Analyzing "Reggae" Rolling Sky OST | Basterd's LFA (Layman-Friendly Analysis)

[00:00:00]Next up, we have Reggae from the Rolling Sky soundtrack. Once again, everybody, this is Sebastian della Fe, a layman-friendly analysis by my professionally trained musician and composer. 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 of that, make sure you're following the channel, subscribe to the channel, or whatever you use. Like the video, share it, comment, leave a 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, subscribe to the Reacts channel. How to request songs if you're not on the live stream. Members getting early access to the content I have explained in this and a bunch of other of the other things later in other videos, so stick around for that.

[00:00:39]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, and I almost pulled it off flawlessly, but please keep that in mind. With that, let's do this. Reggae, let's go.

[00:00:55]>> [music] [music] >> So, we start with a very good old reggae, um, ensemble. We have the drums there giving us that that initial drum fill. Then we start with what? We have several elements. We have the bass there giving us the bass line, right? So, a bass line, um, bass line over here giving us this very lovely, uh, groove, groovy bass line to this, very, very nice, pure vibe, you know? Then we have the guitar giving us that very beautiful syncopation that reggae has, right? Syncopation, uh, I mean, it's not the same kind of syncopation. It's basically on the two and four instead of being in between, uh, but because reggae is so slow-paced, it can technically count as syncopation, right? Syncopation being when you play against your drums, against your beat, or against your metronome. Um in the case of this, yeah, we have the the guitar.

[00:02:03]Usually, you will have like many times reggaeton uh reggae, sorry. Not reggaeton, reggaeton is garbage. But reggae, you would usually have a bum bum bum kind of thing. Uh this one also counts as well. And then, very high up, a little bit here difficult here, but we have this little like uh small church organ like um I like You know what? I'm going to call it like um like black church organ because it's it's the same it's that kind of um it's that kind of thing that you go to like a black Christian parish uh church thing where you know that you're going to like every single Sunday, you're going to have the most fun you could ever possibly have. And they have that um that kind of organ. We're using one of those giving us that initial melody containing what could be our initial motif. Now, when it comes to um to this over here, we are having uh a lot of groove in this case, right? So, groove, this is an older term, right?

[00:03:05]This one was coined in the '60s and '70s. Or relatively speaking, for music, it's one of the newer terms that we have, right? Where it's a phenomenon that happens in genres such as funk, in this case, reggae, where everyone is kind of doing something different. So, if you were to just take any individual stem and listen to it by itself, it would be very difficult to tell what the other ones are doing.

[00:03:29]Um and in in this um in the case of um of these Sorry, sorry. Banana, you just you just distracted me with that. Um you just How dare you? Naughty list for you.

[00:03:41]Um There you go. Banana.

[00:03:44]Um There we go.

[00:03:46]There we go. How dare you? So, uh >> [laughter] >> with that, we bring in uh the groove, right? So, every part wants it played together, it just adds up very nicely as we are hearing over here. Let's see where it goes. What did you do you know what you did. Let's see where it goes.

[00:04:05]>> [music] >> Nice, we add the bass drum. What happened? Banana just trolled me not requesting Despacito, but I saw what you did. Let's see.

[00:04:16]Little drum ooh.

[00:04:26]Okay, so we now bring is so we go from reggae to reggae and maybe like reggae funk jazz fusion. Like we're bringing the rest of um um we're bringing the rest of that, right? So, we are bringing a fusion of this cuz this is usually not how reggae ends up playing out. We are ramping up things by adding a fusion of other genres. And with that we bring what is called a horn section.

[00:04:55]Horn section, this is kind of an unofficial name. It is when you bring in a group of the instruments that I'm going to mention soon. Very common in funk jazz kind of ensembles, right? Usually it's going to be one to two trumpets, one to two trombones, and then one to two saxophones. Usually for these kinds of things there would be like a set standard, but horn sections, especially for these kinds of ensembles, will highly depend on the individual band and what is available to them, right?

[00:05:30]So, we bring in the trumpets over here playing the motif and then in the background we have the the saxophone. We of course bring now so we are keeping the bass and the guitar continuing with the same reggae vibe that we had the same reggae groove, but now we have brought more upbeat drums for the rest of everything, basically bringing a contrast to to the whole thing. Let me hear a bit more.

[00:05:56]>> [music] >> There's a trumpet.

[00:06:01]Trumpet and saxophones.

[00:06:05]So, yeah. Uh guitar, bass, and organ are still doing the same thing they were doing before. And now we are having the rest of the ensemble, the drums and the horn section, doing something else. So, we're having the trumpets and trombone giving us the motif. What instrument's playing the main motif? The trumpets.

[00:06:23]The trumpets are playing the main motif uh because it's the same one that the organ played at the very, very beginning, or at least I think it is. Um and then we are having a saxophone basically improvising on top of everything else, right? So, when it comes to these kinds of genres, uh fusion genres, funk, jazz, uh blues, what kind of stuff, there's going to be a lot of improvisation. Like there's going to be players that they just know that there's going to be some chords and more or less what the melody is doing, and then the rest is basically heat of the moment, um stream like uh what's it called? Stream of consciousness kind of thing, but in music, giving you a basically a one-of-a-kind performance every single time. Some of these, I mean, probably this one was composed to sound like this, and it captures the um the the vibe really, really well of a reggae fusion. Like reggae is one of those genres that it's very rarely done in fusion because of the very like relaxed, low-intensity nature of reggae, right? Like reggae is the kind of like it was the the hippie music, right? It was the preferred one of the preferred uh genres for hippies. Like um you know, like Jamaicans smoking weed kind of thing that they were always um listening to this kind of stuff, very, very nice and relaxed. And we're contrasting it with a very very high energy uh not too high energy, but but relatively speaking very high energy uh fusion over here, and it is working.

[00:07:55]And it is working. So, kudos to the composer for pulling this off cuz making these kinds of combinations is a massive risk.

[00:08:04]And it's being pulled off.

[00:08:06]So, a complete groove, a complete vibe.

[00:08:10]And you know what else is a complete vibe?

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[00:09:24]Become a member today. All right. With that, uh composer Zach um Strei- Streifield, nice. As you heard, it goes >> [music] >> Okay, so we bring in so each repetition each time the melody resets we're adding some sort of change. This case I think I'm hearing one more guitar with basically a funk guitar. So we are now fully embracing the funk fusion aspect of this whole thing. Now funk guitars they rely usually on two main things.

[00:10:07]One muting, two syncopation.

[00:10:11]And number and all of these doing while always playing all the 16th notes, right? So when it comes to these you know we can hear one, two, three, four.

[00:10:21]And a guitar is always going to be playing the 16th note. So four notes per beat.

[00:10:27]So what funk guitars tend to do is that most of the 16th notes are going to be played muted. So if you look at a guitar, right? Let me bring in an image of a guitar real quick.

[00:10:37]If you look at a guitar over here, the way that the guitar works is fairly simple. You have the fretboard over here where you have usually the left hand where you press the press down the notes to the press down on the frets to determine which notes are played and then you have the pickups part where you can strum the the strings. Now if you press down but you don't press all the way on the neck over here on the fretboard you can get a muted note. If you do that for many strings you can get a very nice like chugging sound like that kind of sound. So what funk guitarist will do is that they will keep that that 16th note.

[00:11:22]And then in syncopated manner they are going to play usually like the chords with like maybe some chromatism like >> That kind of thing giving you this very, very unique sound that you can get with funk guitars and I think that's what we got right now in the background. Let me hear a little more.

[00:11:50]Up this time around we we change the the the the the guitar from that to a wah pedal guitar. So a wah pedal is this very, very fun gadget that you can get for usually using guitars, but you can use this for a lot of things, which is as you can see a um a very interesting pedal. It has two positions, down and up. When the pedal is down, the sound is filtered away in a way that it sounds like an ooh. When the pedal goes up, the filter comes in and the filter is removed and wah wah wah. So we are getting that going on right now. We're playing the chord. Wah wah wah.

[00:12:38]Wah wah wah kind of thing over here to add even more to the vibe. That is done via a wah pedal. Let's see where this goes.

[00:12:48]Little [music] change there.

[00:12:51]Drums go back to being reggae.

[00:12:56]And by the way, the the lead the main guitar the one doing the reggae so far has been doing basically an ostinato. Ostinato being when you repeat something over and over and over again with little to no variation. Let me hear a little more.

[00:13:10]>> [music] >> So chill. Very good reggae here.

[00:13:16]Up, slowly bringing the trumpet back in and ah, very nice moment there.

[00:13:24]>> [music] >> Okay, we bring back the trumpets, we bring back the strings over here. It sounds like now we're doing an elongation of the motif. Elongation being another way you can develop your material in which you do a slower version of something you've done before.

[00:13:38]In this case, we're not having the same super high energy that we did before, but we're also not all the way down in the super relaxed energy that we had for the initial reggae. Now we are kind of in the middle. It's sound like we're kind of in the middle over here where we are in the dead center. Like we are we have become we have become the the Democrat and Republican's worst enemies.

[00:14:04]A moderate. There you go. I think we'll complete the intro. Let's see where this goes.

[00:14:09]This is really good.

[00:14:11]There's the saxophone that I >> [music] >> improvised in the back.

[00:14:17]Okay, we switched the trumpets around to do some parallel motion. Parallel motion is a type of is a way to measure counterpoint, right? Counterpoint being the study the art of melodies.

[00:14:27][clears throat] How they are how they develop how they interact with one another. Usually in the context of having two or more melodies playing at the same time.

[00:14:35]Counterpoint can be measured in many ways, one of which is motion. One of the types of motion is parallel motion.

[00:14:41]Parallel motion means that you have multiple melodies doing the same thing at the same time from a different starting point.

[00:14:48]So the same shape, right? So we can have some like parallel octaves, which is the same note.

[00:14:52]>> [music] >> You can have in this case we're we're doing parallel fourths.

[00:14:58]This kind of thing with the trumpets because the way that audio that that sounds resonates with within general everything. We have the whole thing of the overtone series, right? The overtone or harmonic series, every sound that exists has certain overtones to it that are just natural to the sound that we get. And whenever you're you're to hear trumpets or stuff like that. It is very advisable for these instruments to be played with those in mind, right? So, if I have a fundamental note out here, that means that my overtones are going to be octave, fifth, octave, and then uh we can start like it You can start getting but you can get this kind of sound.

[00:15:44]Very, very nice. So, right now we are using >> [music] >> this part over here with the trumpets to create that that kind of resonance while the rest of the overtones are taken by the rest of the ensemble. Let's see where this goes.

[00:16:02]So nice.

[00:16:05]Drums changing even more.

[00:16:11]Okay, we have another synth in the background. I don't I don't know what instrument that is, but it is giving us this new uh we go from an elongation to a reduction. Reduction is the opposite of elongation. You're doing at least in melody you're doing a faster version of something you've done before and we're using a little bit of syncopation. Bum ba da dum bum bum bum da ba dum bum ba da dum bum bum bum. So, we're using that and we're having this synth as the lead one for this. This is so good, dude.

[00:16:44]Ah, so good.

[00:16:45]>> [music] >> And yeah, the groove, man. The groove is so good.

[00:16:50]Now you got the saxophone taking over.

[00:16:53]>> [music] >> Back to the initial reggae.

[00:16:56]There's the wah guitar.

[00:16:58]And we bring the saxophones one last time.

[00:17:04]We resolve the melody with that.

[00:17:07]And with that, there you have it. That was really good.

[00:17:12]That was really good. Tricky, welcome to the area. How you doing?

[00:17:16]The might be probably the best Rolling Sky track or at least my favorite so far.

[00:17:25]This was so well composed.

[00:17:27]Like figuring out fusion for reggae is really difficult.

[00:17:32]And the and this one that was really good.

[00:17:37]That was really really well composed.

[00:17:40]There you have it. That was reggae from the Rolling Sky soundtrack. That was yeah, no Zach incredible. It takes a lot of skill to do something like this and he pulled it off really really It's a big the big risk that was taken but it completely I think I think he pulled it off. I think it was worth it.

[00:17:59]I think it was it's one of the older soundtracks in the game. It doesn't matter. It was really good. There you go. Once again everybody this has been a bastard Zelafe a layman friendly analysis. I'm 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. You want 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're following the channel subscribe to the channel whatever the name you use. Like the video share the video comment turn notifications become a member. Once again everybody don't forget to join the discord server that's where everything gets announced first whether it's a stream is going live the video is going up the channels updates projects giveaways everything gets announced there first. We have the community there we hang out we chat we steal memes from other people servers claim them as our own where I host the vintage story.

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[00:20:13]And how do I remember all of this?

[00:20:15]Practice. I have horrible memory, it's practice. There you go. And yeah, there you have it. Reggae Rolling Sky, that was really fun, dude. That was really good. I really enjoyed it. Good stuff, man. Good stuff, but yeah, let's move on. Let's move on.