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Saturday, November 25, 2017

Song of the Week! 25 November 2017


Once again, I landed on our Discord group looking for song suggestions to be featured for this Saturday, with the early replies generally asking from something spicy in the Classic genre...

...it hardly gets spicier than today's featured track, trust me!

 Charlie Dash! (チャーリー ダッシュ!)
Version
Allx4 (148)x7 (298)x8 (481)x10 (858)
 Taiko 0 Mu, Taiko 3DS 3, Taiko Wii U 3, Taiko PS Vita
 50-320
 none
 clscds


Everyone's favorite modern speed demon has finally arrived in our corner! Coming from Taiko V Version as one of the game's unlockable tracks, Charlie Dash is one of the many recent Classic arrangements to be composed by the NAMCO SOUNDS artist Katsuro Tajima (田島勝朗), already the creator of a few other original songs as well as the trio of Classic song arrangements dubbed by us as the Rock-omatopoeia series.

This guitar-heavy piece is a rendition based on Csárdás, the rhapsodical concert piece that was written in 1904 by Italian composer Vittorio Monti (1868-1922) from Naples. The original Csàrdàs was based on the traditional Hungarian folk dance of the same name, whose naming is based on the old Hungarian term standing for 'tavern' (csárda). The lively nature of the Csàrdàs was interpreted and adapted by the Italian composer into an averaging four-and-a-half-long performance in seven sections for violin, mandolin or piano, which later on also got custom arrangements for orchestral performance and other solo instruments. It's not uncommon for this concert piece to be played by gypsy orchestras nowadays, due to the piece's unique tempo composition.

The Namco-rooted arrangement of the Csàrdàs sports a punny name, with the Japanese pronunciation of 'Charldash' (チャールダーシュ) getting slightly altered into the Charlie Dash nomenclature that Taiko players have grown to know (and fear!) in recent memory. This track is featured on V Version as the boss track that is played in the fight against the clown-looking Love Breaker (ラフブレイカー) and after its release on modern arcade shores as part of the V Version tie-in campaign, it became a recurring DLC companion in recent Nintendo Taiko gaming memory.

Charted by SueP and quoted by several Taiko Team members as 'the embodiment of rage in chart form', Charlie Dash's mode set quickly rose up to fame for its aggressive BPM changes, with its Oni mode sporting the highest base BPM ever registered for a song in Taiko no Tatsujin series to date! Even so, the 320 BPM peak is not even the scariest section to handle, as the two main Go-Go Time zones' brutal speed shifts (240 and 245 BPM respectively) will make facing its longest cluster successions a nightmare... even considering the fact that not patterns are repeated more than once for these sections! Nearly all the other BPM speed shifts in the song are charted with a Go-Go Time flair as well, putting even more pressure on being as accurate as possible in the most relaxed portions.