The Son of the Wind God

This is my theme for a certain character. He is a good guy, and he is the son of the "Wind God."It starts out really slow and ominous, representing his birth and his purpose. He is sad, he has entered a world of pain and suffering. About halfway through the song, his heroic theme is played in its full stringy glory. The song then speeds up, it sounds like he is "flying," then at the end he slowly comes back down to the ground.The entire song is based off of two chords, listen and you'll know what I'm talking about.This song took me a long time, so please listen to it before rating it. I've had this theme in my head for years, but this is by far its best reincarnation, so I decided to post it on Newgrounds.The exact "storyline" is unimportant, just tell me what you think of the song! If you liked it, take a listen at some of my other songs.- Ethan Revere Smith

The Son of the Wind God

I like how you get quite a bit of sound and color out of a somewhat basic sound font, and I really like how you change the texture and pace at 1:50, it really gets going and I almost feel like it's the end of an intro and the rest of the piece is about to begin, which at first made it a little disappointing since it fades out soon after. Most of the time from an 'academic' view of writing music, it's not a good idea to really change course in a piece when it's nearly over, especially when it involves picking up the pace after most of the piece being slow, <i>however</i> here I think it really works. This is partly because it is programmatic (has images/action that the music is representing), and the music reflects the character taking off and then coming back to the ground. It also works because it's a character theme and, to me, it's almost like a tease, like we get a taste of what this theme sounds like in an 'epic' setting but we have to 'tune in' to the story itself to find out what happens. Leaving it open ended like that, with the listener wanting to hear more, can be a useful technique to use, especially if you ever get into trailer music for film/video games.

Even though you do get alot out of the sounds you're using, I might suggest, just to take it to the next level, that you have some more swells leading into phrases, such as the spot around :24-:26

This makes a big difference because alot of audio files made from MIDI will have one glaring thing in common that gives away to our ear before almost anything else that it's not live instruments we're listening to, and that's the fact that MIDI instruments (unless manipulated) almost never phrase music. That is to say, they won't crescendo or decrescendo, especially on held notes.. if you've ever worked in Sibelius, it can be very irritating to put a big crescendo on a note and hear nothing happen until the next note happens and suddenly everything is much louder. If you add a little bit of phrasing, like in the spot I mentioned above, this will go a long way.

I really enjoyed this one, as I said before you got alot of great color out of your musical ideas. Thanks for sharing!

Very nice. Only thing I didn't like very well was the change in the end (the one Jared was talking about from 2:24-end) even though I know that you did it because of the story, I didn't see it fit when compared to the rest of the song. I noticed the motif in the harp and bell was similar to those from a bit earlier in the piece, but when played by themselves it sounded just too different. Maybe make the motif stand out more during the piece so it is a more balanced closure, or maybe even adding a short part in the middle (like, before the flying part) which anticipates this motif before he rises up. That way I would recognize him coming back to where he started a few moments earlier. Overall I liked this pretty much!