december 15, 2024
hi! this is the kickoff episode of sorts to a series i'm going to be doing where i step through each track from void sols in the order i worked on them. my goal is to share a peek into the experience of composing for commissions, as well as my writing process more generally. it's been a hell of a journey and i'm really excited to show some of how we got here :) keep in mind there will be spoilers for the game ahead.
first, i want to talk about some of my wider goals going into the project, dating back to when i was working on THE WARDEN back in july of 2022 (time flies...) and continuing to the end of the project.
of these, the one that stuck with me the most (and the one i tell people about the most) is that i wanted the soundtrack not to feel like something you'd hear in another soulslike. it wasn't just that i wanted the composition to be unique — i wanted to eschew the genre conventions completely, avoiding orchestra and choir sounds in favor of harsh synthesizers and breaks. i thought, our game stands out visually, so it should stand out auditorily as well. generally, i stuck to this pretty closely. a few tracks use synthesized brass or strings, and most of them use some sort of heavily effected piano, which shows up all over the rest of my work too; but everything else feels distinctly synthesized, especially all the bass patches i ended up using, and the majority of tracks use sampled drum breaks. i'll talk about the specific sounds used in the individual track entries.
another goal of mine, or really a constraint imposed by the structure of the project, was to write and produce and finish each track within about a month. generally in the first week or so i would aim to produce two or three sketches, and then we'd pick which one to pursue; then i would spend the next two weeks fleshing out the sketch into a full track, with length dictated by the number of phases in the fight. i'll go into detail on how i wrote for building tension over time during future posts, but nailing that down took up a good chunk of the writing time for the first few tracks. finally i would spend the rest of the month mixing and polishing and then cutting looping portions for each phase so the music could transition dynamically.
lastly, i also wanted the soundtrack to feel coherent, like it's all part of the same story. i accomplished this the same way many many composers before me have done: through recurring motifs and through shared instrumentation, which i've already mentioned. five major motifs show up throughout this soundtrack:
starting with maybe the most subtle motif, but also the most prevalent, appearing in some fashion in every track except for one. this drone is a granular resampling of one stem from the title screen music our sound designer zach wrote for the original demo of the game, overlaid with a very low saw wave. this one doesn't have any intended meaning besides “void sols.” it's a pulse running under the whole game, tying everything to one root.
this is the melody for the third phase of the fight with THE WARDEN, after the adds come in from the little prison cells. i'll go into more detail on how this came to be in the next part of this series, but it shows up again in a few other tracks, namely GATEKEEPER and ZENITH (and a little bonus appearance during the AMALGAMATE fight). in my mind it symbolizes the oppression and constraint that THE WARDEN embodies.
this is the melody for the final phase of the fight with THE WARDEN. like the first warden motif, it shows up again in GATEKEEPER and ZENITH. being more triumphant, it's meant to feel like (and literally also plays during) the moments before breaking out of the aforementioned oppression and constraint. it's one of the few times the soundtrack sounds like it's on your side, rather than something that's fighting you alongside the boss.
this one is a little more subtle — it's a quick set of chord changes that plays during both phases of the fight with THE POACHER, and then again (altered pretty heavily) in both phases of THE IMMACULATE. the meaning to me is hard to pin down, but it was important to me that these two bosses specifically share a motif. they're both more insidious in their oppression of the other little shapes.
finally, this one plays during the VOID WORM fight and again against THE AMALGAMATE. it's sort of a "we dug too deep and look what crazy thing we dug up" theme. that makes it sound a lot less menacing.
wow, this post really got away from me. i hope you've enjoyed this little teaser for the rest of this series! i'm not going to promise a schedule for these, but i would like to get to the rest of the tracks sooner vs. later, mostly because i'm really excited to talk about the process. it's actually been such a blast to work with the folks at finite reflection and i'm really excited to see whatever they cook up next.
until next time!!! <3
hi! this is the kickoff episode of sorts to a series i'm going to be doing where i step through each track from void sols in the order i worked on them. my goal is to share a peek into the experience of composing for commissions, as well as my writing process more generally. it's been a hell of a journey and i'm really excited to show some of how we got here :) keep in mind there will be spoilers for the game ahead.
first, i want to talk about some of my wider goals going into the project, dating back to when i was working on THE WARDEN back in july of 2022 (time flies...) and continuing to the end of the project.
of these, the one that stuck with me the most (and the one i tell people about the most) is that i wanted the soundtrack not to feel like something you'd hear in another soulslike. it wasn't just that i wanted the composition to be unique — i wanted to eschew the genre conventions completely, avoiding orchestra and choir sounds in favor of harsh synthesizers and breaks. i thought, our game stands out visually, so it should stand out auditorily as well. generally, i stuck to this pretty closely. a few tracks use synthesized brass or strings, and most of them use some sort of heavily effected piano, which shows up all over the rest of my work too; but everything else feels distinctly synthesized, especially all the bass patches i ended up using, and the majority of tracks use sampled drum breaks. i'll talk about the specific sounds used in the individual track entries.
another goal of mine, or really a constraint imposed by the structure of the project, was to write and produce and finish each track within about a month. generally in the first week or so i would aim to produce two or three sketches, and then we'd pick which one to pursue; then i would spend the next two weeks fleshing out the sketch into a full track, with length dictated by the number of phases in the fight. i'll go into detail on how i wrote for building tension over time during future posts, but nailing that down took up a good chunk of the writing time for the first few tracks. finally i would spend the rest of the month mixing and polishing and then cutting looping portions for each phase so the music could transition dynamically.
lastly, i also wanted the soundtrack to feel coherent, like it's all part of the same story. i accomplished this the same way many many composers before me have done: through recurring motifs and through shared instrumentation, which i've already mentioned. five major motifs show up throughout this soundtrack:
starting with maybe the most subtle motif, but also the most prevalent, appearing in some fashion in every single track. this drone is a granular resampling of one stem from the title screen music our sound designer zach wrote for the original demo of the game, overlaid with a very low saw wave. this one doesn't have any intended meaning besides “void sols.” it's a pulse running under the whole game, tying everything to one root.
this is the melody for the third phase of the fight with THE WARDEN, after the adds come in from the little prison cells. i'll go into more detail on how this came to be in the next part of this series, but it shows up again in a few other tracks, namely GATEKEEPER and ZENITH (and a little bonus appearance during the AMALGAMATE fight). in my mind it symbolizes the oppression and constraint that THE WARDEN embodies.
this is the melody for the final phase of the fight with THE WARDEN. like the first warden motif, it shows up again in GATEKEEPER and ZENITH. being more triumphant, it's meant to feel like (and literally also plays during) the moments before breaking out of the aforementioned oppression and constraint. it's one of the few times the soundtrack sounds like it's on your side, rather than something that's fighting you alongside the boss.
this one is a little more subtle — it's a quick set of chord changes that plays during both phases of the fight with THE POACHER, and then again (altered pretty heavily) in both phases of THE IMMACULATE. the meaning to me is hard to pin down, but it was important to me that these two bosses specifically share a motif. they're both more insidious in their oppression of the other little shapes.
finally, this one plays during the VOID WORM fight and again against THE AMALGAMATE. it's sort of a "we dug too deep and look what crazy thing we dug up" theme. that makes it sound a lot less menacing.
wow, this post really got away from me. i hope you've enjoyed this little teaser for the rest of this series! i'm not going to promise a schedule for these, but i would like to get to the rest of the tracks sooner vs. later, mostly because i'm really excited to talk about the process. it's actually been such a blast to work with the folks at finite reflection and i'm really excited to see whatever they cook up next.
until next time!!! <3