For a while now (7? years) I’ve been working on defining musical styles of In Extremis, and one thing I’ve always been trying to get better at is ambient music. The first (and still free) music I put on the internet of In Extremis was to help me find the mood of each Sentient Species, and was a great launching point for a lot of music that has come since.
In a lot of ways since I started I’ve grown, well except literally, but I’ve grown a lot with how I think about and compose this kind of music. There have been a couple of big influences during this time, and I’d like to share them first:
This track from Pikmin 2 is one of my favourite pieces of all time. It’s so relaxing and yet still extremely unlike what I’ve made so far, and it took a couple years to figure out that’s not what I was making.
Breath of the Wild was a huge ear-opening experience for me. Not just this track, but the way music was implemented in the game. Some of my most-repeatedly viewed videos on YouTube in the past two years are direct rips of game footage so you can hear all of the natural sounds coexist with the music. It’s a truly wonderful thing, and something I didn’t realize that I had been doing for years in a lot of open world games.
So, let’s get to where this is going.
Two of my YouTube singles don’t quite seem like the others. I’m talking specifically about the Day in Parallelium and The Wilderness video/audio. I’ve taken real pleasure in putting those together over the past year or so, and I wanted to explore that style fully. So, today, I am officially branching off from the YouTube Singles as Ambiences. There will be two playlists now and each update will have at least one of them (fingers crossed). Those two videos have now been moved over to the new Ambiences playlist, along with these new videos:
Additionally, I’d like to share one of the first ideas I had to go with this. I orchestrated one of my favourite pieces of video game music ever from a piano arrangement by Scamper, then broke it up in a similar way to the Temple of Time arrangement from Breath of the Wild. So, here’s Awake from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, using the in-game nature sounds.
Additionally, all the artwork from these (aside from the Skyrim artwork that I cannot find the source for), is up on the Media page towards the bottom under the YouTube Singles.
Skeli'n Studios 