'The Magi Sphinx' - New Original Music! My Submission for Steem Monsters Art Contest! Orchestral/Instrumental + Walkthrough!

grapthar (74)in #music • 5 years ago

Here's my new submission

for this week's Steem Monsters Art Contest. I have shared an earlier version of this song, but this one is the "official" final version. I wanted to add some more string variation, but everything I added was a bit too cluttered and didn't work as well what I had already, so I left those parts out. Also, this song is in 11/8, which I think really made it interesting. Initially it was just in 4/4, but after re-doing the progression in 11, it immediately worked better.

Listen to The Magi Sphinx here.

I grouped everything by

instrument type, we have 2 brass sections, a string ensemble and violin section, and the percussion group. There are 2 main sections, Green and Blue. Green is pretty straightforward, resolving to our tonic of B (minor) at the beginning of each measure for the first 4x around. The second set of 4 bars begins on G, then an A, before returning to B. The 4th bar of each section resolves to our parallel major chord of Bmajor, which gave it a cool epic feeling.

Brass section, Blue, described below.

The Blue section is where

things get really cool. It's definitely dissonant, as we don't resolve to B ever, rather temporarily modulating to Eb. I also like that the drums and brass/strings line up here, which accents the progression really nicely. The transition in and out of the Blue sections also turned out really cool, it was actually sort of accidental but turned out to be a pretty sweet little cadence.

Listen to The Magi Sphinx here.

During the Blue sections,

we have the Violin ensemble that plays little descending lines in between the accented string/brass hits, which is pictured below. I think this worked well, it keeps the weirdness but still flows pretty nicely. The last group is 2 timpani tracks, along with the cymbal hits/rolls, which stick to a pretty basic rhythm. I didn't want these to get too crazy, the song was more about the brass tracks as opposed to backing percussion.