Dance of the Awakened

Dance of the Awakened

If you’ve read any of my little song blogs, you’ll know that many of my songs start as an experiment. Dance of the Awakened came from two experiments – format and instrumentation.

As I build my library of licensable music, I want to include music that would work for trailers. There’s a format – three or four musical acts – for this style of music. Also, the song needs to be big – thick with instrumentation, but the actual elements (melody/hook, harmony, etc) don’t need to be complicated. It needs to support the advertisement and not dominate it. The end result doesn’t quite fit into the format, but I’ve made it easy to edit, so when I create my alternate mixes for my library album, there will be a specific trailer cut.

My instrumentation experiment stems from a different place entirely. I did what many new electronic music producers do when I started this journey a year and a half ago – I grabbed ALL THE INSTRUMENTS! Some of them were free and some not-so-much. If you have the hard drive space and the money, you can find yourself buried in instrumentation. Several months ago, I did a first pass at cleaning out the things that I most likely will never use. Now, I’m honing the list further by focusing in on specific instruments (or instrument packs), which is what I did here. As part of my subscription to Native Instruments, I have access to the Spotlight: India Collection, which I’ve used here and there, but in smaller ways. Most of Dance of the Awakened’s instrumentation came from this collection. I feel like I only scratched the surface with this collection and look forward to doing more with it!

Dance of the Awakened will ultimately live on my Mystical Journeys album along with: In Solitude’s Wake, Echoes of the Wanderer, Celestial Swirls, Skyward Journey, Summit Whispers.

Head over to YouTube to check it out:

Check out my other arrangements and compositions. My library grows every month and now has a variety of styles. Besides world fusion instrumentals, it features electronic music, pop, and a few arrangements of old hymns and carols.