This is the fourth track from the soundtrack for an abandoned game that was to be titled "Unearthed: The Mines of Estra". The game centered around a cave/mine system set in a fantasy world. The user (a low-poly medieval-esque warrior with a pickax) needed to break rocks to accomplish various tasks and advance their way through the rooms. ("Dwarves" in this context refer to beings in the Tolkein-esque way as the game was set in a fantasy world).

This level was ominously filled with the remnants of a long gone civilization of dwarves. It is unknown who they were or why they left, so the music needed to underscore this sense of unease and mystery.

Most of the percussion in this track is created by sampling random things around my apartment. The drop sound is actually a real water droplet. I used an eye dropper and experimented with dropping water into a mug from various heights. This was challenging because the sounds are SUPER quiet so I needed to crank the gain on my portable recorder to get something usable, but I living in a city, it's nearly impossible to get clean recordings with gain cranked that high. Fortunately I have a suite of Izotope RX plugins so I was able to clean the samples well enough to be usable. There are a lot of knocks on various types of wood that were then processed (nothing super fancy, mostly EQ and compression). A lot of the other percussive sounds are created by filtering white noise in various ways. Despite all the fancy synths out there these days, I still tend to get the most use out of super simple waveforms (sine, square, triangle, noise). I guess that's a byproduct of getting into music production when IDM was really taking off. I experimented a lot with using deessers on percussion after hearing about the tip from another producer...I'm still unsure how it specifically differs from using a single band on a multiband compressor, but it was interesting to play around with.

I'd love to experiment more with custom percussion by taking mallets to random objects. Maybe I should take a short trip somewhere quiet and remote that has a barn or garage filled with random stuff armed with a bunch of mallets, sticks, brushes, and a bow and spend a weekend just sampling EVERYTHING.

As previously mentioned on the last few track releases, The full album will be coming out on Wednesday, August 23rd, so I will be intermittently releasing all 5 tracks one a time here until then.

If you want to follow the release, use this link. You can currently preorder the album on bandcamp and presave it on Spotify. More links will be added to that hyperfollow as they get processed by various streaming networks. Feel free to follow me on the various social media listed too (or don't. I'm not your dad).

Edit: TYSM FOR THE FRONTPAGE!!!