We’ve heard plenty of beats sampling the Legend of Zelda (looking at you, Thoto_Leing) but I never considered it the other way around. In 2015, Andrew Martin wrote how Koji Kondo was inspired by 70s British rock but in the 90s and early 00s, there was another realm of music that Kondo dipped into for the Zelda soundtrack: sample CDs.
Before the times of Splice and Tracklib, musicians would use sample CDs to get samples of sounds, melodies, and drum breaks for their compositions and Koji Kondo did just that for a number of Zelda games including Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess.
I love this discovery and I will be digging into these sample CDs too as the samples sounded really good on their own (they’re available if you know where to look and what to search for).
