Analyzing "Lamentation et Triomphe" Genshin Impact OST | Basterd's LFA (Layman-Friendly Analysis)

追加: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Next up, we have Lamentation et Triumph from the Genshin Impact Fountain of Below soundtrack. Once again, everybody, this is Sebastian Delafe, a layman-friendly analysis. I'm a 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, whatever whatever term you want to use, like the video, share it with your 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 down this video. So, let's stick around for that.

[00:00:42]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.

[00:00:51]With that, let's go ahead and do this.

[00:00:54]Lamentation et Triumph. Let's go.

[00:00:59]Nosh, welcome back. What a way to come back.

[00:01:08]Okay, so we start, of course, with a very, uh, lovely low violins here giving us this very cool pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa uh, phrase over here that contains this melody which contains what I believe will be our initial motif. Motif being the smallest version of your musical idea, the seed, the essence from which everything else comes from. And Nosh.

[00:01:29]God damn it. I SAW WHAT YOU DID. I saw what you did. I have so many answers for it. We had a We had already started the video, so anyway, so we're having that.

[00:01:38]Then we have what is called a fermata.

[00:01:41]We hold the last note there with a fermata. Fermata basically means that you're holding down some, uh, note for an extended or arbitrary period of time.

[00:01:50]To add, um, some, um, what's it called? Some tension or to just hold the notes, right? Um, this is usually there's no metric, like no specific metric for this. It's usually up to the conductor or the composer. Then we have a a harp doing a glissando. Uh, glissando is basically what you heard from the the harp where we're basically just going really fast up and down the notes of the harp. And we're having that. Let's see where this goes.

[00:02:16]And of course, we're building up.

[00:02:18]>> [music] >> Okay, so we have this moment. We bring in the trumpets and now we scale back down. We bring in a Spanish guitar that is now going to be playing the chords and we bring in a solo violin now giving us our initial solo. It's playing, uh, basically not quite a solo, but it's a solo violin giving us now its own take on the melody. So, fermata the the one term where they decide to female gender for some reason.

[00:02:52]I don't I don't know about that, but yes, let's see where this goes.

[00:02:57]The video opens with this.

[00:02:59]There's the motif from the Yep. Not very unstable. Okay, so yeah, we have then the, uh, flutes coming in with violins giving us a little bit of a some trills in that, right? A trill being when you go back and forth between two notes very, very fast as you heard the flutes going, uh, over there. We're doing that and then we're bringing this back and I think that we switch the violin for a trumpet.

[00:03:24]Yep.

[00:03:27]All right, building back up.

[00:03:31]And we are like we tease We tease the escalation, then we bring it back down.

[00:03:36]Then we're bringing it back up, which usually would be a big risk. Like having these kinds of very abrupt changes in the intensity of your ensemble is a big risk. It's a very, very big risk. So, let's see where this goes.

[00:03:51]>> [music] >> Trum trum trum there and All right, we're slowly bringing up.

[00:03:58]So, we're slowly adding more and more of the instruments, bringing back the original motif with this very three-based thing. Pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa We're having this kind of thing. We're slowly bringing in the the trumpets, the rest of the violins, the violas, the cellos. We have an orchestra basically for this, right? So, an orchestra, let me just bring the image that we always use for this one.

[00:04:20]Uh, here it is. So, right now we are, of course, going with it. Come on. Finish loading the image.

[00:04:25]Finish loading the image, please.

[00:04:28]Oh my god, it's not loading the image.

[00:04:30]There you go. All right, so, uh, Google being silly. So, we're having this. We're having the violins and of course, we are bringing some, I think, um, castanets. The very Spanish, very European, um, percussions for this. Let's see where this goes.

[00:04:48]>> [music] >> Glissandos from the flutes there.

[00:04:56]Okay, so yeah, we are very like This is so much that is happening at once. So, we're basically pure escalation. We are bringing things up, bringing things down, and we are engaging very heavily in the art of orchestration or instrumentation.

[00:05:13]So, orchestration, instrumentation is the art of picking the right instruments for the right sounds, the right texture, and sometimes the right psychological response. And in this case, we are doing one of the few things that is really only possible in orchestras, which is we are basically chopping the melody into several parts and then distributing each part to different instruments. So, we are basically doing the melody starts with the violin, the first couple of notes of the violin, the next ones are the trumpets, the next one is the flute. And we are just building one single melody jumping throughout this the orchestra as we are increasing the tension even more each time. This is Oh my god, this is a lot, man. This is a lot going on, but it's not overwhelming.

[00:06:04]It somehow is not It's a lot, but it somehow is not overwhelming. Very difficult balance to catch there. Let's see where this goes.

[00:06:11]>> [music] >> There we go, switching over.

[00:06:17]Little syncopation there. Bringing back the violin with the guitar.

[00:06:24]Now it's just the guitar. We have a bell in the background.

[00:06:27]Why and welcome to layman. How you doing?

[00:06:31]All right.

[00:06:32]Violins there. Bringing back a little bit of the of the, uh, Okay, so the violins there giving us a little bit of extra stuff. Uh, the traveler light motif. Thank you. So, yeah, we're we're getting now a new melody over here while we're keeping the guitar still doing that motif.

[00:06:48]Uh, so many juicy for you. There you go.

[00:06:50]So, yeah, we are having this and we are having the traveler light motif. A light motif being a motif or a melody or a theme, so to speak, that is used by the composer or the rights holder in a subsequent work in order to reference back to the original one. In this case, we have the traveler light motif. We are bringing back the one of the earliest motifs from Genshin Impact and we are using it in this work to reference back to it. Every light motif is a motif. Not every motif is a light motif. A motif becomes a light motif when it is used in a subsequent work by the composer or the rights holder in order to reference back to the original. If you are not the rights holder or the original composer, what you are doing is a quote instead.

[00:07:36]You are quoting somebody else's work.

[00:07:39]You are referencing somebody else's work in that way.

[00:07:44]Usually quotes are for the sake of paying tribute or homage to whoever you're making this. So, yes. Uh, let me just call Flux or something like some remember it. Oh, yeah, the melody plays almost all open world battle themes.

[00:07:56]Nice. That is really cool. That is really cool. Being able to sneak it in like that, that's really cool. Let's see where this goes.

[00:08:05]Violins coming in and There we go, trumpets taking over with the melodies.

[00:08:14]Yeah, I remember [music] this one. Yep.

[00:08:17]Okay, so we have the trumpets and the rest of the brass. We have the trombones, French horns playing the chords and the tubas while the trumpets give us this very brilliant, bright sounding melody.

[00:08:29]Glissando from [music] the flute.

[00:08:32]Flute. Violins now taking this part of the melody.

[00:08:36]>> [music] >> Giving us this very beautiful extending.

[00:08:40]And we are now Again, we now again do the, uh, throwing the melody around throughout multiple instruments. We bring back up the, um, the trumpets over there. Each region has a variation of it.

[00:08:51]Some more obvious than others. Fontaine, I recall correctly, was, uh, the first region to make a very subtle notes to it. Nice.

[00:08:58]Nice. The brass, man, is so aggressive.

[00:09:01]So good.

[00:09:03]Building up for the crescendo.

[00:09:08]Oh my god, like these massive build-ups that result in us lowering the scale.

[00:09:13]It's such a difficult thing to pull off because usually when you build the expectation of that big bang, going small is a risk. But, oh my god. What is my unreasonable fear? Uh, spontaneous human combustion. So, uh, I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm unreasonably afraid of that. So, um, we're having this and this is one of the examples of one good way of going up in the, um, Like you're you're building up for this big bombastic moment and instead of hitting that high bombastic note, you go slow. You go You go low and slow and soft. Like you were not expecting that.

[00:09:53]Not that You were not expecting that I would have an answer or that I would have an answer so quickly or that that was the answer.

[00:09:59]Like which part did you not expect? Cuz yeah, spontaneous human explosion spontaneous human combustion is one of the few things that I've always been just terrified of. So, yeah. [snorts] Yeah.

[00:10:13]That That was AN ANSWER? YEAH, NO, it's one of those things that it can technically happen to anyone at any time.

[00:10:20]Technically. And yeah.

[00:10:24]Yeah, SO WHEN BEHAVE. SO, >> [laughter] >> ANYWAY, SO WE'RE HAVING THIS MASSIVE build up and we bring it back down to now starting again with the pianos. So, yes, yeah, when don't don't talk like that to my sweetest salt, okay?

[00:10:41]>> [laughter] >> So, yeah, we're now bringing back to the piano to build up from there. And speaking of building up, I have built up the Patreon. [laughter] patreon.com/jamesrbastard.

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[00:12:06]So, we're bringing this and uh, show us how to smoke. I have been chosen. Yes.

[00:12:12]What is spontaneous human Not Not explosion, combustion. Spontaneous human combustion literally means that out of nowhere, you are on fire.

[00:12:23]It's uh, one of the most horrifying ways of dying and it has happened to a There's There's cases. Extremely rare.

[00:12:30]It's like one in several billion the possibility, but basically it means you are fine one moment and then you're on fire. No cause, no reason. Like it's usually like some gases in inside of you and then that's it. You're on fire and that's it.

[00:12:46]And that's it.

[00:12:48]It's It's like you have like you have a higher chance of winning the lottery same multiple times over than spontaneously combusting.

[00:12:57]So, yeah.

[00:13:00]Yeah, no, you can also straight up teleport, just need luck. No, like teleport like that is one of the theoreticals. Spontaneous human combustion is an actual thing with actual precedent.

[00:13:12]Yeah, most spontaneous combustion cases are old people on the verge of dying.

[00:13:16]Notice how you said most, but not all.

[00:13:19]So, yeah, it's one of those It's one of those. That's scary. Yeah, like the chance as I said, you have a higher chance of winning the lottery multiple times, getting bitten by a shark, and being hit by a lightning several times on the same day than you are to get to to go with spontaneous with human combustion with spontaneous combustion. But yeah, used to be on TV all the time. Yeah, I remember that. Anyway, let's see um Thank you, Nosh, my my sweetest salt with the best advice. There you go. You see, that's why she's my sweetest salt.

[00:13:52]She's got the best advice.

[00:13:55]Let's see where this goes.

[00:13:58]James, since you're an elder, fix that.

[00:14:00]I'm an elder, not a coder. I don't have a say in it. I just I just live here, okay? All right, so we're bringing the piano.

[00:14:10]Let's see.

[00:14:12]Yes, Amaya, yes.

[00:14:13]Okay, so we bring this back down.

[00:14:16]We're bringing the piano, the guitar. We have the the castanets. Slowly building up again.

[00:14:23]Percussion coming back. Oh, we have like actual drums now.

[00:14:27]See if I can just Correct, Nosh, correct. All right, bringing the guitar.

[00:14:33]Violins [music] with trumpets. Violin comes in with the trumpet giving us a doubling. As Again, doubling is when you have multiple instruments doing the same thing at the same time. One of the nonsense things in music when Yes, you can have multiple layers like you can have five instruments doing doublings. It's not a quintupling, it is doublings because each instrument is doubling individually what they are doing. And uh >> [laughter] >> Yeah, it's okay, Nosh. When just doesn't know how to speak to girls.

[00:15:04]>> [laughter] >> Anyway, let's see um let's see where this goes.

[00:15:11]There you go, there's [music] the motif back there.

[00:15:14]Violin bringing it back.

[00:15:16]Nice syncopation there, very nice.

[00:15:19]And Thank you, Nosh.

[00:15:27]Okay, so now we have the piano doing these very beautiful arpeggios up and down the scale while we are now doing a new version of the original motif that we were having, but this time it is syncopated. So, arpeggios and syncopation. An arpeggio is when you play a chord one note at a time as you are hearing the piano doing very very going very fast back and forth. Arpeggios can be slower than that. And of course, then we have syncopation. Syncopation is when you play against your drums, against your beat, or against your metronome.

[00:16:01]In this case, we are getting these instruments playing against the metronome. The metronome is going with the piano, but we are having the rest of the instruments doing this variation of the motif against the metronome. So, yeah, the metronome being the click that that conducts everything. So, everything that we do in music has a click of some sort. Usually a 4/4 of one kind of of some way or another. And basically everything that plays against it is syncopation. So, yeah, let's see where this goes.

[00:16:37]>> [music] >> Slowly building the orchestra back up, bringing it back down with the drums.

[00:16:43]There it is. Trumpets [music] and trombones double with that for Martha.

[00:16:47]Bring it back.

[00:16:49]Nice. Syncopations there to bring this up. Back to the violin and piano.

[00:16:57]Oh my god.

[00:17:00]So, yeah, we have the piano, the violin, and the guitar coming back. The piano is being doubled by the guitar when it comes to the chords. We are having the piano partially doubling the violin. It sounds very solo-esque, but those are still variations of the motif. Let's see where this goes.

[00:17:16]Like Christmas, nice.

[00:17:18]There's the trumpet taking over the melody.

[00:17:21]Building it further.

[00:17:24]Oh, we bring in full drums.

[00:17:26]Oh my god.

[00:17:29]>> [music] >> And again, like man, this this like tact like this tact team freaking melodies are so difficult to make and so difficult to pull off because you have to make sure I mean, especially if it's recorded live, right?

[00:17:45]Because if you record it digitally, then you can just get away with it. But getting them like pull off this kind of this kind of thing is so difficult because yeah, the the ending result is a single line of melody, right? But when you have like, oh yeah, this is a an 18-note melody. You are notes number 15 and 16.

[00:18:05]And if you get it a third of a second wrong, the whole thing is ruined.

[00:18:12]That is just the level of musician that you have to be to play in an orchestra.

[00:18:19]I wish more story-driven games had this orchestration.

[00:18:24]>> [sighs] >> Those story-driven games don't have the revenue that Genshin does now, DO THEY?

[00:18:29]DON'T FORGET, I'm doing my research for a video essay for gachas and I did some research into Genshin Impact. Their first sign of decline was 2024 when they failed to make a billion dollars in revenue from Genshin alone. They only made $700 million in one year. And that was, oh, they're falling off.

[00:18:54]Yeah.

[00:18:56]Yeah.

[00:18:58]Yeah, [snorts] that's what we're dealing here. That's what we're dealing with over here. So, yeah, when your first sign of decline is that you only made $700 million instead of $1 billion in a year, yeah, you have money to throw around cuz All right.

[00:19:15]One of the things that Genshin does that I noticed is that they employ the Budapest Symphony Orchestra a lot as well as other orchestras in China and in Asia, which are very cheap. A session for 45 minutes from the Budapest Film Orchestra. How much is it?

[00:19:30]Cuz it's been a while since I've checked. Film Orchestra.

[00:19:34]The Budapest Film Orchestra over here.

[00:19:36]Let's see if they have their prices listed.

[00:19:39]Samuel Studios, references, booking information, maybe?

[00:19:44]Um Cuz I remember their their So, they have some really really good Um, over here.

[00:19:50][clears throat] Do they have How about prices?

[00:19:53]Uh, no, these are the sessions that you can get. Uh, did they remove the pricing? Cuz I remember, um, looking into them cuz I want I was curious about their pricing and it was something like $5,000 for a 1-hour session.

[00:20:12]Uh, for a not for a, uh, 10-minute recording, which I know it was half an hour recording. Uh, there were other sessions that they had different, um, associated services, maybe? No.

[00:20:24]Um, ensembles, we have Why us? Studios booking information, maybe? Uh, maybe in booking information? No, this is the same thing. Uh, associated services, references, comment Yeah, okay, no. So, it looks like there's no, um, there's not of them like they did the Elden Ring soundtrack. Like, look at these, man. So, yeah, no, it was something like the London Symphony like the London Orchestra was like a third of the price. Like, it was like a third of the price to the London Orchestra or something like that. Uh, not like Symphony Orchestra was done by I want to say Alice So, but I don't think it was them. Yeah, no, like London is insanely expensive. You can get the same quality with Budapest. And it's like Yeah.

[00:21:04]How much is the London Phil- Philharmonic?

[00:21:07]Hundreds of thousands.

[00:21:09]And with Genshin money, you can afford it.

[00:21:12]With Genshin money, you can absolutely afford it. Uh, which is which is which is so much about Genshin.

[00:21:18]Like, yeah, like say what you will about the state of the game, they have the money. They already made the money.

[00:21:22]They already have enough money to throw around for 20 years. Whatever doing whatever they want.

[00:21:29]And get away with it.

[00:21:31]So, yeah, it's, uh, it's it's insane.

[00:21:34]And I remember like when I checked the Budapest Symphony Orchestra, uh, the Budapest Film Orchestra, it was, um, it was back in like 2022. No, like 2020.

[00:21:46]It was 2020 cuz it was during the pandemic. And it was I remember it was anywhere between five and seven thousand dollars. I think $5,000 if you wanted a 10-minute, uh, recording, 7,000 for the half-hour limited, um, with limited rehearsals, right?

[00:22:04]That is a full orchestra. Usually to book a full orchestra, it's tens of thousands of dollars. Because of it's you have to book the the musicians, you have to book the, uh, sound engineers, you have to get all the project sessions files done, they have to do the rehearsals. It's an extremely expensive, um, it's an extremely expensive thing. And, yeah.

[00:22:27]Yeah, no, and that's that's just Genshin making a billion dollars a year kind of thing. So, yeah, no, like gacha is in a completely different universe, man. So, yeah, like Oh my god.

[00:22:38]I just thought about it. Imagine if Ubisoft was bought by miHoYo instead of Tencent.

[00:22:45]>> [snorts] >> I'll give you that NIGHTMARE FUEL. WITH THAT, LET'S see how this ends.

[00:22:51]See.

[00:22:52]Uh, classical [music] repeat, yeah, there is.

[00:22:54]All right. Bringing back this new drum beat, building things back up, and those nice crescendos with an elongation of the melody. We bring an elongation of the melody over here. Elongation being another way that you can develop your material in which you do a slower version of something you've done Excuse me, you've done before. So, in this case, you can hear we are doing a melody we've done before, but right now we're doing it way slower for the sake of drama.

[00:23:22]Let's see how this ends.

[00:23:26]One last run of the original motif, building up, instead of hitting that high note, and >> [music] >> there you go. And this is how you end an orchestral piece. I haven't answered this question, which one?

[00:23:47]Um, would you rather Hang on, hang on, hang on. Would you rather make music for Genshin or for Vintage Story? Genshin.

[00:23:55]I would love to make music for Vintage Story, don't get me wrong. But with Genshin, your budget is basically unlimited.

[00:24:02]I could ask for the most rare instruments and they would just give them to you.

[00:24:08]For Genshin. Like, getting a gig at Genshin as a music as a composer is probably one of the like one of the most incredible dreams that you can have as a musician.

[00:24:18]So, yeah. So, yeah, there you go. We have this massive ending and this is how you end an orchestral piece.

[00:24:26]Especially if you're going for big scale orchestra. You would have a bum ba da ba da bum ba da bum ba da bum ba bum.

[00:24:33]Why? Because every time you do a big orchestral piece, you have to feel the weight of the machine that is playing the piece.

[00:24:43]So, what happens when you hit the brakes for the ending?

[00:24:46]There is inertia. And you need to slow that down. You need to let that machine slow down. We let that happen. We have one last run from the cellos over there and the double basses. And there you have it. Lamentatio et triumphus from the Genshin Impact Fountain of Below soundtrack. That was awesome, dude. Once again, everybody, this has been a Bastard Elefay, 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 YouTube video archive, thank Thank you for watching. Make sure you're following the channel. Subscribe to the channel. Whatever you can use. Like the video, share it, leave a comment, turn on notifications, become a member. Once again, everybody, don't forget to join the Discord server. That's where everything is announced first, whether it's the stream the streams going live, the videos going up, the channel's updates, projects, giveaways, everything is announced there first. Of course, we have the community there. We hang out, we chat, we steal memes from other people from other people's servers, claim them as our own, and where I host the Vintage Story VINTAGE STORY community server. It used to be a Minecraft mod.

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