Since Donkey Kong Country featured advanced pre-rendered graphics, Wise wanted to push the limits to create "equally impressive" music and make the most of the limited memory he was working with. Wise found Donkey Kong "a little more brutal" than Mario, so departed from Super Mario Latin and calypso-inspired sound. He wanted to compose in the style of 1940s jazz, seeking to imitate the Glenn Miller Orchestra in the "DK Island Swing", but was restricted by the SPC700's limitations; he "used a lot of small samples and made [the soundtrack] very synthesised" to work around them. His colleague Grant Kirkhope said that Wise's familiarity with the SNES hardware meant he could "make it do things that people hadn't heard before".
Since Donkey Kong Country featured advanced pre-rendered graphics, Wise wanted to push the limits to create "equally impressive" music and make the most of the limited memory he was working with. Wise found Donkey Kong "a little more brutal" than Mario, so departed from Super Mario Latin and calypso-inspired sound. He wanted to compose in the style of 1940s jazz, seeking to imitate the Glenn Miller Orchestra in the "DK Island Swing", but was restricted by the SPC700's limitations; he "used a lot of small samples and made [the soundtrack] very synthesised" to work around them His colleague Grant Kirkhope said that Wise's familiarity with the SNES hardware meant he could "make it do things that people hadn't heard before".