Baldur's Gate 2 progressive metal OST album thing
Skylark
Member Posts: 2
Hello,
I've written an instrumental progressive metal album using BG2's narrative to dictate where the song goes. Imoen has a motif, so where she reappears in the plot, her theme reappears. Same for Irenicus, Bodhi, Aran Linvail, creatures like trolls (it's more of a rhythmic motif though), beholders, illithid, places like Athkatla you get the idea. I edited my most recent playthrough (a human blade in a party of Yoshimo/Imoen, Jaheira, Anomen and Viconia and bringing along the quest relevant NPC in the 6th slot awaiting Sarevok) with the music so that you can have an idea of what this even means. All the music is my creation with the exception of an extremely short reference to the SoA main theme in the seventh song (it's less than 10 seconds long in a work totalling more than an hour) because I had to give it a nod in the music somehow.
You should survive the process (short):
https://youtu.be/OOa-7Y60rYA
An outrageous sum (looooong):
https://youtu.be/WVre4VrULX8
The style is somewhere between Between the Buried and Me, Dream Theatre, Animals as Leaders, and Plini, but with a lot of jazz and fusion influence as well. Each track covers a chapter ("An outrageous sum" consists of most of the large side quests in the game and so it's.. quite long), and you can find the compositions in midi form on my channel if you want a sneak peek at the upcoming songs. I'm making this all around a full time job so it's happening when it happens, I only have so much time to do stuff for this and most of that time is spent practicing my guitar.
I've been writing and practicing parts for this for a couple years now, and finally I have something to share. I've been a long time fan of the Baldur's Gate series, since the OG cereal box with 6 cds or whatever it was. I love this game and I hope that comes through with this project - I tried to evoke the feeling of what it's like to play each part of it, what it was like for a younger me who was absolutely enraptured by this wonderful piece of art. I'm extremely grateful to Beamdog for preserving it so faithfully (I literally could not get the classic version to screen record).
If you end up listening to any of this thanks so much, it's been a ton of work and I can't do all this and also be on social media and be good at that, so getting anyone to even click on my work is hard. But I hope that I captured even a small amount of what this game has meant to me over many years.
Edit: just in advance because it's plaguing online art spaces currently; I did not use AI for making any part of any of this, not the music, not the instruments, not the video, literally nothing. The drums are programmed by hand by me using modern and massive 2 and the midi score which you can hear on my channel; the synths and pianos are also programmed, and I played all the bass and guitar on all tracks using neural DSP archetypes Plini X and Nolly X.
Edit 2: the working title for this project was always "Child of Bhaal" but WotC pretty much said no when I asked permission to use Bhaal in the title (or rather, they CBF giving individual licenses to nobody musicians) so I'll probably name it after the 7th song, "To spark it anew". All the song titles come from lines of dialogue in the relevant chapter. I thought it was a fun idea, since if you're just listening there's no real way of linking the music to the narrative that inspired it. Which was the goal, pretty much - I just wanted a way of getting beyond a blank page at first. I'm really happy with how it came out.
I've written an instrumental progressive metal album using BG2's narrative to dictate where the song goes. Imoen has a motif, so where she reappears in the plot, her theme reappears. Same for Irenicus, Bodhi, Aran Linvail, creatures like trolls (it's more of a rhythmic motif though), beholders, illithid, places like Athkatla you get the idea. I edited my most recent playthrough (a human blade in a party of Yoshimo/Imoen, Jaheira, Anomen and Viconia and bringing along the quest relevant NPC in the 6th slot awaiting Sarevok) with the music so that you can have an idea of what this even means. All the music is my creation with the exception of an extremely short reference to the SoA main theme in the seventh song (it's less than 10 seconds long in a work totalling more than an hour) because I had to give it a nod in the music somehow.
You should survive the process (short):
https://youtu.be/OOa-7Y60rYAAn outrageous sum (looooong):
https://youtu.be/WVre4VrULX8The style is somewhere between Between the Buried and Me, Dream Theatre, Animals as Leaders, and Plini, but with a lot of jazz and fusion influence as well. Each track covers a chapter ("An outrageous sum" consists of most of the large side quests in the game and so it's.. quite long), and you can find the compositions in midi form on my channel if you want a sneak peek at the upcoming songs. I'm making this all around a full time job so it's happening when it happens, I only have so much time to do stuff for this and most of that time is spent practicing my guitar.
I've been writing and practicing parts for this for a couple years now, and finally I have something to share. I've been a long time fan of the Baldur's Gate series, since the OG cereal box with 6 cds or whatever it was. I love this game and I hope that comes through with this project - I tried to evoke the feeling of what it's like to play each part of it, what it was like for a younger me who was absolutely enraptured by this wonderful piece of art. I'm extremely grateful to Beamdog for preserving it so faithfully (I literally could not get the classic version to screen record).
If you end up listening to any of this thanks so much, it's been a ton of work and I can't do all this and also be on social media and be good at that, so getting anyone to even click on my work is hard. But I hope that I captured even a small amount of what this game has meant to me over many years.
Edit: just in advance because it's plaguing online art spaces currently; I did not use AI for making any part of any of this, not the music, not the instruments, not the video, literally nothing. The drums are programmed by hand by me using modern and massive 2 and the midi score which you can hear on my channel; the synths and pianos are also programmed, and I played all the bass and guitar on all tracks using neural DSP archetypes Plini X and Nolly X.
Edit 2: the working title for this project was always "Child of Bhaal" but WotC pretty much said no when I asked permission to use Bhaal in the title (or rather, they CBF giving individual licenses to nobody musicians) so I'll probably name it after the 7th song, "To spark it anew". All the song titles come from lines of dialogue in the relevant chapter. I thought it was a fun idea, since if you're just listening there's no real way of linking the music to the narrative that inspired it. Which was the goal, pretty much - I just wanted a way of getting beyond a blank page at first. I'm really happy with how it came out.
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Thanks for giving it a spin, this has been a very long time in the making and I quit and restart many times 😅 I've come this far that I'm hopeful to finish it, but at every stage I felt like "this is as far as this is going to get" and I keep surprising myself. Having anything to actually share has been a massive milestone so really I appreciate you giving me your time.