Weekly Composition Post — The Tree
(Poster image crop from original by "Malta Girl" used under CC 2.0 license)
This week's track is "The Tree".
I don't have a lot of time for writing, unfortunately, so no short story this week, but I wanted to explain how I got to the piece I ended up doing (and the "story" of it).
The prompt was "Trees," but I heard the 'Enchanted Garden' sample loop in Logic —- this is the arpeggiated bit you hear underneath the whole thing —- and my mind went to an image that's popular in Japanese pop culture media (like anime, manga, games, etc.): a "guardian tree." The idea is that as a tree grows in a spiritually meaningful spot, and becomes particularly old, it's invested with mystical power that protects that space, or something like it,
(My actual mental image, specifically, was the Fujisakura from SRW OG Saga: Endless Fronter, a giant shimenawa-wrapped cherry tree that's the center of the nation of Kagura Amahara, but that felt like a too-specific ref for most folks who might find their way here.)
The story of this song in my head is that an adventurer (probably a Bard™) finds such a tree, and attempts to commune with it: the piccolo line that starts off. What they discover is that the tree stands on the site of a formerly destroyed, peaceful kingdom, and that the spirits of its citizens live on inside the tree (the synth choral stuff that comes in next).
As the adventurer keeps communing with the tree, they find a kind of middle ground state where their spirits connect, which is why the piece ends on the piccolo and choral lines harmonizing.
I'm satisfied with this piece (for something I wrote in a week, anyway) but there are bits I don't like. The synth sample loop ends on a really discordant-sounding progression and I felt like I was fighting it the entire time; it took days just to figure out a satisfying way to end the first cello chord bit that didn't sound discordant as hell.
I'm also barely a composer and not at all an audio engineer, so there's things I wish I could have fixed that I couldn't in the mix, or editing the MIDI instruments (the choral sections both sound extremely choppy, and lack the smooth slide an actual singer would put on the notes).
But! The whole point was "keep writing songs" and "do it in a week" and maybe a reminder that perfect is the enemy of "finished" isn't so bad once in a while.