Gerudo's Wild Arms
By jegasus on September 8, 2024 10:38 pm
It finally happened. I'll be honest, I feel a little bit defeated. But I fought bravely until now.
This is the first time I'm submitting the same song to two music-making projects: Weekly Beats and the tri-weekly M8 Community Jam. I thought I'd be able to make separate tracks for both endeavors, but alas, 'twas not written to be. It's fine, though. I'm fine... No, I'm not crying - I just got something caught in my eye......
Anyways, the theme of the Jam was "We Ride at Dawn" and the optional challenge was to insert a random PS1 or Sega Saturn sound as a sample. I took the optional challenge in a slightly different direction: instead of actually sampling a PS1 sound, I just ripped off the melody of a PS1 game. Well, if you're feeling charitable, you could say I got profoundly inspired by that PS1 game's soundtrack, hahahaha... When I saw the theme, my brain immediately went to the opening theme song of this PS1 game called "Wild Arms". I never played the game, but some friend in high school recommended I listen to the main theme and it just stuck in my brain forever. It's so good - It starts with a lovely and lonely cowboy-sounding guitar, followed by an awesome whistled melody. I knew I wanted to play off of that melody, so I tried recreating it onto the M8 from memory without having listened to the original in a LONG time. I eventually gave the whistle melody a very different conclusion and started building things around that little melody.
I also added a sampled guitar instrument and reached (what I thought was) a super cool accompaniment to the whistle. In fact, I liked it so much that it ended becoming the backbone of the whole song, hahahaha... I also added some intense thumping kicks and loud claps, which gave it a more dancy vibe.
At this point I started to need to make things sound SUPER LOUD to be audible in the mix, but that ended making many of the instruments clip like crazy. I am not a huge fan of the final effect, but I didn't really know how to undo the damage so I just kept building on top of it, making sure everything else I added was also super loud. A more skilled musician and mixer could likely fix it with just a few tweaks.
After that I felt like I kinda hit a brick wall - I didn't really know where to take the song. So I sat down on my keyboard, hit play on the M8 and tried to find some cool little flourishes I could add in the background. While noodling, when I was trying to find what key the song was in and what notes "fit", I accidentally stumbled upon the main motif of one of my favorite video game soundtrack songs of all times - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's "Gerudo Valley". After noticing this, it struck me how well it fit both the general theme and the vibe of what I was making here. So I just added that little piece to the song too.
Finally, I still felt something was missing, so I went ahead and added some piano chords just to give it a bit more flavor.
So there you have it! This song is nothing more than the theft of two great video game soundtracks mashed into one weird experimental EDM song.
In semi-related news, I finally finished Baldur's Gate 3 about two weeks ago!!! It's such a great and fun game. The ending got me crying a few times. I felt that kind of empty you feel after finishing a fantastic book - you just want the story and those characters to hang on with you a little while longer... But their story is over and they are no longer here... Gah, such a bittersweet moment.
Anyways, it feels good to have my attention span mostly back to myself and not feeling like I **absolutely need** to play BG3 during every waking second, hahahahaha....
Wishing everyone a great week!!! I can barely believe it's been 36 weeks already!!! We've survived so long!!! We're close to the finish line, I can almost see it!!!
Cheers, peeps!!!
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