Story
So this one came out of a Discord server, of all places.
I’m part of a community called Become a Pro Composer (BAPC), and the founder, Kevin, put together this incredibly ambitious thing: a whole browser RPG called Odyssey of Sound, built entirely around music from the community. Fifty composers, each one getting a “brief” for a scene in the game, and every track becomes a relic players find as they piece the story back together. I jumped on it the second I saw it.
I ended up writing five pieces for it: music for the intro cinematic, a boss battle called “Crypt of the Sun King,” a track just called “Coffee” (more on that in a second), music for the final boss’s death, and the victory theme, “In The End.” I kept telling Kevin I’d take more if he had more, and he kept giving me more. Love it.
The intro and the final boss’s death cinematic were pretty standard write-to-video work for me at this point. The two that actually challenged me were the boss battle and the coffee track.
I had never written a boss battle before. Ever. So I did what I do with anything I don’t know how to approach - I went and actively listened. Mostly Elden Ring, some Bear McCreary and John Williams for a bit of filmic weight. And then, like usual, most of the actual track got written in the shower. I don’t know why that’s where my brain does its best work, but it is. I got out, ran straight to the studio, and wrote down everything that was still in my head before it left. I settled on an asymmetric time signature - 7/8, with some 8/8 and 12/8 mixed in - to keep it feeling unstable and urgent the whole way through, and leaned on pipe organ and choir to make the Sun King feel both grand and dangerous at the same time.
Coffee was just madness, honestly. The brief wanted hyperactivity, and I had zero clue where to start, so I just started throwing things at it - arps, a wall of mid and high percussion, a sample of coffee pouring, an alarm clock going off at random, even a goat screaming because why not. My daughter Alia actually helped me figure out how the arp should sit against everything else early on, which ended up shaping a good chunk of the track. I even took a five-second clip of her singing, sped it up 5x, pitched it way up, and drowned it in reverb and delay. Somehow all of that chaos still had to hang together musically, and getting it there was honestly a blast.
“In The End” I wanted to feel like the end of the hero’s journey - big, uplifting, orchestral, the kind of thing that could close out a 90s or early-2000s movie.
Huge thanks to Kevin for pulling this whole thing together. Getting fifty composers to contribute to one cohesive story is not a small thing to organize, and I had a genuinely great time being part of it. 🎵
