A symphonic metal cover of Weiss Schnee's third theme - also known as Mirror Mirror III.

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First one in a bit that wasn't done by ear from the ground up, with there being a nice piano rendition available. Lucky me, as I'm not sure this would've happened without that. The section in-between the quiet verses and the opera interlude has a bunch of tempo changes that would've thrown me off like something fierce. Granted, the way it is here isn't entirely accurate either - were one to play this and the original side by side, there'd be substantial lag around that part. But it works in isolation, and that's good enough for me.

Anyway, when it comes to the arranging, I kept things mostly unchanged in the opening parts, just slightly expanding on the strings and adding a bit of percussion during the 1st chorus. Things really changed once the rock section kicks in. The part for the high guitars, I moved over to strings and changed the low guitars from just playing 8ths to longer notes that end on 8ths. When it loops, this is expanded upon with some harmonics, a idea that I had quite a bit later in production. The drums here, I kept entirely unchanged. It just works.

During the second verse, I added strings and moved the simple vowel notes of the background vocals to a choir, as well as add some minimal brass and woodwinds. In an early idea, I was going to include woodwind runs to make the chord progressions more dramatic, but that just ended up sounding too busy.

What gave me the most trouble, were technical difficulties, with audio frequently ended up distorted on export. I ended up resorting exporting the video and audio separately, and using a separate video editor to splice it back together. Frustrating.

Time spent working on the track: 40 hours.

Credits:
Composed by Jeff Williams and Alexander Abraham.

MIDI referenced sequenced by 2pts, of Musescore:
https://musescore.com/user/8857781/sc...

Artwork used in thumbnail:
https://www.deviantart.com/cadhla182/...

Video made with FL Studio ZGameEditor Visualizer plugin
Effect author credits:
Electric - nimitz Twitter: @stormoid Adapted from https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ldlXRS
WormHoleEclipse, Blooming, TextDraw - Jph Wacheski http://jph_wacheski.itch.io/
Polar - Kjell, Dubswitcher
Dubswitcher Starburst, Dubswitcher Soft Glitch - Dubswitcher

#rwby