Themes

Song: Wild Waters Theme Song

By Tanner ⋅ July 17, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Planet Source Code is one of my favorite open source programming sites on the internet. I’ve been involved with PSC since the late 90’s, and still like to drop in every now and then. I was doing this just last week when I came across “Wild Waters” (follow the PSC link above), a freeware 2d game written in VB by Trent Jackson. Trent was looking for music for the project, so I looked around and found this old (but good!) song sitting on my hard drive and offered it to Trent as a theme song for his project…

Song: Tiberian National Anthem

By Tanner ⋅ June 24, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Here’s the weird thing – even though you’ve never heard this song before, I guarantee that if you listened to it without hearing the title, you’d associate it with some kind of patriotic event. I don’t know why that is, but it’s a real phenomenon. Music association is a fascinating tangent in the “nature vs. nurture” debate, after all…

Song: Faith

By Tanner ⋅ June 23, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Technically, I don’t know where this fits musically; the main melody isn’t even a melody – it’s a simple chord progression. The 2nd section is a 4-part harmony (even correctly harmonized for the most part), and the final section is distinctly modern. The instrument mix is all over the place but was designed to be largely “churchy” in nature (hence the organ and choir throughout). The percussion was added as an afterthought because I felt it added some oomph to the epic sections of the song in a way only percussion can do…

Song: From Here

By Tanner ⋅ June 19, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

There are a lot of cool features in this song, the main one being that this song uses only three (yes, three) different chords. Written in C# minor, all I used was the VI, VII, and i chords – repeated in the same pattern throughout – as part of an experiment to see what I could accomplish with a minimalist chord structure… And even I was surprised at the outcome. This song is epic. This song is beautiful. This song is grand.

Song: Find You

By Tanner ⋅ June 17, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

“Find You” is a return to the roots of classic RPG music. Originally designed as a main theme (or main character theme), this song was probably my first real non-battle orchestral theme. The melody itself is purposefully short and simple, and the three levels of orchestration (duet -> trio -> epic) are pretty standard for an RPG theme. The counterpoint between the oboe and brass in the final section worked out particularly well, and – fun fact – this song spans almost the entire physical range of the oboe.