'The Mermaid's Healing Song' - New Original Music/Submission for the Splinterlands Music/Lore Contest! Electronic/Instrumental + Walkthrough!

grapthar (74)in #music • 5 years ago

Coming in just under

the wire, one day before the end of the contest, is The Mermaid's Healing Song, named for one of the brand new Spliterlands cards! I wrote this a couple days ago, but really finished it last night. I wanted it to have an aquatic videogame level sort of vibe, and I think generally it worked out! I also limited myself to spending a total of 30 minutes on the track, 20 the first day, and 10 last night to wrap things up, so this is also one of my timed songwriting challenges! Let's go through it!

Listen to The Mermaid's Healing Song here.

Tracks 1 and 2 are what the rest

of the song is built on. Track 1 provides the arpeggiated chords at the beginning of each measure, and Track 2 a sort of pipe-like synth sound, which plays our bass notes. We are in Ebmajor, and use our tonic and the flat Vii (Db) quite a bit, though at the end of each 16 bars, we move to a Bb (our V), before resolving back to Eb. I've attached screenshots of both tracks, the full 16 bars of both, below.

Track 1, full 16 bars.

Listen to The Mermaid's Healing Song here.

Track 2, full 16 bars.

Track 3 provides our drums,

which have a very ambient, wide sound, which fits with the underwater/radar reverb sort of vibe. Track 4 adds some more layers of harmony with another pipe-like synth. Towards the end of the song, we have a break which plays an Eb, Ab and Bb, before returning to our full 16 bars. Over this, we have tracks 6, 7, 8, 9, and 12, all of which add various layers of sounds.

Listen to The Mermaid's Healing Song here.

All of the other tracks

add various melody and harmony parts throughout the song, with Track 13 being the only one used continuously throughout. The other mostly come in with our full drum beat, and Track 11 only on the second half of each 16 bar set. I think these all worked pretty damn well, they were all random choices at first, but with a little tweaking, they seem to really fill things in nicely. There is a point where Track 15 adds a very dissonant note, because of the delay effect and the notes stacking, but I think it actually sorta works, giving a weird little tension temporarily.