Kadabra
By frogcity on February 4, 2024 3:58 am
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In anticipation of the new Dune movie, I tried a short cinematic score. It tracks against my imagined scene of Paul stumbling into the Fremen oasis and discovering it's much more than just sand out there.
I really wish for more when climactic cinematic scores don't have memorable melodies, and I think I committed that sin here because I ran out of time to come up with something that hooked better (writing in 5/4 was a new challenge, kept struggling to make it flow), but at least some of the ambience and swells and a harmony structure that captured the emotion I wanted went down pretty well. Getting a memorable John Williams motif on top it that fits and is reinforced and echoed throughout the composition is my goal the next time I try something like this. This is too much Hans Zimmer style, a style I really don’t prefer personally but was fun and an easier style to try to imitate aspects of.
The little atonal zingy things in the background that sometimes are on key and sometimes are atonal (both chromatic and whole tone) are heavily inspired by the classic Zelda games which feature a lot of atonal harmony, especially in the dungeon explorations.
One thing that’s simple but I’m still really proud of here is there’s a very linear point of interest that’s bouncing around between the different instruments, so you get to hear the best of each instrument before it gets out of the way for the best of the next instrument. I rescored the arrangement a number of times because it was too busy and it wasn’t really working to do harmonies with this instrumentation, and I’m pretty satisfied with where it landed where at one moment it’s a flick in the flute pitch that’s interesting, the next moment it’s polyrhythm in the snare that plays off what the flute just did, next it’s a tubular bell with a new huge verb, and so on. The progression is dead simple, apart from being unusual and in an odd meter, but the arrangement of the parts and texture to my ears is my strongest yet. The lack of repetitiveness may also be biasing me since I listened to it so many times re-working the structure which created a repetitiveness for me that doesn’t exist for the listener of the final track.
I realized after listening more carefully that some of the drum samples have abrupt silence after killing them early before the full sample is done which gives an unpleasant abruptness if listening for it. I am not sure how to resolve but maybe I need to tweak the release in the sampler next time and/or use a better sampler player / not cut off samples midway / use a different sample.
Overall I wanted to invoke a sense of mystery, exploration, weirdness, and unseen danger that opens up into understanding yet still with danger in the air.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC0 Creative Commons Zero (Public Domain)