I don't think there has been a thread for songs from the Touhou series in general (aside from one short one about trance songs in particular), so here we go.

I have great respect for ZUN, both as a game designer and composer of the Touhou soundtrack. They always seem to have just the right tone that he's going for, though some may argue the songs are repetitive or share motifs with previous arranges. Can't blame him for having a style though, considering the number of tracks he's composed.

On top of that, doujin circles have been churning out arranges like all hell and there's never a shortage of songs from them, in most genres. Making this thread with that in mind, to discuss both the originals from the games and music CDs themselves and the remixes and arranges that have been done of them.

I absolutely love Touhou music and my brother is obsessed with them. I think ZUN is GOD in music and love his original works so much.
Some of my favorite doujin groups are Buta-Otome, Liz Triangle, C-Clays, Magnum Opus, Demetori, Kitsune's Workshop, Xi-On, Iron Attack, and some others.
I can't place any favorites in the Originals cause I love them all(except a small few..)!!!!!!!

>>2 Buta-Otome does my favorite vocal arranges, not to mention their instrumentals (notably the piano). Ranko's voice is just so awesome - not the typical vocals you'd expect from japanese music. Rather than be either restricted to squeaky moemoe or the opposite end of the spectrum, she can do all of those, and really well. Especially noticeable in this song.

Of the others, I've heard a few of their songs but never gotten around to singling out their circle and listening to all their arranges.

Touhou music is the best indeed, and ZUN is a great composer.

Hm... my favorite originals are: Gesokyo Past and Present ~ Flower Land, U.N. Owen Was Her?, Septette for the Dead Princess, Emotional Skyscraper ~ Cosmic Mind, A Maiden's Illusionary Funeral ~ Necro-Fantasy, and many more! (Probably all of them, but I can't list them all!)

As for my favorite doujin circles, they are: Liz Triangle, ShibayanRecords, XL Project, Silver Forest,EastNewSound, Kraster, Sound Online, Alstroemeria Records, C-CLAYS, COOL&CREATE, and... that's all I could remember for the moment...

>>3 You should Listen to Liz Triangle and C-Clays too!! They do great vocal songs and the voices are nice too!!
>>4 I love those originals too!! but we can't forget The Fantastic Legend of Tohno, Border of Life, Flight of the Bamboo Cutter, Reach for the Moon~ Immortal Smoke, Faith is for the Transient people, Wind God girl, Dream Battle, Love Master Spark, etc, etc!!!!

Tamusic does some pretty awesome piano/violin covers. ;D http://www.youtube.com/user/violinpiano2

I'm a sucker for the remixes done in Immaterial and missing power and Hisoutensoku... (If I got the names right) The fighter touhous. ;D Favoring Flowering Night (just cuz im a Sakuya user ;D)

i had a feeling you were the one who started this....anyways, yup /o/ listening to them nao o7

>>6 Mhm Tamusic are great at their violin and piano covers.

I haven't gone too deep with the Touhou remixes (although I'm thinking I might have to now after hearing some of the songs in this thread).
I really like EastNewSound and WAVE. And then there's Alstroemeria Records.

The originals are awesome too; don't think I have any one favourite though.

>>5 Oh, I know a few of their songs, and they're awesome! It's just that there are so many different circles, I haven't made it a point to follow each and every one. Not yet at least.

>>6 Oh hell yeah, TAM. I'm a sucker for both piano and violin songs, so I'm well aware of that guy lol

>>8 I found EastNewSound relatively recently, and so far I like the different approach they take to arranging the songs. Their instrumental background tends to follow the original melody, while the vocals take a different spin on it.
Also, her yandere Flandre voice is sexy.


Alright, compiled a list of a few of my favorites, complete with explanations that are too long for their own good. Time to geek out up in here.

Ultimate Truth from the 6th stage of PCB. I always loved this one because of its urgency, mixed in with the sudden mood shift in the middle after the intro, despite being one of the shorter tracks from the games. Of note though, my favorite piano arrange, by Pizuya's Cell, arranges this song to over 6 minutes long, and it's just great. It starts off following the normal melody, and it just gets better from there. I often listen to it on repeat.
Pizuya's Cell also did a great arrange of Capital City of Flowers in the Sky from stage 4 of PCB. You know what, I just like all of their arranges.

I actually liked a lot of the songs from MoF. This particular arrange by O-Life Japan of Romantic Fall was really amazing, to me. O-Life single-handedly made me like folk-style songs. Every time that violin solo starts up in the middle, I make it a point to stop everything to hear it out. Also of note is their arrange of Autumnal Waterfall.

Last Remote from the extra stage of SA. For similar reasons as Ultimate Truth, it gives that sense of urgency that adds on to the hectic stage itself. It's one of the few songs I actually prefer the original to many of the arranges.
Also of note, I found a violin rock album by TAMusic and Keigo Kanzaki, covering all the tracks from SA. It's as awesome as it sounds in every way, and geeking out about each track in particular would take too long.

By far not the entirety of my favorites, but these are what come to mind immediately at the moment. I don't want to kill the thread or anything :I

>>6 TAM makes GREAT music, that you cannot deny
>>8 I know songs from EastNewSound and WAVE too though I donèt listen to them much...
>>9 I am familiar with O-life and litened to their songs at least 100 times over and over again because of their godlyness.... Have you heard of the arranger called Yuu? He makes godly orchestral music and made this awesome arrange of Immortal Smoke an other themes.

Short comment: I like Septtet for the Dead Princess! :D

All the Touhou songs are just amazing. i love them all so much! ZUN IS INCREDIBLE!!!!

So, Ayanavi stumbled upon an amazing set of albums - the House Set series. They've been uploaded to youtube as approximately hour-long remixes of the entire track list from each game, individually.

They're definitely worth a listen if you have an hour to kill. Links below:

House Set of...
Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil
Perfect Cherry Blossom
Imperishable Night
Phantasmagoria of Flower View
Mountain of Faith
Subterranean Animism
Undefined Fantastic Object
Retrospective 53 Minutes (Music CD)

If I missed any, let me know.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsBgCYL9Dn8&feature=related

Not sure if this counts are a remix, but it's one of the themes with added lyrics. I thought it was pretty cool, but that might just be me. Danzai! /o/ \o\

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf-GRU96dHQ

Oh, the following are from the house set mentioned in >>13, but these are just some tracks that I liked ._.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOhcrT6hTIg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfZdEVmjTQs&feature=relmfu
(The beginning was nice, the drum in the middle kills it)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB1JC41RWMg&feature=relmfu

>>14 IOSYS's songs are pretty fun. Definitely counts as a remix, but some people really dislike their derpy interpretations of the songs.


Reviving this thread once again to bring up another circle! Anyone heard of FELT? Obviously I don't know too much about them because I can't read japanese, but they have a nice variance of different styles. In particular, they have three main vocalists, each of whom typically fits one of their styles.

Forgive me if I'm not quite accurate with my generalizations, I haven't listened to too much of their discography yet. These are my first impressions. Linked to their name is an example of their singing.

Maika (舞花) has a voice you might find "typical" of female japanese vocalists - it's higher pitched, and somewhat "cute" - but I find it's done really tastefully. She controls her voice very well.

Mika (美歌) has a deeper voice than Maika, and she tends to sing songs that are more emotional or sentimental sounding - that might be a subjective observation, but just listen for yourself. Her voice is really unique.

Vivienne - I'm not quite sure what to say about her voice, because I'm not entirely used to listening to engrish singing. But I like what I've heard so far. As stated, a lot (if not most?) of her songs are all in english, and they tend to be more upbeat than the other two singers.

I plan to listen to their entire discography at some point. Just thought I'd share it now.

As a followup to >>15, I made four playlists for each of their first four albums on youtube for anyone interested. Just for ease of access - I didn't upload the songs or anything, just organized them. I'd link downloads to the albums themselves, but that would be promoting pirating ' ^'

I don't condone pirating if you're lazy about it. Use google.

Milky Wink
Fairy Queen
Flower Flag
Blue Drop

Bump

Trojan Green Asteroid got released recently according to Misuto, it's a new album out by ZUN that had a nice story regarding Maribel/Renko in it.

I managed to find the entire album on a single track in youtube. Touhou fandom, you never cease to amaze.

On a more personal note... special mention in this post goes to C-Clays for producing such wonderful vocal pieces of both Shou's theme Vaizravana and producing not only lovely vocals, but a non-obnoxious arrange of U.N. Owen was her? called Prayer.

I'm a real fan of flandre, she was the first touhou I learned about and is largely the only reason I beat EoSD - I just wanted to fight her. If it weren't for her, I'd probably not have ever gotten into the series; so it's nice to find quality arranges of her themes.

And to wrap up this post,I'm going to admit that I'm perpetually addicted to IT IS SO, a eurobeat arrange of "A soul as red as ground cherry", one of Rumia's themes.

What makes it interesting is that it's one of the only good english vocals I've found. It has an interesting take on Rumia, which more or less led me to accidentally memorizing the lyrics - So now I can't listen to her themes without attaching lyrics to it.

Incidentally, Rumia has become a favorite of mine as well. The entire EoSD cast is pretty lovable.

Thought I'd share this for the maybe two people that ever look at this thread. Even though I already told one of them, and the other one is me.

I found a thread on Maidens of the Kaleidoscope where someone posts his attempts to analyze each character's themes in comparison to their personality. As a warning, he throws around a lot of musical jargon, discussing things about the melody and its counterpoint with the harmony and bass, as well as chord progressions and dissonance, instrumentation, major/minor usage... if you aren't familiar with any of those listed terms at all you might find yourself disliking his interpretations.

It's worth a read if you have time. I only got through EoSD and PCB, but he does an analysis of nearly every (boss theme) song until the end of UFO.


On another note, I finally listened to all of FELT's arranges! But rather than geek out about how much I like their arranges, it would be best if you just check out those album playlists I linked a few posts back. The only ones missing would be Silver Drive, their newest one, and Rebirth Story, which was largely a remix album. Rebirth Story does have a few new songs though, so check out their discography for info on what to search for.

I'm not going to be held responsible for posting download links or anything, but I will say that if you search for "lossless felt" and the album name on google, VNSharing tends to have readily available DDL's for each of them...
You didn't hear it from me though ' ^'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFHs1fOyVfA&feature=related

Relevant. And catchy.

(Bump)

^

I really like the arranges from the doujin circle WAVE
http://touhou.wikia.com/wiki/Category:WAVE

It's most of the time instruments only though

This thread wins!
I love music from Touhou.

Love it all.

I love Touhou's music! >w< It fits the games, and characters so well! Plus, they're really catchy! :D

Sally's originality is surely without saying, but I feel they may need a introduction for those who have never heard of them prior to this.

They're fairly new, releasing their first album at Comic Market 80, which put their rock spin on the first half of the TD themes. They released an additional CD to cover the latter half, then wen't back to EoSD to create their final 2 CD's.

I highly recommend giving them a try. Oh and did I mention that Chata lends her marvelous voice to several tracks?

Magic Hour with vocals by INZA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU2KGVftwjI
Is a remix of Young Descendant of Tepes.

Found another song y'all might be interested in :V

Unlike me previous posts it isn't a massive spam of songs. It's just one song that has really nice vocals.

MOFUYA - 本当のキモチ

It's a vocal rock remix of UN Owen. I'm going to admit an unpopular opinion: I'm not actually that big of a fan of UN Owen in its original incarnation or similar remixes. (Don't get me wrong either, I do like it; just not as much as other songs)

But this song really breaks the mold, and it's a remix in the loosest sense. It is its own song. While you can hear reference to UN Owen in the instrumental, and even the vocals sometimes if you really listen hard enough, it's best experienced as a unique song rather than an homage. It carries a much different tone and style than the original.

I have two playlists full of touhou songs! °w°
But if i'd have to pick only one, it might be this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xSzkVLtKsM
(sorry, i still don't know how to make text links)
...
Well, in fact i so much love touhou songs and remixes that it would be impossible to chose one since i overlove them all D:

guys

an hour of jazz touhou remixes

I COULDN'T BE HAPPIER ; u;

My gift to you.

>>29 Wahou, that's just awesome! well i just must admit the "bip bip" sound gets printed in my mind now i have the feeling to hear it now even without the music °_° But thanks to you there's new amazings touhou musics in my playlist :D

By the way, i've noticed >>13's post. Now there's also TD's House set! :D http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMg19we-Q-c

>>30 haha yeah, the beeping gets annoying after a while but there are a lot of other jazz remixes of the touhou osts, some fast paces and other really smooth.

As for house sets, my favorite would have to be the unidentified object

Mine is definitely EoSD's one. More precisely, Lunate Elf and Beloved Tomboyish Daughter 's remixes :D \o/

Listening to "Calling Me" by K2 SOUND

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwhdRHHncO0

Even better, I found a jazz touhou mix with no annoying beeping and the actual quality is like 298469x better

It goes under the album name "Cafe de Touhou" so you can pick from hundreds of mixes. By far my favorite collection, it's just a shame it's not compressed into one video for convenience lol

Oh yeah, from DDBY right? :D I have the whole album in my playlist, just right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aFbULX8qEM&list=PL1BFEB27A8771C9FF&index=12&feature=plpp_video (the link leads you directly to the first track of the album).
They have made other albums, but to be honnest i said myself to look for them so many times and i always forgot xD But i'll do it tonight, thanks for reminding me x)

>>36 Yup from DDBY

You sir, are a great person. I JUST KNOW IT FROM YOUR TASTE IN MUSIC! and thanks for the playlist link, I'll definitely use it in the future

>>36 I'll one-up you on that :V

Or rather, 2/3-up you. One of the download links is broken.

By the way, the beeping is because it's the audio used in Touhou Clock - a collaborative project between lots of different artists and musicians. All the songs are set to the tempo of an actual clock's ticking, because of that. It's an embeddable web app that changes songs every minute, and plays a short, 5 second flash clip every other 5 seconds. It's pretty neat. Even Walfas (maker of create.swf) contributed a couple times :V

So that this post is more on-topic though...
Have some MIDI drawing medley!
It's a MIDI arrange of every track from Ten Desires using one of those music programs that show the notes scrolling horizontally across the screen - except the creator used that in an artsy manner to create pictures with the notes, while still keeping it melodic. There are some pretty cool effects if you watch the whole thing through.

Bah, the touhou clock link up there doesn't work for some reason.

Here: http://boxell.jp/clock/

>>38 when the letters started appearing, I was like..

oAo oh snap

It's the cool version of Lavender Town Syndrome!

>>40 Did you get to the part where Yoshika eats the music? :V

This thread needs a bump.

If you're a fan of Touhou arranges already, I'm sure you've heard of Buta-otome? Or if you don't recognize the name, I'm sure you'd recognize Ranko's voice.

They've been one of my favorite Touhou doujin circles since I first heard them - in fact, I mention in my second post in this thread (>>3), a year and a half ago, that one of my favorite songs is by them, and that's still true now. Their vocalist is simply unmatched in my opinion, and the fact that their instrumentals (especially their pianist, pictured above) are amazing all on their own makes this one of the most well-rounded vocal groups I've heard.

But something people don't often know is that they've also done two original, non-touhou albums (Bowling and Chess) - and they're just as great, and awesome to hear how they do without framing their music as an arrange.

For anyone not too familiar with them, I picked out a few song links to give a good range of what to expect from them. This is one of the few groups I would be willing to go way out of my way to buy one of their albums, once I figure out how ordering from doujin groups in Japan works.

Voice of a Distant Sky (orig. Bell of Avici ~ Infinite Nightmare, from Gensou Homo Ludens)
Panorama Girl (orig. 桜花之恋塚 ～ Flower of Japan, from Long Skirt Panorama Girl)
Babbling On and On (orig. Reach for the Moon, Immortal Smoke, from Twilight Elegy)
Echoed Bonds (orig. Maiden's Capriccio ~ Dream Battle, from Bond)
Skull (original song, from Bowling)
Circus (original song, from Chess)
Everyday (original song, from Bowling; I just really like this one)

I like Draw the Emotional and Foreground Ecilpse. They are awesome. But then again, I'm more into the heavier Touhou arrangments...

I'm not even that big on Touhou in general, but damn do I like the stuff that comes out from it.

>>26 i agree. I really like listening to Sally after all the other metal touhou music because it's like breathing in fresh air (and i really love IZNA's voice) although i kinda feel bad that they arent that well known.

other doujin touhou circles i like is foreground eclipse and draw the emotional, and a bit of pizuya's cell and sally.

>>44 That album is great, Alstroemeria Records is one of my fav circles (is that what you call them??), Shibayan Records being my #1

bump