The "final" track I suppose to the fire cat game I composed for. This one was the replacement for the title screen when I decided to use the other track for the end screen. I feel that this track encapsulates the feel I was going for with the whole project.

Listening to this again just makes me feel like I'm cheating. Having a simple arpeggio be this effective just feels way to easy just to make something sound good. Having that solid bass under it really gives off an RPG kinda vibe I feel. I find that ironic because I rarely play RPGs because I'm very impatient and dislike grinding. Even extra ironic with the fact that I'll sit in a training mode in a fighting game for hours at a time doing the exact same thing over and over again.

I remember when I started getting a hang of chords and stringing them together I would always fall into that trap of just vamping between two chords. A little too much gymnopedie stuck in my brain I suppose. I a bunch of songs that I really like are just "two chords" for an entire section but it's a bit more complicated after studying a bit further.

When you have only two chords you can easily bore the listener since it's gonna be the exact same thing for about a min or so straight. You'll need the necessary tools to keep the listener invested like developing the melody, goofing around with the instrumentation etc. Not to mention that writing an interesting melody with just two chords can be a nightmare to get right.

In this example I semi-cheated by having the two chords be "interesting" by default. You would have your I chord first but I would have it as a 7th chord while having the melody hit that sharp 11th on top of that (that sharp 11th technically puts us in Bb Lydian). The next chord is your vii chord but instead of it being diminished it's now a regular minor chord with the melody hitting that 7th. The way the chords and melody interact give it a very moody feeling because your chord extensions do that for some reason. In this case it adds a lot to the track.

I feel what gives this track a lot of energy is the fast harp arpeggio with the drums playing along right with it. The 16th notes with the high hats just sound so right along with the syncopated kick drum. I personally feel that these two alone already make the song interesting so it was a good idea to go with it.

Something I just remembered was that you usually don't want to have your bass and the kick drum clash with each other. What I mean by that is they share the same frequency space being really low on the spectrum. While you can try to EQ the muddiness away, you can't mask a bad arrangement. The bass here plays a lot more sparse compared to the kick of the drums. This was on purpose just to give the drums more room to go a bit more wild.

I've noticed a small trend with these tracks where there's always a weird/cool sound somewhere under the harmony that I really like. In this case we have a heavily filtered vibraphone with a phaser taped to it. I actually don't know if the phaser does anything special other than add some sort of vibrato to the vibraphone which sounds redundant. I've just tried turning it on and off and it SOUNDS better I guess. I'm a mongoloid when it comes to this stuff and I have no clue what I'm doing.

The B section I feel is good BUT I think the melody is lacking a teeny tiny bit. We modulate to F for fun but the way the song ends sounds a bit off to me don't you think? I ended it on the 9th of the chord so it sounded un-resolved but even then the melody leading up to that feels a bit clichéd. Other than that I like it a lot since that weird vibraphone is playing an interesting pattern. The drums and the harp arpeggio sound really good too even if the harmony is just basic circle of fifths. Maybe that's why the melody was forced into this clichéd sound. Maybe if I was more aware I would have done something about it but that's all in the past now.

Considering this is the last to be uploaded of the "FireCat Game" I think it was a pretty good attempt at a 4 real soundtrack. It had its problems but it's certainly something that I can say that I'm proud of. There were 2 other cutscene songs but they were too simple and boring to justify uploading on here. I wouldn't even have much to say about them either way too.

A detail I just forgot to mention and give emphasis to was that I also did sound design which was it's own nightmare to get right. It was mostly because my cheap copy of FL Studio HATES .mp3 files and would rather explode than try to edit them through the sampler.