Licks
By Devieus on July 28, 2018 4:49 pm
This song is based on The Lick, a jazz cliche you can hear all over the music world if you know to look for it, it is the melody you hear in the first bar of this song. I kind of like The Lick, it's a rather short melody that sets itself up and immediately resolves itself in a very short amount of time.
So rather than trying to avoid it, I'm doing nothing but The Lick in this one, but I'm making it totally awesome by doing all sorts of variations and using amazing instrumentation.
For instance, the lead you hear is three instruments layered just so: a piano, pizzicato strings, and a dulcimer (hammered, of course) that creates this awesome sound with an awesome timbre and an awesome feel. I then backed that with my magic square wave (it's just a regular square wave, but the individual channels are detuned differently and on different phases) and thus great harmony was formed. Then I added an organ to complement the bass square and a middle section with a different set of layered instruments to pad the otherwise very short run time, this time a clarinet and a regular strings section. Followed by the addition of a drum section of just two SFXR plug-ins with the right amount of punch (pun intended).
And then comes the one thing that really makes it feel like a Castlevania song: the key change (three semitones up). It just feels right to me.
Of course very little of this is news to anyone paying some manner of attention to it, astute listeners can even see some similarities to Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow's Cursed Clock Tower soundtrack (key change included). I'm just really stoked about this song, so documenting it for posterity seems fair.
I didn't really adhere to any specific progression cycle, it's hard to really say there is a cycle at all, but the key is in A minor (C minor after key change) supposedly. It visits A# Lydian for a bit as well as C lydian (instead of C# Lydian by accident, though it finishes nicely) after the key shift.
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Suhweet key change and I love when the crunchy beat kicks in too.