Steem Monsters Music - 'The Splinterlands' (Original Music Score Teaser)

---

Title: The Splinterlands

Composition by @isaria.
Arrangement by @harrisonmir.

A few weeks back I got to chatting with @aggroed and @isaria about the music score for the super-hype, new, blockchain-based collectible card game called 'Steem Monsters'. At that time, the hype had found me first, as I had already purchased my starter pack and [too many] booster packs. Being a fan of CCG's myself, naturally I was stoked at the prospect of working on the music for this project.

Isaria and I fell into a great routine for bringing these tracks to life. I've said it before and I'll say it again: she's a brilliant composer and it's so fun to get these awesome ideas from her to work on. Typically, she'll record a video of the piece, and I'll study what she does and work on my interpretation of her work in an orchestral score. This is the format we used for this piece, and I honestly didn't stray far from her composition on this one. In fact, the structure is almost exactly the same, it's just in the form of a full orchestra.

I laid the bed/chords down first with some great Native Instruments Kontakt libraries ('Damage' for the percussion), and then went into my Friedlander violin for the lead. To get an authentic sounding violin with synth emulators is pretty tricky, and it can be dangerous to get too ambitious with 'real' sounding instruments. Writing this stuff takes a lot of 'masking' to make sure nothing sounds fake, because one second of unintentional synthetic sound can break the immersion. Overall though, I'm very happy with how it's coming out so far. I'm going to work a little further to really get that humanization right in the vibrato and portamento. I plan to add a few more bells and whistles here and there to keep things interesting, but I'd say this is a fantastic start.

I actually live streamed some of the process on DLive a couple days ago, which you can watch here.

Steem Monsters is looking to be such an epic experience for CCG lovers, and I plan to bring my A-game to make sure the music score reflects that. Stay tuned for more Steem Monsters epicness!

Much love and thanks for listening!

Graphics by the talented @calumam.

Follow @steemmonsters for more news and updates!

---

► Listen on DSound
► Listen from source (IPFS)