Analyzing "On The Run" by Shirobon (JSAB/Geometry Dash) | Basterd's LFA (Layman-Friendly Analysis)

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Next up, we have On the Run by Shirobon.

[00:00:04]This is in both Just Shapes and Beats and Geometry Dash is my understanding.

[00:00:08]Once again, everybody, this is Sebastian Zelafe, a layman-friendly analysis of a professionally trained musician composer. And my objective here 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 a lot, make sure you're following the channel, subscribe to the channel, whatever you want to do, use 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 if you're not on the live stream. Members getting early access to the content. I have a spiel for this and 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.

[00:00:46]Otherwise, please be patient with me. I am acoustic and guitarded, so please keep that in mind. With that, let's go ahead and do this. On the Run, let's go.

[00:01:01]Okay. So, this is awesome. We start with two components. One, we have a bass down below giving us a bassline. And then, we have this very cool chiptune synth giving us an arpeggiated melody that contains our initial motif. Motif being the smallest version of your musical idea, the seed, the essence from which everything else comes from. And an arpeggiation is a Basically, you're just doing a lot of arpeggio, right? Arpeggio means that you play a chord one note at a time. For example, here's C major, here's arpeggiated.

[00:01:34]So, we're doing like this kind of this kind of like inter um interlocking like mixed up uh kind of uh arpeggio. And then, an extra element to this is that we are having a little bit of echo to this.

[00:01:50]We're echoing this. However, in electronic and digital music, you can't just capture echo. That's not something that naturally occurs in a synthesizer.

[00:02:00]So, because of that, you have to emulate it. We have two ways of doing it. One of them is reverb, the other one is delay.

[00:02:05]Reverb is for reverberations. Imagine you are in an empty auditorium. I I don't even have to make you imagine it.

[00:02:13]Imagine you're in an empty auditorium, an empty room kind of thing. For example, this piano over here.

[00:02:18]>> [music] >> We have this sound over here, but if I then turn on the um I turn on the reverb, let me add a bit more uh distance to this.

[00:02:31]>> [music] >> You can kind of hear the reverb if I turned it all the way all the way up.

[00:02:40]You can really hear those reverberations happen where the original does not having. So, we are emulating the um the echo by that. Then, we have delay. Delay is what we know as echo, right? Like imagine being at the top of the of the Grand Canyon, something like that. Echo, echo, echo. Echo, that kind of stuff. That is delay. Now, the cool thing about reverb and delay is that because these are emulated, that means they can be programmed. And if they can be programmed, they can be set to the beat as is happening right now. So, we are getting that happening right now.

[00:03:18]Let's see where this goes. It's a cool um a thing. Yeah, it is.

[00:03:24]All right, there we go. Second bass popping in. Let's see.

[00:03:34]Okay. So, we bring in now uh a second synth. So, we're having now the bass occupy most of the spectrum. It's kind of drowning out the the the the sound that we had before. We bring in the drums. And now, we are bringing in a second synth that is now highlighting the higher notes that we had doing a doubling. Doubling is when you have more than one instrument or more than one layer doing the same thing at the same time. And it is now helping us outline the upper notes of the melody of the motif itself. Let's see where this goes.

[00:04:10]Wait.

[00:04:12]Wait.

[00:04:18]Nice. A little bit of effects there. All right, there we go. We bring the full drums now.

[00:04:24]Build-up synth. We are building up for a drop of some type.

[00:04:28]With effects. And Okay. So, we have a brief moment there off the ramp we go. We have some rhythmic displacement. And we bring in the first drop. So, rhythmic displacement.

[00:04:47]Uh rhythmic displacement.

[00:04:50]Rhythmic displacement, as the name suggests, is where you displace something in your rhythm so that you're pushing something down so that it sounds later, rushing something up so it sounds earlier, or you're using silence in order to achieve either of these two effects. In this case, we are doing what is I think in electronic music called a hook.

[00:05:07]Hook. Uh hook. Oh, damn it. I can't Hang on. There we go. Just snapping all my fingers. A hook, uh which is basically we are taking Let me take it a step back. When you are making music, you're doing one of two things. You are building tension or you're resolving that tension. That point in between, we call the cadence.

[00:05:26]Now, when you use rhythmic displacement for this purpose, what you are doing is that you are taking that moment of resolution. By the way, electronic music building and dropping the beat is the same dynamic. So, you're taking the moment of the resolution or the drop, and you're pushing it back. In this case, we used one more run of the motif.

[00:05:45]You can use silence, you can use other textures. Either way, what that does is that that gives you extra multi extra phantom tension that then makes your drop or your resolution that much more pronounced. So, we're having that happen.

[00:06:00]Right now, we bring in the drums.

[00:06:02]Stronger bass this time around. And now, we are doing the motif once again without the delay. And because we don't have the delay echoing as quickly as it was before, now we are hearing I just realized that first time around that we heard it, it wasn't just the second synth, but it was also that it didn't have the delay anymore. So, now we have the sound without the delay. And now, we are hearing the original version of the motif. Let's see where this goes.

[00:06:32]I don't think I have it all in now.

[00:06:34]I don't think I Nice.

[00:06:42]Okay. So, we have a very aggressive bass going on as well. Uh cuz usually the bass usually hits along with the bass drum. But in this case, the bass is hitting along with everything the drums are doing.

[00:06:54]Oh, this is so cool. Let's see where it goes.

[00:07:01]Synth now building up. And >> [music] >> Okay. So, we now So, we now focus on the bass.

[00:07:16]>> [laughter] >> Sorry, this is funny. So, we now focus bring the focus over to the bass.

[00:07:21]And we are now doing a doubling to the bass with the jumping sound from Super Mario from the original Super Mario Brothers or a similar sound to it.

[00:07:33]And we change the pitch of that to meet the the pitch of the bass. So, we're basically having one note down here, and then one note up here.

[00:07:45]And they're both playing the same note.

[00:07:47]Um and then, we are just chopping the sounds so that they don't play in full. We bring in a new rhythm to match what the original motif was doing. And then, we're taking it from there, man. This is so fun. Let's see where it goes.

[00:08:07]Nice. [music] Whoop, extra whoop whoop there.

[00:08:12]And now, with the spaces that we had in between with this like jumping part, like Mario jumping part, we bring in the motif.

[00:08:25]And we engage in a call and response. We turn this into a call and response. Call and response being a musical conversation where you have one part doing something, the call, in this case, the jumping. And then, you have something else doing something else in response, the motif. So, we have an iteration of the part of the We have the jumping motif coming in or the jumping part uh the jumping idea coming in, the rhythm of the jumping. Then, we have as a response a part of the motif. The jumping stops. Then, the motif stops.

[00:08:56]The jumping starts. Jumping stops. Motif starts.

[00:09:00]This is really cool, man. Oh my god, let's see where it goes.

[00:09:04]>> [music] >> The jumps are big, but it's a neat progression. Yeah, you can hear it here.

[00:09:10]Build up. And Okay. So, we bring in this new thi- this new part over here, new variation of our motif, which I think I mean, it's simple uh transitionary material. We bring in a similar rhythm to what we've been doing. Now playing the chords. Um I think that we're just playing the chords instead of um of arpeggiating them. We bring in the go uh kind of thing. How do you get game points? You just by watching the stream.

[00:09:43]Uh just by watching the stream. Every 5 minutes, you get 5 points. So, we are now bringing in the the the synths here just playing the chords. I think it might be the same chords just one after the other uh to get this effect of a pom bum, bum that we're getting over here, we are having that very, very fun syncopated go sample going on. And yeah. So, syncopation syncopation is basically playing against your drums, against your beat, or against your metronome. And right now you can hear it. The goes are going when the drums aren't. Really cool stuff. Let's see where this goes.

[00:10:21]Oi.

[00:10:23]Why is it not clicking?

[00:10:25]There we go.

[00:10:28]Nice.

[00:10:30]>> [music] >> Nice. Oh, oh.

[00:10:35]And we are getting an arpeggiation there in the background when the goes are happening. So, it's still a call and response, but instead of having the um the Super Mario jump thing, we are having the go the the chords doing the thing.

[00:10:57]Oh, this is awesome. Let's see.

[00:11:04]Nice.

[00:11:07]That was smooth.

[00:11:09]Back to the original motif. [music] Dan and Slayer, requests are not open yet, man. Requests are not open.

[00:11:15]Oh, dear me.

[00:11:21]Ah, the original motif. There you go.

[00:11:24]So, now we bring both ideas together.

[00:11:28]We now bring both ideas together. So, first we did one first, one second, now both of them at once. Building up.

[00:11:35]Really cool.

[00:11:37]Ah, this is so much fun. Like you can tell that these were composed together and then we had them one after the other so that they could fit that way really, really nicely. Oh my god.

[00:11:51]Excuse me. So, yeah, we're having um we're basically building up from everything we've done. And um yeah.

[00:12:01]We're taking it from there. And speaking of building up, I've been building up the Patreon. patreon.com/jamesrbastard.

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[00:13:28]We have both parts going that now, the motif and the transitionary material.

[00:13:33]Let's see where this goes.

[00:13:35]>> [music] >> Building up again. And Ah, we switch over from straight eighth notes to tripleted eighth notes. This has to be one of the most straightforward examples on how to go from straight eighth notes to tripleted eighth notes. Straight eighth notes, one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four. Tripleted eighth notes, one ta ta ta two ta ta three ta ta four ta ta one ta ta two ta ta three ta ta four ta ta. It feels so much so so much smoother. The rest of the material is continuing the same exact way, but just by swapping the drums and the bass like this.

[00:14:23]So [clears throat] good. It goes to show how important your rhythm section really is. If you want to listen to a song that does it to a more egregious degree, listen to the intro of The Mirror by Dream Theater.

[00:14:35]I get to mention it. Mirror by Dream Theater, you have the guitar starting with an ostinato. Ostinato basically means that you're repeating the same thing over and over and over and over and over again with little to no variation. And the Dream The Mirror by Dream Theater, their guitar is doing the same thing. John John John John John John John John John. One minute straight of just that. Then you have the drums, the synths, the bass, they just switch around it, they move around it to the point that it's genuinely difficult to tell that the guitar is still doing the same thing. And right now, to a different degree, we have done something like this, completely shifted things around and changing how the track feels at all.

[00:15:19]Let's see where this goes.

[00:15:21]>> [music] >> Nice. There we go. Now we bring back the [music] the motif.

[00:15:31]All right, so good.

[00:15:37]Nice. Speeding up. And off the ramp we go.

[00:15:42]Arpeggios in the background with delay.

[00:15:47]Little bit of the motif there.

[00:15:50]Little bits of the motif here and there.

[00:15:53]And back to build up.

[00:15:56]Nice.

[00:15:58]Building up. We have a vocal sample there.

[00:16:01]Kind of doubling.

[00:16:05]Lyrics. Nice. Building up.

[00:16:09]Nice. Nice. Nice. What are we [music] doing? What are we doing?

[00:16:12]Building up.

[00:16:13]And we bring back the call and response. And this time Oh, boy. We bring We drop the beat. We bring the call and response. We bring the go, go, go again. But this time with the second material that we have, the two chords going back and forth.

[00:16:38]Oh, this is so good. Let's see where this goes.

[00:16:42]>> [music] >> A bit of the motif when the goes are going.

[00:16:47]>> [music] >> Yeah, motif there is sneaking with the goes.

[00:16:53]Nice.

[00:16:54]Building up again.

[00:16:56]All right.

[00:16:57]Little bit of syncopation there from the drums.

[00:17:00]>> [music] >> All right, syncopated chords this time around. We're bringing a similar uh [music] [laughter] [music] back the motif.

[00:18:05]Slowly allowing more of the motif jump in.

[00:18:11]We bring one more run of it.

[00:18:16]Okay, there we go. One last vocal sample, one last go at it. We end it with a half cadence, and there you have it. So, half cadence, right? When you're making music as I said, build up resolution or tension resolution cadence, right? A half cadence a half cadence is when you build that tension and you intentionally do not resolve the um the tension so that you can create extra momentum so that you can go into the next section, the next song, or you can loop back to the start. So, right now we do we do something like that. And oh my god, that was so much fun. There you have it. On the Run by Shirobon featured in both Just Shapes and Beats and Geometry Dash, is my understanding.

[00:19:06]That was so much fun, dude. Once again, everybody, this has been a Bastard's LFA, a layman-friendly analysis. I'm a professionally trained musician and composer, and my objective here has been to explain things 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 to follow me in the channel, subscribe to the channel, whatever you're doing these days. Like the video, share it with a comment, turn on notifications, become a member. Once again, everybody, don't forget to join the Discord server.

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[00:21:55]On the run, Shido Bon, Geometry Dash, and Just Shapes & Beats, man. That was awesome, dude. Really cool stuff, man.

[00:22:02]Really cool stuff. But uh yeah, let's move on. Let's move on.