The Making of Egyptian Memories
I’ve seen many other musicians talk about the process in their composition for their new tracks, so I thought I’d go through the process of how the Egyptian Memories release came to life.
I have always been interested in Egypt, and in particular the culture and symbolism of Egypt, and it was something I wanted to capture with my first Egyptian resource pack. My first aspect of research went into the forms of instruments that were used within Egyptian music, the drone, or a single note played over an extended period (sustain) was something that seemed prevalent in the vast majority of pieces.This drone helps give a very mysterious atmosphere to a lot of the Ancient Egyptian pieces I composed.
As you may already know, my style of music is towards a more darker style where there is always “more than meets the eye”. All themes that I’ve listened to while composing these pieces, all pointed towards this same similar style.
The Mummy’s Inspiration
When I was younger, I remember two distinct Egyptian films that I loved and this was quite often the biggest inspiration for me. The first inspiration was the 1999 film by Stephen Sommers “The Mummy”. Jerry Goldsmith composed the music, and it had a stunningly haunting soundtrack.
The Giza Port was the greatest inspiration for one of the themes I wrote for this track, it had this haunting, yet positive melody to it. This one track inspired Peace in Egypt.
I didn’t want to make it as dark as Giza Port, so I made it slightly faster to almost “brighten” it up slightly, as I knew that the other themes, were going to be slightly darker as at the time only The Pyramid had been completed.
I have to say out of all the resource packs I’ve released with Degica, and this has to be my personal favourite purely for the amount of fun I had in composing it. A lot of my ideas came out at random, and thanks in part also to the World Sample libraries I’d purchased at the time Ra and Silk. These resources have such fantastic sampling and were incredibly easy to play, which for others who know how much sometimes you’ve got to edit your midi notation painlessly for hours on end, you’ll find yourself put off by your work, these pieces flew out thanks in part to these libraries by East West.
It also happened at the same time, that the developer of Re and Apophis got in contact with me for a non-exclusive soundtrack, in which he asked for very similar things to what I was already composing at the time for this pack. So working alongside his ideas and wants for his own Egyptian Game I was able to get even closer to the classic Ancient Egyptian feel that I wanted for this pack. So much so that one of his tracks will be featured in one of the updates to this resource pack in a couple of months time.
I hope you enjoyed this little delve into how I composed some of the themes of this resource pack, it’s a little wordy, so I do apologise for that, but if you’ve made it to the end, congratulations! 🙂 If you’ve not checked out Egyptian Memories feel free to click here to have a little nosy and perhaps you’ll be able to get a bit more information on how I came about the composition, including the Sample Libraries and Instruments I used in this process. If you’d like to purchase the resource pack, you can get it directly from RPG Maker Web here.