Slave Knight Gael - boss theme (8-bit version)

First things first, SORRY my fight footage doesn't perfectly match up with the phases!

This has taken a great deal of effort, partly due to my general paucity of skill and partly due to the fact this is an EPIC of a piece. A lot of chipping away when I had the spare time. This was much harder than O+S!

In the middle of the process I shifted from a free version of Cubase I was using to my Mac Pro which I use to make normal compositions on, because I was concerned at how hard it would be to track alongside the more complex music without having it in the project, and also because I am faster using Logic than Ableton. This experience has certainly been an excellent opportunity for ‘ear training’. I suppose in all I took about 120 hours to put this together. And it has been sitting in various versions on my computer since I did the Ornstein and Smough one (though I completed the majority of the work in three weeks of hard work).

Yuka put an incredible number of runs in this piece, as she usually does, and there’s a lot of hard-to-hear stuff. I do believe that it was probably in some ways easier to write this piece of music in the first place than work out the notes listening back! I have done my best, and certainly have not got it right in some places, but I wanted to try reasonably hard to give a real impression of the complexity of the music. Although I have enjoyed the other covers on Youtube I felt they were lacking the level of complexity that Yuka put into the work.

This is my favourite piece of music in a video game ever, which is really something as I am a giant fan of Nobuo Uematsu. And yes he would feature multiple times in my top 10, but this is my number 1 piece. It is so evocative of the fight, it has three incredible phases, it fits the spirit of Gael perfectly, and it is an absolute treat for someone who enjoys pieces with detail in them.

A particular focus I placed was on the less ‘flashy’ bits. There are parts of the piece where, due I guess to the difficulty of balancing orchestral instruments, it is possible to lose fantastic elements. So I brought up the volumes and occasionally added a little creativity or beefing up certain bits, but I tried to avoid any artistic licence where I could clearly hear what was happening. I do this ‘rebalancing’ a lot in the second phase, and I am very pleased with the result.

A remarkable thing is how LITTLE copy and pasting happens in this piece. It is just pure effort from Yuka. Definitely inspiring and instructive for me. It is always a temptation for any composer to rely on repeats. So many of the violin runs are ‘one-and-dones’ in this piece, and the same thing goes for the choral work. That’s just incredible devotion to making a memorable and stunning composition.

If anyone has any suggestions for future ones that would be great. Plus if anyone has any pixel art they would want to be featured on the next one please send me a message.

I am also interested in writing for any video game projects, free of charge as this is my hobby (I'm a lawyer by trade). Point anyone who is making a game to me, preferably something with boss themes in! I store my compositions in 'Doug's composing showcase'. See here for an imagined piece for 'Bloodborne 2':    • Bloodborne 2 Fan Music/Art - Kann-Kur...  

Thanks.