‘soft’ arrangement I made, and I used a Drum & Bass sound for most of the song. Despite the drastically different feel, this happened to be one of my more popular arrangements from the 2010 year of GaMetal.

I’ve arranged this one a bit differently from my 2010 version. The biggest change would be moving the metal section to the end of the song, rather than the middle.

That was probably the biggest complaint I had about my old version, that the metal part came in too abruptly and ruined the flow… and I agree, listening to it now, everyone was right.

I considered leaving the rock part out completely, but didn’t want to leave the people who liked that section hangin’, so I decided to move it to the end instead, sort of like how I did Eternal Wind.

In order to make the rock part a bit more acceptable of a changeup, I extended the soft part of this song with a synth-centric section from 3:08 to 3:47, and a new guitar solo after that part. In early drafts of this arrangement, I didn’t have the synth-centric section at all, but I didn’t care to have 2 back to back guitar solos without getting back to the main melody in some way.

Having almost 5 minutes straight of soft Stickerbush (rather than 2 minutes in the old version) makes the rock changeup a lot easier to accept once it finally hits, imo.

This song has had a lot of requests for a remake these last few years, but I’ve always been a bit reluctant to do so because I knew it’d be a somewhat difficult task. But with it taking the #1 spot in the May Madness ballot this year, you all left me no choice, but I’m glad you did, because I really like how this one turned out.

And of course, I hope you do too!