Analyzing "Knockout" FNF: Indie Cross OST | Basterd's LFA (Layman-Friendly Analysis)

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]Next up, we have Knockout from the FNF Indie Cross soundtrack by orenji music.

[00:00:07]Once again, everybody, this is a bastard LFA, a layman friendly analysis. I'm a professionally trained musician composer and my objective is to explain things in a way so that you don't have to be one to understand what is happening here musically. So, if you like the sound of that, make sure you're following the channel, subscribe to the channel, whatever you want to do, like the video, share the video, comment, turn on notifications, become a member. Once again, everybody, don't forget to join the Discord server. Join the Patreon, subscribe to the gaming channel. How to request songs even on the live stream.

[00:00:35]Members getting early access to the content I have as people listen a bunch of other things later than this video, so stick around for that. Disclaimers showing on your screen right now, so go ahead and pause the video to read them in full. Otherwise, please be patient with me. I am acoustic and guitar-ed, so please keep that in mind. With that, let's go ahead and do this. Knockout Indie Cross FNF, let's go.

[00:01:02]Okay, so we start of course you can see from here that we're doing a Cuphead inspired uh theme. Cuphead of course very much um inspired by the 1930s uh jazz and cartoons kind of thing. So right now we are paying tribute a little bit to that. Uh we start with a few elements. We have a piano, we have drums, we have a bass giving us our initial riff so far. So, we have an initial riff going on. A riff is go Not quite a riff.

[00:01:33]Um motif maybe? Maybe motif. I'm going to say motif. Uh so we have our initial motif. Motif being the smallest version of your musical idea. That is the essence from which everything else comes from. We're going to have to see where this goes. The difference between a riff and a any motif is that a riff uh let me I might as well just explain it, right?

[00:01:50]So a riff is a motif that is then put through an ostinato, which means that you're repeating something over and over and over again with it with little to no repetition and then you play that on a guitar or a bass or a keyboard um or whichever other contemporary nowadays instruments we might have, right? So we're having this one starting over here. Now something to note when it comes to FNF is that these ones are suppo- are based on rap battles, right?

[00:02:16]Like that's the theme of the game. Uh so because of that we have to deal with the format of songs. Um I know that we call everything a song because it's easier, but there is technically a categorical distinction between songs and instrumental music or pieces or tracks.

[00:02:31]Uh same term just different uh same same concept just different terms for it.

[00:02:37]These are just the more popular ones used for it. Uh songs are usually going to have lyrics, they're going to have vocals and these lyrics or vocals are going to be the driving force of a substantial part of the music. When it comes to FNF, we emulate the sound of vocals usually without the lyrics. Let's see where this goes.

[00:02:54]There you go.

[00:03:00]So, we bring in the first few vocals over here as part of the introduction and of course we have the other theme of FNF, which is the call and response.

[00:03:11]Call and response being a musical conversation. Rap battles, I think you can see where this is going. We have one part that does something, the call, and then another one does the response.

[00:03:21]Now right now we had two things happening. Number one, we had the call and response, which was a canonic imitation, and then we had some doublings.

[00:03:30]Doubling is when you have more than one layer or more than one instrument doing the same thing at the same time. Um as we hear heard here the the vocals the the vocal tracks uh doubling the rest of the band. And then we had a little bit of canonic imitation over here. Canonic imitation is a subset of call and responses where the call and the response are the same melody. So in this case the start of the melody was the same and then we went off to the syncopated um bit that we have that pa ra pa pa pa pa pa pa pa which was a tutti. Um syncopation being when you play against your drums, against your beat, or against your metronome. The metronome is the imaginary click that maintains all the rhythm.

[00:04:12]Uh a tutti means everyone.

[00:04:14]Um basically we have everybody doing the same thing. Very popular in jazz and in funk uh and similar genres to this. Of course, uh Cuphead very much inspired by that big band jazz, so it makes sense.

[00:04:28]When you are making music, you want to keep a careful balance between what is familiar and what is new. Too much familiarity, too much repetition, too much of the same thing, you're exploring the listener, they tune out. Too much new material too quickly, you risk overwhelming the listener, they tune out. There is one universal exception no matter the style or genre, which is solos. And then jazz, funk, these kinds of genres have an additional exception, which is the tutti.

[00:04:50]You bring in a tutti, you bring in a solo, as long as it sounds cool enough and it fits enough, you can get away with almost anything. Almost meaning the principle of familiarity and new material become more relaxed. Not infallible, you can still um run into either of these two extremes, but the likelihood becomes lower. So we have that going on. Let's see where this goes.

[00:05:17]So we are now doing variations of the material that we had at the start. Some of it a lot of it is syncopated, a lot of it is bringing uh in some tuttis for this kind of stuff and we're doing call and response. So we have a brief intro, now we're in their first verse over here. So if we're dealing with song, we're going to have um two main building blocks, verse and chorus. Verse is going to be your baseline. I call it floor level of intensity. Chorus is going to be the ceiling level of intensity. Uh and basically everything else is going to build around them. So verses are going to be baseline. So that means your melodies are going to be a little bit more held back. You are going to usually do more lyrics, so they're going to be a little bit faster. Whereas your chorus, you're going to want to let go. This is where you want to unleash everything where you have the two extremes. So we're having that happen.

[00:06:08]Let's see where this goes.

[00:06:13]Continuing with that response call and response.

[00:06:17]And by the way, the drums are giving us a more um straightforward uh drum beat this time around being very very nice while we're having all the other syncopation. So you can actually start hearing how everything plays against everything else. Let's see where this goes.

[00:06:37]Okay, so we switch over to the next part and of course we are continuing with the call and response as the music in the background builds. But of course we have a shift in tone, we have a shift in um in chords and everything. We have gone from our first verse to our first pre-chorus. So if verse is floor, chorus is ceiling, the pre-chorus is going to be a connective tissue between the two. Call it your wall, call it your ladder, the stairs, a ramp, whatever it is as long as it connects the two, that is the point. It it allows you to smooth in the transition between the two, build up for that release. Let's see where this goes.

[00:07:15]Nice melody there, nice.

[00:07:18]Building up and tutti.

[00:07:25]And we are now And now we you can hear that we completely unleashed everything. Off we go to the chorus. We are all the way all the way up to the climax of this and we have completely unleashed everything.

[00:07:40]Fairly similar to what we've had before, but the energy is a lot higher now.

[00:07:45]Let's see where this goes.

[00:07:47]All that syncopation, man.

[00:07:50]Little bit tutti there. Little break break there.

[00:07:54]And back we go to the verse. Verse number two.

[00:08:01]Oh my god, we got a little doubling there. So now we are now we're engaging in a lot more jazz principles. Uh we are starting to rotate different instruments around. We bring in of course right now a xylophone. We are bringing the the saxophones, the horn section, that kind of thing. We are making sure that there are very few breaks in between. Very high energy music, a lot of changes, but we are still more or less still doing the same material that we've been doing before, allowing the listener to not get overwhelmed that easily by the changes in instrumentation. Let's see where this goes.

[00:08:38]Nice and new part, nice.

[00:08:45]With the doublings from the trumpets, that's so good.

[00:08:50]See.

[00:08:53]I really appreciate how much um how many parallels there are between this and the Cuphead soundtrack because Cuphead has a very difficult soundtrack to keep up with. Like Cuphead soundtrack is like 1930s everybody was on cocaine kind of music, right? So we're we're emulating it pretty well over here without overwhelming the vocals because you also have to balance out the FNF vocals kind of thing, right? Really cool that we're actually getting away with it. Right now I think um we are still in the verse. We might be building up to the pre-chorus soon. And speaking of building up, I have built up the Patreon.

[00:09:32]patreon.com/jamesarbastard everybody. If you want to support this channel more than you already are by by watching and all that good stuff, consider joining the Patreon today. Linked in the description. Even if you're not joining for if you're not joining the paid um membership, do join the free one because this is where the non-gaming LFAs are going. What are those?

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[00:10:35]Become a member today. All right. And yeah, there is a Kofi as well. I just keep not mentioning it. Anyway, let's see where this goes. Knockout. Let's let's continue rebuilding up. Let's see.

[00:10:49]Three quarters two.

[00:10:52]Oh, those scales. And yeah, we are continuing doing variations of call and response and canonic imitation over here. Right now, you just heard the the trumpets playing a scale and then the vocals playing the scale after that instead of using the vocals that were first given in the original call.

[00:11:13]This is a call and response chain where we had three parts. We had the original call and then instead of the expected instrument doing the response, you put another one in between. That becomes the call and then you get another response from another else. So, what did we do?

[00:11:28]We had vocal one doing its thing, then we had trumpets do the response, and then we had vocal two giving us the canonic imitation.

[00:11:38]Really cool way of messing with the with the formula and getting away with it without risking too much.

[00:11:46]Creative. Let's see where this goes.

[00:11:49]Nice change over there. So many changes.

[00:11:51][music] All right, there we go. Chorus.

[00:11:58]Chorus two. [music] And another thing that I forgot to mention, this here feels very intense, very high speed.

[00:12:11]The reason for it is not because the drums the drums aren't really that fast.

[00:12:17]Not that fast. We are having the rest of the music that yes, the instruments are going back and forth fairly quickly, but what gives this a sense of incredibly fast pace is a very risky thing to have at a high pace, which is the harmonic rhythm.

[00:12:36]Harmonic rhythm is the speed at which your chords change, which is different than the rest of the rhythm. You can have the same chords playing at a certain time certain beat, and if they don't change much, your harmonic rhythm is slow, which gives the inherent feeling of harmonic rhythm a slower feel, whereas the more you change your chords, the faster you change your chords, the more intense the music feels. This is not something you hear, this is something you feel. So, Limbo Limbo my god, I don't think so.

[00:13:13]No.

[00:13:14]So, yeah, if you tell me right now, I'm just going to forget. If you tell me right like yeah, I would advise against you know, coming to my chat and recommend me a song because I will forget it. So, harmonic rhythm. If I were to do a chord progression, right?

[00:13:27]Let's do 1 2 [music] 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1. [music] That has a certain pace to it. That has established a harmonic rhythm. If I then play the same rhythm, but I shift the chords around and change the the speed at which we change the chords, watch what happens. Let's do the original first. 1 2 3 4 1 >> [music] >> 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 [music] 2 1 3 4 1 1 2 3 4 1 2 [music] 3 4 1 2 3 4 1.

[00:14:10]Now, I did mess a little bit up with the chords over there, but the rhythm was the same.

[00:14:16]The rhythm was the was the exact same, but because I changed the speed at which the chords change, I changed the I was changing every time instead of every two, it sped up the harmonic rhythm increasing the intensity of which the music feels. So, right now we are having that, which is a big risk to take. Like this is one of the reasons why this kind of big band hectic music is a big risk.

[00:14:44]Because it's very fast paced and it can very easily tense you up and overwhelm you. And welcome back Ronald says, yes.

[00:14:49]Okay, so yeah, we did that one. Yeah, yeah, we did that one. There you go.

[00:14:52]There you go. All right, so yeah, with that the two of us goes.

[00:14:55]And by the way, if you want to ask if we've done if I've done the song or not, I would advise you look on the channel cuz at this point we've done well over a thousand LFA's and I'm pretty sure I'm going to be I'm not going to be able to remember all of them. So, yeah, search on the channel first and just in case.

[00:15:11]So, yeah, yeah. Anyway, let's see where this goes.

[00:15:15]Continuing [music] that chorus similar to what we did before. Nice.

[00:15:20]So good.

[00:15:24]There's that low deep in the in the trumpets there there.

[00:15:30]We switch over to a harmonized melody.

[00:15:32]Nice. And quick break.

[00:15:37]And we bring one of the most devastatingly effective tools a musician has at the disposal, one of the loudest things you can put, silence. Off the ramp we go. Off the ramp being a colloquial term that I use.

[00:15:51]Colloquial by that I mean there's no official academic definition for this or at least I'm choosing not to use it for the sake of simplicity. And off the ramp is what I like to call it a particular term of music that makes you listen and feel suspended up in the air at the mercy of inertia waiting to see where you land. Kind of like going off ramp.

[00:16:03]How do you do this? Remove the drums, maybe the bass as well. Or in this case, everything. We bring back this. I think we're going to bridge now. Let me hear.

[00:16:17]Okay, so we go into a solo section now.

[00:16:20]So, after the chorus, we have a brief break and yes, F1 is coming back.

[00:16:25]10:30 beer shop is qualifying. Cool. I'm not going to watch it. So, I usually just hear the respond the the results after. I don't give myself time to watch anything. So, we bring in solos. As I said, familiarity, new material, solos and tuttis being an exception. So, right now we are taking basically what would be a guitar solo or a saxophone solo or something like that and we are attributing it to the vocal things over here. Do you want a live report?

[00:16:53]We'll see. So, maybe on the Discord. Maybe on the Discord. All right, so let's see where this goes.

[00:17:01]And we're getting back.

[00:17:05]There we go. We spin it up and back we go.

[00:17:10]So, basically having a back and forth battle of guitars kind of thing.

[00:17:15]We're very much after solo and now in the outro.

[00:17:18]Nice. One last climax and one last run similar to the intro.

[00:17:27]We break it down and one more run.

[00:17:31]Intensifying, building up, and and we end it with one last we do one last tutti. Those very nice syncopations and there you have it.

[00:17:45]Oh, that was awesome. There you go. That was Knockout from the FNF Indie Cross soundtrack by Odingi music Cuphead themed. That was awesome, man. I really enjoyed it. Once again, everybody, this has been a Bastard's LFA, a layman friendly analysis by a professionally trained musician and composer. And my objective here has been to explain things in a way so that you don't have to be one to understand what's happened here musically. So, if you're watching this on the YouTube video archive thing, thank you for watching. Make sure you follow me on the channel. Subscribe to the channel, whatever term you want to use. Like the video. Share the video.

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[00:20:38]Knockout FNF Indie Cross, that was really good, man. I really enjoyed it.

[00:20:43]Managed to capture all the intensity of it without compromising on the on the game theme. Really good stuff, man. Really good stuff. But yeah, let's move on.

[00:20:55]Let's move on.