Bouldy Boss Battle – Hades (fan composition)

Here we have an imagined soundtrack to a hypothetical boss battle against Bouldy the boulder from Hades.

I’m uploading this the same day I finished editing it, so we’ll see if I regret that later. Usually, it’s a good idea to sleep a night before saying a song is finished because the editing phase makes me deaf to a lot of choices I would consider as mistakes after resetting my ears. I wanted to mix this song loud like a heavy metal song and I think it worked pretty well. As long as it still feels like it breathes, I’m very happy.

This piece is an example of a trick I learned a year or two ago. It’s the idea that by using the same rhythm and a melodic contour for your melodies, you can introduce novel melodic ideas while making the song sound very cohesive, because it basically borrows from itself.

Here, the melodic idea is two quarter notes of the same kind followed by four eights notes outlining some kind of a trichord (usually a nasty chromatic mediant) and then it ends on a whole note. That’s the structure that almost all the melodic ideas are built on. Then you just vary the actual notes. The first iteration of this starts at 19 seconds, the second at 39 seconds, the third at 59 seconds (with a variation in that the first note is not the same as the second). From there on, I feel like we’ve repeated this musical idea enough and it’s time to throw in something new.

I hope you like it 🙂

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