I started building the first demo in Ableton. I aimed to make something textural and stripped back, pulling samples from Dark Souls 1 and Twilight Princess, but heavily processing them to extract specific timbres rather than recognisable musical material.
The main elements were:
- New area sound from Dark souls, pitched, stretched and layered to make a pad sidechained to the kick
- snippets of Midna talking, garbled around to form sounds to work in call and response
- Percussive transients formed from resampling and processing sounds, pitch-slowing them as much as possible and applying multiband compression and spectral bin spearing
- resampling water sounds I’d recorded and using a spectral compressor sidechained to the pad
The overall texture I was going for was damp and biological, as we’d discussed these textures in the mindmap we worked on as a group. I was aiming for what I was thinking of as a “wet” quality, something that I think using spectral processing can help attain.
I sent the demo to the group. Their feedback was that they liked the overall textures but in terms of arrangement the energy wasn’t matching where the video was heading, the visuals were more propulsive and high energy than the demo suggested. I suggested I worked on something arrangement-wise more inspired by modern rave music, sharing tracks by Current Value, Blood of Aza, Kavari and Blawan, and they said that they liked it a lot, and would be happy for me to go in this direction arrangement-wise.
This was a significant pivot, but the demo wasn’t wasted, I saved the resampled material and presets to use in future versions.
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