How I Make the Music for History Dose

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:05]Do you want to know how I make music like this for the History Dose episodes?

[00:00:24]Stick around to the end to see the final product. In case you weren't aware, I'm Joe, the artist and editor for the YouTube channel History Dose. If you've already seen the how the artist made video or any of my painting tutorials or live stream paintings, you know a lot of effort goes into manually creating the art for each of these episodes. But what you might not know is that over the past few years or so, I began manually creating all the music for the episodes with my MIDI keyboard and a bunch of virtual instrument libraries. licensed music just wasn't really cutting it for us with only a few authentic sounding tracks for any given culture that we were covering. So, I realized we need to start creating our own original scores, unless we want to keep recycling the same old stock themes over and over and over. So, today I'm going to walk you through what goes into creating a musical track for History. The musical theme for today is The Mongols Are Your Gates. So, I'm beginning this composition with a dark undertone of orchestral strings to give us sort of a brooding vibe. My MIDI keyboard allows me to play with the sounds of any instrument I have in my library. I can use the mod wheel to control the dynamics of the strings, helping to give them a natural sounding rise and fall.

[00:01:39]Now, of course, the 12th century Mongolians didn't have access to string concerts, but part of my musical philosophy here is to balance familiar cues of cinematic tone and drama with historically authentic instrumentation.

[00:01:54]There are a few Mongolian instruments that I know will fit perfectly in this piece. Let's start first with the shimonic drum. It's a drum that has a nice bassy thud to it. In one of my libraries, I have a sound that kind of emulates that sort of tribal stretched animal high drum. I'll have this sound provide us a sort of heartthumping beat over our dark string composition, which will help to establish a feeling of suspense or tension. The next instrument I want to add some accents of is the sewer. This is a Mongolian inblown flute. It has a very light and kind of raspy quality to it. Unfortunately, there is no sewer instrument, but another emblem flute that I have is the Turkish nay, an instrument that has a similar structure and uses the same exact method of playing as the sewer.

[00:02:42]Now, I'm just applying a light accent here that kind of coincides with the fall of one of our shimic drum beats.

[00:02:55]Also, I'm going to copy and paste this sewer audio clip and stretch and pitch it down. I'll throw that at the beginning of our composition to give us this kind of dark ambient drone before the strings emerge.

[00:03:15]This is an example of some sound design I do while composing tracks, experimenting, stretching sounds, playing with EQ, etc. This helps to give a sort of atmosphere to my pieces. Now it's time for that Mongolian classic, the throat singing. I have a few libraries with a bunch of throat singing samples. I'm going to go with an overtone, higher pitch throat singing sample that will come on after our flute accent rise in volume and lead us into our crescendo.

[00:03:54]That crescendo is from a library that contains a lot of organic sounding drones and I think it makes a powerful punch in our track. At the moment of this crescendo, I want to introduce the moringur or horse head fiddle.

[00:04:09]It's a traditional two-stringed bode instrument from Mongolia. We'll apply a high-pitch sample to contrast with the lower tone of the background drone.

[00:04:32]layered on top. I want to apply some more throat singing phrases just to drive home that Mongol horde at the gates feeling.

[00:04:58]So, back to my point about balancing some more orchestral and cinematic elements in my compositions. I'm going to add a rhythmic run of strings to sort of resemble a lot of the horse galloping rhythms you get in Mongolian music.

[00:05:27]And we need this track to really push the epic button. So, I'm going to add in some Tao ensemble drums. The Tao is a very powerful Japanese drum that's widely used across media to nail those epic moments. For instance, the composer of Robert Edgars the Northmen decided that in addition to all of their traditional instruments, they needed to add some powerful drums to drive home that epic battle feel. So, they opted to insert Tao drums for a more thunderous score.

[00:06:19]All right, so now we're pretty much finished with this track. I've skipped over some of the boring stuff like me playing around with EQ, reverb, delay, etc. of certain tracks to get them sounding just right for the composition.

[00:06:31]In a second, I'll go ahead and play through the track in its entirety. But first, as you've seen, there's a lot of attention that goes into manually creating the music for History Dos. If you want to help Chris and I stay afloat as human creators in a growing sea of AI content, consider supporting us over at Patreon for as little as $1. It means a lot to us. All right, so here's the finished piece.

[00:07:39]with you.

[00:07:42]Heat. Heat.