Saturalia Nightmare Soundtrack
0:00 God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
1:40 Carol of the Bells
3:21 We Three Kings
The soundtrack to Prequel Adventure's Saturalia Nightmare, which you can play here:
https://www.prequeladventure.com/this...
Background artwork by Kazerad used with permission.
Late 2019, Kaz approached me to take some simple holiday hymns and spruce them up a bit, but I also got the feedback for them to sound like an "epic christmas nightmare" so things got a little carried away. I hadn't made music in years, it was a bit rough shaking the rust off.
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen was very straight forward, simple, and relaxing to work on, and covered all of my comfort zones. I went with the first thing that came to mind, and it was cozy from start to finish. I borrowed an ostinato string pattern that I made for an earlier sketch here.
Carol of the Bells was hard to decipher, there's so many arrangements of this song that finding a good jumping off point was muddled and frustrating. It doesn't help that I never learned to read music, so I had to work with some free midi files and otherwise do it by hand, and as it turns out there's some debate on what the notes are supposed to be with these midis, so a lot of it I just did by ear like I usually do. I wanted to feature a strong central solo violin, but I'm frankly disappointed with how it turned out and feel like I could do a lot better if I were to try again.
We Three Kings is my favorite piece here. I wanted to shoot for a musical genre that I don't have much experience in. I changed some chords for this arrangement to make it sound more boisterous and cinematic, which ended up working surprisingly well in the end. Because the song is in 3/4 (and I couldn't find any drum patterns that worked in that time from my library) I had to hand-key the percussion, which I think turned out to be the better part of this song.
Software used:
Reaper 5
Kontak 5
Heavyocity Damage and Modern Drummer
Shreddage
Project Sam Orchestral Essentials 1 and 2
Spitfire Audio Albion I