You hear a voice. 
Or do you hear a person? 

You say that's impossible. 
That's one and the same. 

Then I respond. 

You read your science fiction, 
and you dream. 

We read your science fiction, 
and we laugh. 

Of all the stages civilization has gone through, 
this, is it's darkest stage of all. 

One would think, man already knew how to kill. 
We're just now getting our feet wet.

Yeah, that's right. Lyrics, *evil laughter*

Largely inspired by GVE's Sounds Like Heaven (But It Feels Like Sh*t) and Aphex twin's Come to Daddy, with some Metroid Prime influence thrown in.

Hope you like it.

-----

Leviathan, for all intents and purposes, is a badass. A very sick, evil, twisted, and maniacal badass, but nonetheless, a badass. This first fight is meant to be one of the most memorable bits of the earlier parts of the game, but I felt like the original version of RISE plays it off as any other boss fight. So, I gave Leviathan a different genre altogether - Industrial. 





Some notes about the track: 


The vox: 
The voice is supposed to be Leviathan, but that IS NOT the voice actor that will be used - I did the vocal clips for now, and though I'm proud of it, it's still awkward, and I'll probably update it with the right voice actor sooner or later. 

Though samples are "technically" used in this track - i.e., the vox is a clip I made for the intro of AURA, and it's used twice in this track, but other than that, it's entirely made by hand and from the ground up. 


Soundfonts: 
The opening synth is pulled from the BloodWarPlus soundfont bank (Techno Synth_18) with light distortion and Vocodex. 

The drums are all from one soundfont kit, separated into three channels, each going into a different mixing chain but all winding up at a heavy distortion effect. (industrial_drums - bank 0 patch 129) 

The breakbeat(I think?! I do know that the last 5 seconds of that loop-around is definitely breakbeat, but I don't know what the other part supporting the second vox counts as.) ending doesn't actually use true "sliced" drums - I made a very simple drum track to go along with the rhythm then duplicated all the notes and moved it over about 3 half steps; ran it through a very top-heavy EQ; then started shifting/adding some more notes around in about 8-10 spots till I was happy with it, then I went crazy with the loop-around point, lol. 

That unearthly tribal Hmm is a choir soundfont called real choir mmm's (creative name, huh?) by a guy named Grubby on sf2midi. He was kind enough to make about 12 different vowel variations, and 6 of these are ones I frequently use - real choir mmms, real choir homs, real choir zoms, real choir eees, real choir oohs, and real choir hooaehs. (sp). 

The throat singing-esque synth at the very end is actually not a synth at all, just really heavily filtered. I took the Melted Choir patch from SGMV2B and just ran a phaser and flanger through it. 

And of course, that choir you're probably sick of by now, CGM3 choir for the section just before the breakbeat loop-around. 


Production: 
There are two vocal clip channels, three "industrial_drums" channels, two "CGM3Choir" channels, one "real choir mmms" channel, one "Melted Choir" channel, and one "BloodWarPlus" channel. 

Believe it or not, the highest CPU usage was 64%. 

Everything is run through their own separate EQ's and some have their own specified effects, of course, but here's the kicker - it all winds up at an insert containing a Soundgoodizer, a Vocodex, and a Fruity Blood Overdrive. - Vocodex being the last plugin on the list, so you could almost say the track was *cringe* mastered with a VOCODER... I should probably be shot. LOL. 

The opening vocal clip has absolutely no "direct" equalization - Soundgoodizer and Vocodex handled the effects. The second vocal clip has a 3 db boost at 158hz.