Exalted Dirt - Through the Dark Wood

Symphonic-styled music mingled with heavy metal lends itself well to video RPGs and other types of adventure/quest games, in my opinion. This is a derivative composition altering two musical ideas from my "Vampire Slayer". As the music began to acquire some coherence and depth, it started to remind me of a young boy in a classic-style RPG wandering through a creepy forest to reach his next stop in fulfilling his quest. It was unintended, but the flute solo near the end reminded me of the sound that was used in an old Super Nintendo game called Secret of Evermore (a good game, but definitely not one of Square's best offerings).

This composition marks my transition from using MTV Music Generator (OLD windows 98 software - there was also a Playstation version which I used before my PC recording days) for all my programming needs to using Ableton Live (Lite, Version 8). While I had extreme difficulty setting up the software and authorizing it (I crashed my OS and was forced to reinstall it!), once I began to learn how to use Ableton Live, I was thrilled by how truly easy it was to operate. I recorded my own vocals for one of the instrument samples using Audacity. All the rest of the instrument samples were exported from MTV Music Generator, in hopes that I could maintain a similar sound as before. With some of the samples I editted in panned octave layers for increased depth. I have come to disliking how little sustain all the cymbal samples had within MTV Music Generator, so after exporting them I layered all of them with some fade-ins to increase their length. Again, this was all done in an attempt to maintain a similar sound as in many of my earlier recordings, while putting a little more quality into the finished composition. At this time (February 2014) I have not yet come to understand how audio recording works with Ableton Live, so I recorded my guitar parts using Audacity, which I might continue to do from now on anyway. Audacity is simple software to use, and it has some advanced multi-track audio editing capabilties. Anyway, after exporting the recorded and edited audio from Audacity, it was easy to import the audio files into the Ableton project.

My intention is to use this in my own game project, but if anyone out there wishes to license it, that would be fine too. My game design is coming very slowly, and I'm not afraid to say it's very likely I will never finish it. What do you expect from one person who has so many time-consuming interests? Making music by oneself is a full-time hobby alone! Aside from that, I play in a worship band at my church, which requires practice time. Sunday morning and evening services take up most of my Sundays (I'm not complaining-- I enjoy it immensely). Add to that my prayer and Bible study time, coupled with writing lyrical compositions and occasional blog entries. Then making myself available to a wife and daughter outside of a full-time job with unexpected overtime makes my life pretty full. I rarely play video games anymore, though I'm still an old-school RPG fan (Final Fantasy-type stuff-- FF6, known in the SNES days as FF3, is still my favorite of all time), but the time required for it often seems like a waste to me now. Now I've also been considering and praying about ministering once a week at the Healing Rooms in Wooster, near where I live. Add in some occasional housecleaning and meal cooking-- what? A video RPG project, from SCRATCH?!?!? Really?

Enjoy, and God bless,
--Corey Finney (Exalted Dirt)

100 BPM

E harmonic minor with added flattened 5th