I'm going to start up a thread here where every day I'll be running through a little behind-the-scenes insights on one track I wrote for the Nether Update~ I'll kick it off with Chrysopoeia a lil later today, so stay tuned

Let's talk Chrysopoeia!

So one fun thing about all the Nether tracks is that (while I named them after I finished writing), they're all named after alchemical concepts or phrases. I really identified the concept of making a portal to the nether with that kinda aesthetic.

Chrysopoeia, in alchemy, is the transmutation of something into gold, and the ultimate goal of alchemists. Likewise, the concept behind the piece was turning one sound into another, literally with the use of re-sampling & granular synthesis.

I used Pigments, a granular synth, to take a reversed-music box progression & create a chord pad out of it. Around 50% of the track is me modulating & processing this one two-chord sequence, which I built the entire progression around.

The other major part of the track is using the VST Noire, a piano library, in a pretty unconventional way. I played at an extremely low velocity to reduce the attack on the notes, but used a bowed overlay to make it sound more like a zither than a piano.

With both parts, I also made heavy use of pitch-shifting to give the synths & piano the qualities of playing on a fretless instrument, sliding around between notes in a way that isn't usually associated with either instrument.

The final touch I'll mention is that after the track was finished, it needed just one more little detail to really come together. So I sampled elements from the piece itself, reversed them & fed them back thru a delay & processing chain, to create a series of unsettling stingers.

I lied, there's actually one more thing: The swishing & crackling sound you hear throughout the track is actually me recording my fingers & ring rubbing against my coffee mug & putting it through analog tape processing to make a sort of crunchy percussive layer~

It's Rubedo time!

He's always saying that (he has never said that)

Rubedo, in this case, is not the character from Xenosaga, but the title of a Nether track, and also derived from alchemy. Meaning "redness", it signifies the final stage in an alchemical success.

In the case of writing this track, I wanted to express the feeling of claustrophobia & tension giving way into awe, much like mining through narrow crevices until finally opening up into a large lava-filled cavern, immense in scale & emotional resonance.

Rubedo is also the simplest of the tracks, relying mostly on a prelude-style piano track (something celeste fans are probably familiar with, I love a building arpeggio). It uses two instances of Noire, one for the base arpeggio, and another one to emphasize the bass notes & solo

The same progression plays twice, while cross-fading between mic distances: The first time, it goes from a slightly reverberant atmosphere, into really close in. The second time, it goes farther and farther away, into a cavernous space. Impossible if I was recording a real piano

On the 2nd time, I add an ascending line to give it that tension & release, which is actually comprised of both a buzzy vocal-sounding synth in Massive X, paired with the slavic choir from Vocalisa. I wanted to have that tense vocal sound, but just unreal enough to question it

A fun note is that the little solo that bridges the 1st and 2nd repetitions was something asked for after I sent in my first draft. There was a little something that felt missing there, and so I was happy to improvise some melodic material to fill in the gap!

Thirdly, it's time to talk about So Below!

To note, this is not a valley girl re-imagining of the Capy game Below. It's actually half of a motto used in a lot of fun mystical stuff including alchemy, "As above, so below" usually referring to an astral realm or heaven etc.

Anyway I'm a big nerd so I isolated "So below" to refer more to the umbral occult nature of the Nether in relation to the normal world, "above".

The track itself was the first one I wrote, and is closest to the material I had initially demo'd with.

The piece is based on a drone & features two "sides", along with a threshold-crossing moment in the middle. While it doesn't accompany this physical passage, I wanted the piece to feel like reflections of itself. In the first half, it's fairly pretty, and in the 2nd, dire.

The threshold crossing in the middle, I wanted to sound distinctly Other, and so I used a vocal-sounding synth made in Massive X, paired with a bass flute. I was scared this would be too far removed from what fit with the game, but it worked out!

Throughout the piece, the piano used again is Noire, but in a peculiar gamelan-sounding way & lots of bass drones & pitch bending.

The dire sounding second half is just a building drone with alternating piano & synth moans, while a distant timpani pattern grows & fades.

Okay let's break apart Pigstep!

I don't have any cool insight on the title, it's just dubstep for piglins. I don't think they know what dubstep is, but I'm not writing the lore here I just wanted to write a fun little track that was good to dance to~

My actual first inspiration was my favorite riff from FF7's Under the Rotting Pizza. I remember hearing that coming from my PS1 and freaking out like what the hell games can sound like this what the hell!! It's such a juicy bass, and so my first goal was to make my own juicy bass

I found a bass that was almost perfect in Massive X, so I took the appropriately-named Brass Stomp & modified it to make it even more punchy & bass-y, and ran it through some EQ & limiter filtering to give it the intro progression. I wanted to ramp it up so the drop hit hard

The drums are a layer of 3 different elements: First, during the intro, there's a super slowed-down sample from Ableton's Mad Beatz pack, which has some really fun chuggy sounds, clave & the remnant of what was probably a piano decay, all put thru a super long delay filter

When the drop hits, I add in another slowed-down sample of some shakers that have a distorted liquid quality to them when stretched out. It was a great shaker layer to add into the already odd-sounding percussion loop

The final layer is Kontakt Drum Lab, with my favorite kick because it's got this layer of analog static on the decay that just sounds so grimy and neat. So all together, the 3 layers make a bed of rhythm across the lows & highs, leaving room in the mids for melodic stuff~

My secret weapon for this track was using mellotron to sound as old & sampled as I could, while still writing original material. Remember the piano decay from the 1st perc layer? I decided to lay into that by having a mellotron-sampled piano play the same chord in the intro

The same piano, of course, goes on to play the melody later on in the track when it comes in.

Meanwhile, there's another classic mellotron sample, the flutes, playing the percussive chord progression & later some super nostalgic-sounding descending bass stuff~

During the B section, I also double the melody with a super overblown & delay-filtered version of the piano lead to give it even more impact~ For this layer, I also brought in a little organ sustain to keep the melody notes going into the chord progression

Finally, my favorite little detail: in the very last repetition before the breakdown, I add in some of my favorite lil Massive synth arps. Then during the breakdown, I automated the reverb size up & back down again, which creates that weird little distorted pitch effect

The last last note is that there's something deeply ironic about how dramatically I mixed the stereo track, and then had to mix a mono version for the game. Luckily they let me sneak in the stereo version into the OST release

AND THATS IT ty you for letting me spam yr feed