Analyzing "YOUNITHM" CHUNITHM OST | Basterd's LFA (Layman-Friendly Analysis)

[00:00:00]Next up we have Unitham by Canon Okuni from the uh Chunithm soundtrack featured in Chunithm is my understanding. Once again everybody this is a bastard ZFA a layman friendly analysis. I'm a professionally trained musician composer and my objective here is to explain things in a way so that you don't have to be want 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 news like the video share comment turn 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 a much beautiful listen and a bunch of other things later on this video. Stick around for that. Disclaimers showing on your screen right now. So go ahead and pause the video to read them in full.

[00:00:43]Otherwise, please be patient with me. I am acoustic and guitared, so please keep that in mind. Also, this is um OST, right? Like this is original soundtrack, right? With that, let's do this unithm.

[00:00:52]Let's go.

[00:01:02]Okay, this is tuna moist. Okay, so we start with this beautiful, beautiful uh piano. Let me just uh fix my notes over here. Uh we have this beautiful piano and we're doing two layers of the piano because you know we have two hands and the piano you can play with two hands.

[00:01:16]One hand is playing the chords in block chords and the other one is giving us some initial arpeggios. An arpeggio is when you play a chord one note at a time as you're hearing it in the higher melody over there. Uh that melody over there, the way that it's being done is giving us what sounds to be our initial motif. Motif being the smallest version of a musical idea, the seed, the essence from which everything else comes from.

[00:01:38]So we are having this this kind of uh motif which is then immediately inverted. Inversion in melody is when you take a musical idea and you play it the opposite way or you play an upside down um reflection of it.

[00:01:53][clears throat] Go ahead, Megumi. Go ahead. I'll miss you. Why are you talking? Where you where you going?

[00:01:57]Anyway, so inversion is an upside down reflection. So if we were to play, for example, this over here in if we were to invert that, we would be playing an upside down reflection of it. Basically going the opposite way.

[00:02:10]So we're doing immediately uh developing the motif with that. Let's see where this goes.

[00:02:17]is the linked verse menu motif. Okay.

[00:02:20]So, yeah, the menu motif because we have that little um that little trill there at the at the very top. So, this beginning piano is the link the there it's another it's a motif from a different part which means this is not our motif. This is a light motif. So like motif is a motif that is reused in a future work by the composer or rights holder in order to reference back to an existing to an older piece. In this case, we're having what is called the linked verse menu motif. We're putting it on this piece over here cuz I did get explained that this is that you would get um put on the linked verse first and then go for this thing over here. So it's kind of like a transitionary thing.

[00:03:02]risk with the risk with this is that when it comes to motifs, your motif is the way that we perceive motifs is very much how birds perceive their mother. Uh as in I'm going somewhere. Okay. You know how if um like a duck or a chicken uh the like when the egg hatches, the first thing the bird sees, the first living being the bird sees, it perceives and the brain just hardwires to be their mother. Um that is kind of how it works with music and motifs. The first thing that you will hear with the music is what you will perceive to be the motif itself, the theme of it. So waiting too long to bring the actual motif can have a little bit of an issue there. You risk the uh the listener getting that oh okay moment. It's the more you the more you wait the less likely it is. [snorts] So yeah, let's see where this goes.

[00:03:57]Some distortion there from some sins.

[00:04:01]There we go.

[00:04:06]Okay. So, we bring in this new uh one over here. Now, we have the actual motif of this piece. Very nice high up with this very, very lovely synth. The synth underneath that is continuing the arpeggios. It's not the same arpeggios as the link verse motif, but they are still arpeggios keeping something consistent. Whenever you bring some sort of abrupt change like this, it is best to have at least one thing overlap one way or another. In this case, we are keeping the the arpeggios there. We're having the drums now giving us the initial drum beat like a light beat.

[00:04:40]Let's see where it goes.

[00:04:44]Nice.

[00:04:47]Nice. Moving around.

[00:04:52]Okay. So we bring back the um we bring back the piano for a few more moments.

[00:04:57]We bring another run of the linked verse motif. So in this case it looks like we might have a dual motif um going on over here. It is very very risky to have more than one motif in your piece because motifs are highly jealous. They are extremely envious. They are absolute divas. They require the front and center um uh stage at all times if possible or else it risks your music feeling uh disjointed, incoherent and an absolute mess. So it is a very very fine line that we are treading over here. So far it is working. Uh usually if you want to bring two motifs that are different, you want to make them sound like they der like they're derivative from one another. You this is usually how you do mashups. For example, like a mashup or a medley. you're bringing a bunch of different pieces of music and you are playing them one against the other. Like you're bringing different motifs and you're playing one against another. And usually the best way to go about this is to um is to just put them in a way so that they sound like they derive from one another. For example, if we bring in the u this motive and then we decide to do [music] we can have that or we can have uh which one was the other?

[00:06:29]Those are three cons three completely separate pieces of music, but because the motifs are similar enough, you can get away with the with um with making the illusion that they are derivative motifs, tricking the motifs themselves into cooperating with one another. And yes, I know I'm using this very like emotional illogical language because that's music. Music is highly illogical.

[00:06:54]Music is very emotional. It's pure emotional expression. And um and it has internal logic as a result. So yeah, let's see where it goes.

[00:07:05]Oh there.

[00:07:13]Okay. So we now bring two synths. One of them is going with the chords. We have the main synth here giving us the melody, a new variation of of the of the motif. and we're having the other one going back and forth between the chords and runs um giving us sometimes a counter melody most of the time doing the accompaniment. Right? So, a run in music doing something really fast. We got a little bit of a counter melody there there at the end. Very nice to complement the um the main melody going on. Let's see what this goes.

[00:07:50]Okay. So, we are having two melodies.

[00:07:52]Technically speaking, we're having the main synth doing the thing while the other synth is continuing the accompaniment. And then when the main synth is done, we engage in a in a short call and response. Call and response being a musical conversation. In this case, we're having a very long call with the first melody. And as soon as that melody ends, we're having the run from the response, which could be a reduction of the melody. reduction being a way to develop your material in which you do a faster version of something you've done before. In this case, we are having you know one of them we have that going on and the other one just we can have that uh that can work.

[00:08:33]Uh in the meantime we are having our drums and our bass doing um a really cool beat. The drums are giving us a very very fast beat and our baseline is syncopated. Uh syncupation means when you are playing against your drums, against your beat or against your metronome. In this case, the bass is playing in between the bass drum hit uh the bass drum beats. So every time the bass is not playing, the the bass the bass drum is not playing, the bass is playing. And we're just going back and forth between those two. Let's see where this goes.

[00:09:09]Okay.

[00:09:12]Oh, we're just we're just going to go with that. Okay. So, we bring a new variation of the motif. We have harmonized this. Now, we have engaged some harmonization on it. We continue the call and response, but now we have some harmonization and some doublings going on over here. Doubling is when you have more than one instrument or more than one layer doing the same thing at the same time. We brought a couple of more synths over here to accentuate and give a new uh texture, a new tambber to the main motif. We are adding a couple of extra notes or um in between we are making it a lot more dynamic. It's either a reduction of this or we are adding notes in between mostly uh neighboring tones right a neighboring not neighboring um um not neighboring uh passing tones. Uh a passing tone is just a note that you put in between. Uh so passing tones for example if I have this note and this note I want a passing tone. I just put a note in between.

[00:10:09]It's just a way of saying we are putting more scales in between. Uh then we have harmonization. Harmonization is going to be counterpoint parallel motion in thirds or sixths. So let me break this down. Counterpoint being the study the art of melodies. 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. Counterpoint can be measured in many ways. One of which is motion. One of the types of motion being parallel motion. Parallel motion means that you have multiple melodies doing the same thing at the same time, the same shape from a different starting point or from a separate interval.

[00:10:46]Intervals are the distance between notes. There are several ways of counting intervals. The simplest and easiest one is you take a scale. Let's do C major for this example. C D E F G A B which is going to be all the white keys in the keyboard starting and ending on C.

[00:11:03]So we're going to we're going to have that and then we're going to take a point of reference. in this case going to be C because we're in C major might as well which is going to be our first or our root note. From there we can count up or down. If we count up it's going to be C being our first then up a second D, up a third E, up a fourth F, up a fifth G, up a sixth A, up a seventh B, and then C again is up an octave.

[00:11:27]Octave is going to be the same note repeated up or down throughout the instrument uh throughout the range of the instrument. And just as we can count up, we can count down. C, down a second to B, down a third to A, down a fourth to G, down a fifth to F, down a sixth to E, down a seventh to to D, down an octave to C. So parallel motion, thirds or sixths, up or down, depending on what works best for the composer. So if my first melody is on C, [music] that means that my harmonization would need to be on E up a third, A down a third, E down a sixth, or A up a sixth.

[00:12:03]So what that means, up a third, up, up a third, down a third, up a sixth, or down a sixth.

[00:12:18]And you can keep adding more and more octaves if you want. Uh the result is going to be basically um just more distance in between. So we are doing that and we are continuing that call and response that we were doing in between.

[00:12:30]Very very fastpaced. Uh very very fast-paced. But the harmonic rhythm is also slow. Now that I'm thinking about it, the harmonic rhythm sounds a little bit slower. Balancing everything out. Uh harmonic rhythm. Uh I think it's uh the harmonic rhythm is slow. Uh harmonic rhythm is how fast or how slow you change chords. It's not how fast you're playing them, it's how fast you change them. Uh this is something this is more of a meta concept when it comes to music because this is not something you really hear, it's something you feel. Um so for example, if we bring the the example we always use, right? So 44, we're going to use um some bars over here. Four bars of 44, one note per bar and um one chord per bar. And we can do uh C here. And then two bars later we do G. So that means we're going to have uh 1 2 [music] 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 [music] 3 4 1.

[00:13:30]So um that is going to establish our harmonic rhythm. Nice and neutral. And if I then without changing the rhythm just add a couple more chords. Let's add this uh D over here and G to G7 over here. Just by the nature of this, it's going to feel like we pick up the pace. So we are going from 1 2 3 [music] 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 [music] 2 3 2 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 [music] 4 1 2 3 4 1 I did not change the rhythm itself. I just I just increased the harmonic rhythm.

[00:14:14]And because I increased the harmonic rhythm, the pace feels like it went up even though I played everything at the same speed. So right now when you do that, when you have high when you have a fast harmonic rhythm on a slow piece, it can give you that sense of um of it being kind of fast even though the rest is not. Or in this case, we have a very fast-paced piece with a slow harmonic rhythm giving it a very nice sense of balance. Even though it's going fast, the pace is nice and stable, giving you, as I said, a very good balance. And you know what else has a very good balance?

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[00:16:00]Become a member today. All right, back we go. Let's Let's continue. Let's see where it goes.

[00:16:11]We're speeding up the drums there. And okay, so we bring in what sounds to be a transitionary section where we are having the call and response. Now we're going the call and response between the rhythm section which is the chords over here and then some arpeggios as the response. A very very fast run arpeggio/cale as a response. Then we are moving the different chords around for this um being the ultimate master chart.

[00:16:42]Nice. Nice. So yeah, we're doing um we're we're bringing this mainly as a transition. Let's see where this goes.

[00:16:48]We have sped up now. So we speed up the harmonic rhythm. We're bringing a bunch of new chords, but we have slowed down everything else. We are keeping everything nice and balanced. Let's see where this goes.

[00:17:01]We slow down the rhythm. Oh, we start changing [music] the Everything around nice and off the ramp we go. Off the ramp being a colloquial term that I use.

[00:17:14]Colloquial. By that I mean there is 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 any type of transition that makes your listener feel suspended up in the air at the mercy of inertia waiting to see where you land.

[00:17:28]Kind of like going off ramp. How do you do this? Remove the drums, maybe the bass as well. And it seems like we had a um a change in time signature. Yeah, we're going from the um very nice straight four four to now more like a three bass like maybe threes or six even. 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5. We bring back the piano. We have another synth like kind of a chip tune synth. And it seems we might be having both the um the light motif and the motif. Let me hear a bit more.

[00:17:58]Yep.

[00:18:02]Oo, with a little bit of counterpoint there.

[00:18:06]Harmonization.

[00:18:08][music] Nice low note. And we bring it back to the 44. Very fast.

[00:18:26]So yeah, we're bringing now. So now we bring up the uh the next section and now we have brought up the rhythm and the harmonic rhythm. They are both just almost as fast. Right now we're having a lot of chords going on. We're engaging in a lot of modulation. Right now modulation is when you change from one set of chords, one scale or a key signature to a different key signature.

[00:18:49]So every scale that you have in music, for example, C major, as we said before, that will have a collection of chords depending on the combinations of the notes that you do. Usually we do uh triad based chords like these are the most common chords that you can get. Um and that is going to give you the key signature of C.

[00:19:10]Every [snorts] other scale that exists will also have um its own key signature.

[00:19:15]And once you put them all together, all the major and minor key signatures, you get the circle of fifths. Now, if you want to move from one to another, the different combinations of notes will determine how far you are. For example, in the circle of fifths, it's called the circle of fifths because the first note of the scale of C is C, of course, and the fifth one is G. And G between G and C, there's only one note difference in between the scales. So while C has all the white keys in the keyboard or all natural notes, G takes F, turns it into an F sharp and now it has the same structure as C major, just starting from from G instead.

[00:19:56]We have the same structure, different starting point. So if you want to change from one key signature to another, there's many ways of doing it. They're all called modulation. There's many types. There's of course um there there's like common chord, common tone, pivot, peerity third. Uh there's direct modulations, that kind of stuff. And right now it seems we might be doing what is called a circle of fifths modulation. something that Bach would do a lot where it's basically we are just running through the different um key signatures [music] and we are just basically um engaging in the same cadences that we in C and then in order to go to D we just do the uh 251 for for or the four five one right uh so we're having so we're just moving the chords around And then from uh G to D, we need to have um what's it called? A major. So we move to A major to D major. And you just continue doing all the cadences for this. It's been a very long time since I've had to worry about a circle of fifths cadences. And you just continue going until you reach this the key signature that you want. It seems we might be doing something like that right now. Let's see. Let me hear a bit more.

[00:21:17]There we go.

[00:21:19]Oh, adding some arpeggio to note. Nice.

[00:21:24]Insanely fast arpeggios.

[00:21:32]Okay, so we bring in some vocal samples over here. We're having the Oz being sung, taking what used to be one of the melodies that we had before, and we are bringing the the other ones, the the other sins are um are doing arpeggios.

[00:21:47]We're having the motif now being done with these very very beautiful vocals and uh the drums are going absolutely insane as it goes.

[00:21:57]Bass is now aligning [music] more than the drums too. Nice.

[00:22:02]Speeding up.

[00:22:07][music] So we bring a synth high above that is just playing one note and doubling what the snare is doing. We are basically getting a pedal note out of this and it's just playing the same rhythm as the snare. So a pedal note or pedal tone is usually just a note that you hold for an extended period of time. These used to be more on the bass, but this time we are just bringing it above, giving us just an extra layer of this to add to this insane composition. This is really good. Let's see where it goes.

[00:22:43][music] Drums going in faster.

[00:22:47]There we go. Bringing that cadence off the ramp we go.

[00:22:52]Back to the um light motif.

[00:22:56]Oh, nice modulation there.

[00:23:00]So yeah, we're modulating. We're we're moving this around and we land that final cadence.

[00:23:07]Uh some Morse code could be some Morse code. Yeah, could have been Morse code for for all we know. Um maybe like spelling the the the track or something like that. But yeah, no, with that we have that one last we use the intro as the outro, but we use a different version of the intro because this time the first intro was basically just uh in the same scale. the second in the outro was like changing around it was thank you. Oh, that's really cool. That's really cool. And with that, there you have it. Unithm from the Tunithm soundtrack. That was awesome. That was awesome. I really enjoyed it. Once again everybody, this has been a bastards. Ah, once again everybody, this has been a bastards LFA, a layman friendly analysis. I'm a professionally trained musician, a 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're following the channel, subscribe to the channel, what you use, like the video, share the comment, turn on notifications, become a member. Once again, everybody, don't forget to join the Discord server. That's where everything gets announced first. Whether the streams going live, the videos going up to 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. So, claim them as our own where I host THE VINTAGE STORY VINTAGE COMMUNITY SERVER, that kind of stuff. Also, share these videos with everybody that should know. Use the hype function on YouTube. We have a group on the Discord coordinates for that. So, linked in the description, help the channel grow. Members, get early access to the content that is scheduled. The videos for the week on Saturdays. And if you're a paid member on YouTube, regardless of your tier, you get access to the videos when I schedule them, at least for the LFAS. So, become a member today. If you want to listen to this without interrupting every 3 and a half seconds, I'll be linking in the description down below. If you want to request a song and you're not on the live stream, check the pin comment on this video. It has the instructions on what to do. If you want to catch the streams when they happen live, we aim for Monday through Friday. We stream live on Twitch, YouTube, and Kick so that you can tune in whichever platform you prefer. We have the full upto-ate streaming schedule showing in your local time zone in both Discord and Twitch, both linked in the description. So, if you live in Palomar and you're like, "Yeah, but what time is whatever time it is in Hungary? I don't live there." Do not worry. Just go to Discord or Twitch, both linked in the description, and it's going to show the streaming schedule up to date in your local time zone, accounting for daylight savings if necessary. and subscribe to the gaming channel. Follow the gaming channel cuz of course I have a gaming channel. I'm on YouTube. What else could I possibly have? Games are bastard. It's up with the gaming after sh is when they happen.

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[00:25:29]So subscribe to the channel linked in the description or search on YouTube same as James our bastard. Swap the J for a G and you got it. And subscribe to the reacts channel. The LFAS are react format. This is where we are putting the reacts for everything else. James reacts bastard. Subscribe to the channel linked in the description or search on YouTube same as James R bastard. Extend the R2 reacts and you got it. And uh yeah, there you have it. Unithm Tunithm. That was incredible, dude. I really enjoyed it. Good stuff, man. Good stuff. But uh yeah, let's move on. The sworn.