Zephyr

You can also listen to this track on Bandcamp as part of the album TONE!

You know the drill. Bandcamp and Soundcloud have character limits in their descriptions, so I’m making a post here to write out my thoughts about this theme. I guess that goes double for this one since I have to write about a character too. Speaking of which

Character Notes:

So this is Teal’s character theme, aka my character’s theme. How would I describe Teal? Teal is a good boy. He just wants to make people’s lives better. He’s also the only good and only boy on the team. Also, he’s the youngest member of the team. Strangely, he’s also supposed to be the team leader.

Go figure.

Maybe that’s because he’s the bard of the group (I guess that fits why I’m making music for us) but really he just gets pushed around by the others. But seriously though, Teal loves his team, even if they are psychopaths.

I wanted to go a different direction with characterization this time, so Teal is actually from really mundane circumstances. Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve never watched RWBY, but unlike his teammates, Teal is from a middle-class suburban childhood and he’s never been particularly traumatized by any encounters with Grimm. He doesn’t have a strong personal vendetta against Grimm that motivated him to become a hunter. He just wants to help people.

So, he’s pretty naive. A lot of Teal’s development so far has been about him having to come to terms with his own hypocrisy or the notion of “the ends justify the means.” In fact, his refusal to kill about a dozen drug lords inadvertently caused the deaths of about twice as many people. (Quick clarification, he didn’t kill those people, but not getting the quick cash from that job led his team to do some things…)

But he is 15. He’s a child. One of the great things I think about this particular campaign is that all the characters are fairly young, so they’re all starting to form their own beliefs but at the same time being in contact with others that have such different outlooks on life also has a big impact on them.

Oh wait, that sounds like college, except that instead of paying (ten’s of) thousands of dollars, they’re risking their lives. Y’know, that’s probably a better deal considering the state of student debt.

Music Notes:

I don’t know if you’ve skipped ahead to the inspirations for this track yet, but I’m sure I’m dating myself by including Fireflies and late 2000’s Hatsune Miku in there. At the same time, I’m really surprised that nothing Touhou crept up in this piece. I think this might be the first piece I’ve ever written where I wasn’t inspired by something ZUN wrote. Don’t worry though, the others are pretty much all Touhou (w).

Despite that, I have mixed feelings about this track. The beginning sounds kind of desert-themed, and I never intended it to be (probably has something to do with the instruments I chose) and I also spent way more effort on this than I would like to admit. Particularly because it’s for my own character, I didn’t want this to be the most labor intensive part. I wanted this album to be a present for my group, not some self-centered project.

It’s just that my source material wouldn’t fit together on the page like it did in my head, so I spent hours trying to fit a harmony together with them. Having no music theory knowledge and terrible pitch recognition probably didn’t help though.

There’s a 16 measure part somewhere in there that took more effort than the entire rest of the album. For some reason, every time I tried to sync up drums, bass, harmony, whatever it always sounded like a sixteenth note off. Still, I managed to get it done and it’s probably my favorite part to listen to in the track now (w).

I’m not sure how well it fits Teal though. It’s definitely the happiest track in the set, but it’s not really the energy I was going for. Oh well, you take what you can get. At least it’s the shortest track of the bunch like I intended, and it can only get better from here, right?

Right??

Inspired by:

Fireflies (Owl City)

教えて！!魔法の Lyric・Oshiete!! Mahou no Lyric (初音ミク・Hatsune Miku and TakeponG@Chom P)

Snow Halation (畑亜貴・Hata Aki、山田孝弘・Yamada Takahiro、中西亮輔・Nakanishi Ryousuke)

光るなら・Hikaru Nara (Goose House)

Leitmotif from Bullet Hell Monday (正幸糸・Masayuki Ito)

光・Simple and Clean (Utada)