Alora Fane

I've been talking about this for AAAGES, but I've finally got around to posting my first recent composition on a new YouTube channel I've set up specifically for my music!

The video is here:

I'll be using the channel to upload pieces I composed for my games, and others I composed just for the fun of it, or for practice; this one's from the latter category.

I recently saw a video describing a certain chord progression called the 'Royal Road' that's commonly used in anime and Japanese pop music, and thought I'd add to my arsenal by composing a practice piece using it. I used some silly anime-esque 'lyrics' to guide the melody; always a useful technique.

It's playable, and I can sort of play it myself, though not well enough to actually use a recording of myself as the audio. I'm a composer, not a performer!

I've been putting off posting my music for ages because I'm expecting nobody to care, and for the videos to end up with like 5 views after a month or something, which might negatively affect any benefits listening to my music has for me.

So I'll be curious to see how this goes.

I've got most of my old music on ∞ my Bandcamp page ∞, but many more recent things I've never shared anywhere. So I'll be posting those hopefully quite regularly to this channel over the following weeks or months.

If it goes well, then hopefully that'll motivate me to make music more often!

I'll need to experiment with the visual formatting; this ended up shrunk, I think because the three pages side-by-side didn't match the 16:9 ratio, so the text comments on the score are smaller than I'd prefer.

I should also post pdfs of the sheet music for solo piano pieces like this somewhere; I'll be thinking about the best way to do that.

(Also, in order to ensure you're not a bot, YouTube apparently requires that you either make a short video of yourself or provide a photo of your ID, neither of which I want to do, or just build up a 'channel history' over the course of maybe two months. You need to do this in order to be granted the honour of being able to include links in your descriptions. Since I opted for the latter option, I won't be able to include links to things like my Patreon until then, annoyingly.)

5 COMMENTS

MontyCallay99~1Y

Very cool! Your composition skill astounds, as always. It's almost a bit unusual seeing you write something mostly in ionian rather than mixolydian, which I think you mentioned was your favorite mode! I think you've captured the grandiosity of the chorus very well in those transitions, which feel very effective emotionally.

Really interesting to see you experiment with different styles, especially something a bit more pop-music-y like this. I find there's a simple beauty in a good old punchy chord progression - sure, one can overdo it, but they work for a reason! A personal favourite of mine is ii-V-I or vi-ii-V-I.

When did you start using imagined lyrics to guide the melody? The first time I remember you using those was for the character themes way back in Taming Dreams - was that something you came up with yourself or did you see it somewhere else?

Tobias 1104~1Y

Thank you!

I posted this one first largely because it makes use of something I thought would be more familiar to people than pretty much anything else I've composed recently. It was only really meant as practice for a technique - I had no intention of sharing it when I composed it - hence the repetition of the chord progression (though apparently repeating a chord progression - of even just two chords - incessantly throughout isn't uncommon for pop songs).

I read a few books about music composition a few years ago, during the period after MARDEK when I was trying to refine all my creative skills I think, which mentioned using unheard lyrics to shape a melody. So as much as I'd like to claim it as a brilliant idea of my own, I got it from the mind of another! I don't often make use of it, but it's very useful when nothing I like is coming to me straight from the aether.

Falcon62~1Y

Only sharing your channel here might not result in many views, which would be a shame, seeing how good your music is!

Tobias 1104~1Y

I also mentioned it on Twitter, though for now I'm still hesitant about putting it out there at all, so I'm trying to take things slowly. If I get into it more, I'd be more willing to mention it elsewhere... though I don't even know where I could! I've just been assuming YouTube's algorithm will be responsible for any traffic I see.

astralwolf91~1Y

Kinda mid on the first listen