You know the feeling. You've been staring at a Sheikah shrine puzzle for eleven minutes, slowly accepting that a stone tablet from an ancient civilization has outsmarted you, and then — you rotate one platform, a ball rolls into a hole, and Nintendo rewards you with the most smug, glittering little fanfare in gaming. That's the "Puzzle Solved" jingle, and I put it on guitar.
This clip is the triumphant Zelda: Breath of the Wild puzzle-solved lick, arranged for six strings. It lasts about as long as your sense of accomplishment does, but it's a gorgeous little study in how a handful of notes can bottle pure dopamine.
How this little victory fanfare works
The trick is almost embarrassingly simple: bright major tonality (the shrine world lives in C major), an ascending melodic contour, and notes drawn from a chord rather than a scale run. It's really an arpeggio in disguise — the melody climbs through chord tones and lands high, so your ear reads "resolved, rewarded, done." Rising pitch plus consonant chord tones is the oldest reward signal in the book, and game composers lean on it because it works in under three seconds, no lyrics required.
The useful takeaway: if you ever want to write your own "you did it" sting, don't shred. Take a major triad, arpeggiate it upward, and finish on a high chord tone (the 3rd or 5th up an octave sparkles best). That's a whole victory jingle in four notes — more on the method in my guide to lick creation.
Now I hear this jingle in my sleep, and my brain fires off tiny celebrations when I open a jar of pickles. If you want the tab and Guitar Pro file before that happens to you too, they're on my Patreon.