I was told to make a prologue theme for the first cutscene or so. I had made two "cutscene" songs before this one but I don't think they were used nor were they anything special. I had to re-do this one from scratch which was quite the challenge.

For some reason I couldn't get the sound I wanted for a prologue theme. It needed to sound simple and sweet while also giving a sense of adventure. After listening to a few reference tracks on YouTube I decided to start with the instrumentation. I knew I wanted off beat stabs on something stringed so I goofed around with other instruments and noticed that I rarely use the harp. If I think about it it seems rather wasteful to have a harpist just playing this pattern since their instrument is capable of so much more.

I feel like the bass in this track helps a lot. Since there's no drums the harp is the one keeping a sense of rhythm with it's quick off beat stabs. The bass kind of adds to that by playing short notes under that to really keep it grounded while keeping the harmony sparkly clean.

This was written during the last week or so before submission and I had to really get it out early so they can put it in the game. I didn't have time to write from scratch so I did the next best thing by CHEATING. I had turned the level 2 music into a major key and changed the B section a little bit.

During my first year in college my professor told us about how he would just re-use old compositions and change the key, mode etc. just to get work done and I fucking get it man. Music is fucking hard I don't know how people do this shit all the time. Hell I don't even know how you drawing art people have the ability to sit down and draw for weeks straight.

Now that I remember, when I was exporting this I noticed that even though FL studio was set to "WRAP" on the export settings it still left a teeny tiny bit of silence at the start and end of the audio file. I nearly went ballistic because I had already submitted all of the songs to the group and upon closer inspection ALL OF THEM had that small bit of silence that created a TICK sound. I have the cheapest version of FL studio so I can't just drag audio files into it or record live audio. I have no clue how to even set up having everything to record onto one track then export that instead of the usual way.

Also, here's a pro-tip from me because I'm a cheap bastard. If you have the cheap version of FL studio which means MIDI only, you can still mess around with audio clips by loading the whole thing into a sampler and making one really long note so the whole audio clip plays. It's a pain in the ass if you want to listen to a specific part since it doesn't play properly unless you play it from the beginning. I used this shit to get through college and it works a little too well.