The Fall of Weyn - Part 1

Basic premise

The Fall of Weyn is my latest track and it was an absolute blast to compose and produce. It’s a track that’s been in my head for over a year, going around and around. I was playing with the main theme for Kintovia II one day and gave a minor version a try and then decided to just see where it went, originally just singing it into a voice recorder app.

The track tells the story of an army returning from battle to an anxiously waiting city. The first one or two soldiers return and this is represented by the lone horn. As more return the strings come in and we shift focus to a lady awaiting news of her husband. As she continues to watch for news a figure appears at the gates; a friend of her husband. Instantly she believes him to be safe and the piece shifts into a major lift. The drums recede as she daydreams about seeing her loved one again. Unfortunately it is not meant to be, and the enemy is hot on their heels, as the guitars cut in chugging we get the realisation that something is wrong, and the solo heralds; “The Fall of Weyn.”

So that’s the story.

Design decisions

Originally, in fact if you listen to the solo horn piece I released earlier, which is actually just the beginning of this track, it goes high quite high. There’s a large interval jump in the third pattern repetition. It was too big. There’s a lament there in that interval, it’s painful and the horn really rings out. In fact there’s a resonance there, which somebody commented on and said, “you have a lot of resonance there, you might want to tame that.” But I thought about it, and I decided, no, the pain represented by that resonance is actually a stylistic choice.

And it works really, really well, but I didn’t want that to be there in all the iterations. If it were there in the first in the second repetition, it would lose the effect, so I modified the line in the first repetition of the horn to make it more subdued.

Then I bring some strings in. In the story at this point, we have the army returning from battle. It picks up as more people are returning injured and the sadness really does kind of build.

Then we get the major lift, the drums fade away and we head into this lush, very strings oriented, very sustained legato section. It has the feeling of reminiscing about all of all the times this couple had together. It’s fantastic. So the drums fade away here to very much emphasise the point. In fact most of the rhythm backs away, to reiterate this feeling of being lifted away from the current scenario.

The epic guitar solo really was a way of expressing the chaos. It’s out of place in some ways in this context. We’ve just had orchestral up to now and then all of a sudden this entity arrives on the scene; this devastation arrives on the scene and just wreaks havoc.

And that’s really what I was trying to portray with the solo. As Joshua solo progresses, it gets more and more complex. It’s actually more complex than I originally wrote it, which turned out to be absolutely perfect for the piece.

There’s a number of influences in there that come from the soundtrack to The Rock. It is a phenomenal, soundtrack, and I highly recommend anyone who likes this particular track of mine to go check it out because it really is incredible.

There are a lot of nods to it in a lot of different places. The solo horn at the beginning is by far, probably the biggest not and I really tried to emulate the style that Hans went for in there. There’s also a couple of chords and changes which feel very similar to those used in The Rock.

I’m planning to do a second part to this a little later on to talk about instrumentation choices and how the track is made up. Stay tuned :)