Winter's Prayer - Zenith OST

Listen to Winter's Prayer over on SoundCloud!

Overview

Zenith is a conceptual precision platformer game I created for the purposes of this game jam. In Zenith, you play as a lost Child of Eden, attempting to return home to The Garden. To return, you must traverse The Four Seasons, a treacherous land filled with hazards and difficult navigation. 

"Winter's Prayer" is a 5 minute and 13 second looping track I made in FL Studio 20 that serves as the mountainous Winter region's main OST. Combining elements of Breakcore, IDM, Riddim and Heavy Metal, we find ourselves at this strange combination of synths and processed breakbeats. 

The Process 

Now silly ole' me waited so very excitedly for this jam to start, pumped full of excitement and ideas. As soon as I opened up the lovely DAW, FL Studio 20, I was struck with an immediate (and notably vicious) case of Writer's Block. Not a single idea came to my mind and everything I scribbled out in the piano roll sounded horrid to me. For days, I would come back to FL, opening new project after new project and hoping an idea would stick. 

However, I promised myself I would see this jam through no matter what and here I am, writing the final touches on the submission. It was today that I sat down at my computer after I got off work and finally just gave in to myself. I stopped trying to make something perfect, and instead, made something I enjoyed.

Rather than deciding on a specific sound or genre, I simply took sounds and styles I enjoyed and mashed it with my own preferences and style. I tried to think outside of the box instead of using my normal process for making music. This time, I thought of words or concepts that I wanted to be a part of the beat. For example, I thought very often of the idea of a harsh cold that I wanted the drums to embody. To achieve this, I processed the living **** out of them and it resulted in this kind of glitchy and choppy drum break that still had the energy of it's organic version.

For most of the melodic elements I wanted to establish an atmosphere that made the listener think of a cold, mountainous range with danger at every footstep. Considering the game is a precision platformer, I find fast paced and erratic music very amusing. The combination of the energy of the music and the fast-paced execution needed to complete the game is a pretty funny situation I would find so much joy in putting players through.

Something I also don't do often that I tried to do a lot in this track is layering different instruments to create a fuller sound. Most of the instruments in the project use the exact same pattern, but the sounds are all fairly different and add a bunch of variation to the track. In all honesty, I just clicked through random VSTs and looked for sounds with cool names, then I'd just test them and mess with the settings until I found something I liked. Then it was just a simple matter of deciding where it would come into the track and then mixing it.

Aside from the drums, my favorite part was probably the bass line. I've never been too good at actually writing basslines so this was a first-time experience actually enjoying my bassline. There's actually two basses playing the same pattern, one of them being a sub bass and the other being a dnb serum preset I found scrolling through Big Boy Splice. I distorted them both to varying to degrees and then panned them in either direction. It made this cool stereo-ish feeling and made them sit a lot nicer in the final mix since they weren't directly over top each other in the middle.

After that I kind of just added randomly chops or breaks at some sections and finished sectioning the track so it looped into itself. It was honestly a really fun experience and I would 10 out of 10 do it again. I've wanted to produce an OST on my own for so long and I finally found the drive to do it. I hope you've enjoyed listening to my track and reading the process of how I got to the end. Thank you if you've made it this far, and please, have a wonderful day.

- gosaLou.