![]() It’s not hard to imagine what meaning this might have in a boss battle. Of course, syncopation involves displacing the beats or accents in a rhythm so that strong beats become weak and vice versa. SYNCOPATIONįinally, most music in this video game sub genre is heavily syncopated, either in the melody, the accompaniment, or both. So now you’ve set your piece at a fast tempo, sprinkled in some chromaticism over the chords and the melody, but you haven’t really written a boss battle track until you’ve added in the final ingredient. Making it excessively chromatic or aggressive can easily tip the scale from “dangerous” to “grating.” It’s a bit of a tightrope, but if you can still stomach your melody when you’re done with your track, that might be a good indication that you’ve passed this particular test. After all, we might be fighting this boss for a while, so the piece still needs to be tolerable. The trick here, I think, is making this sound beautiful in its own way. This, along with the chords, help the piece feel dangerous. Two instances of chromaticism in the melody as well. Though it starts off like we’re voicing a Dm7 chord, we quickly introduce some of that chromaticism on measure 15 when we bend from C# to D, and then again in measure 16 as we end it with Bb and bend up to B. Take a look at the main chords for this piece: Well, in this piece, I wanted to make sure there was chromatic movement in both the chords and in the melody. It’s just two, chromatic notes, a half step apart, chugging along. Think of the theme from Jaws, for example. In the Renaissance, music that was unexpectedly chromatic was considered to be music of the devil, and lord help you if you wrote something with a tritone.Įven though composers don’t get burned at the stake today for writing chromatic music, it still has a sense of uncertainty and maliciousness to it. ![]() This has been used for “evil-sounding” music since people started creating hard and fast musical rules. Hopefully, your heart races along with it. The track I wrote clips along at a steady 170 bpm. Either way, an increase in speed, generally, is ingredient number one. This increase in speed mirrors the way your pulse might quicken at the sight of a video game boss. Pop music, for example rests between 116 bpm and 150 bpm on average, so this is quite a bit faster than what we’re used to hearing on a daily basis. Not just in video games, but in, well, life too. I’d say a vast majority of music is slower than that. What is it about this piece that screams “boss battle?”
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