Analyzing "Prophecy" Zenless Zone Zero OST | Basterd's LFA (Layman-Friendly Analysis)

[00:00:00]Next up, we have Prophecy second anniversary theme song with lyrics from the Zenless Zone Zero 3.0 soundtrack.

[00:00:10]Once again, everybody, this is the Bastard LFA, a layman-friendly analysis.

[00:00:14]I'm a professionally trained musician and 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 of that, make sure you're following the channel, subscribe to the channel, whatever the news, like the video, share the video, comment, turn on notifications, become a member.

[00:00:28]Once again, everybody, don't forget to join the Discord server, join the Patreon, subscribe to the gaming channel, subscribe to the React channel, how to request songs if you're not a livestream member, is getting early access to the content. I have much more to be before this and a bunch of other things later on 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.

[00:00:45]Otherwise, please be patient with me. I am acoustic and guitar-ed, so please keep that in mind. With that, let's do this. Prophecy, let's go.

[00:00:56]>> Okay.

[00:00:57]1 2 3 4 >> I had a ship that horizon.

[00:01:05]The world was only just a dream.

[00:01:08]>> Yeah, that's good.

[00:01:10]>> Okay, so we start with uh what sounds to be a um a behind-the-scenes practice session, right? We have the the one of the leaders of the band giving a beat. Uh then we have the vocalist here.

[00:01:28]It sounds like the vocalist playing the chords over here, giving us what sounds to be a practiced uh version of the melody, but we can already surmise a couple of things. One, we have our first chords over here. We have like this organ-like sound, like a small church organ. Um we can we can we call it like a black church organ, you know, like the one that you hear it and you can already imagine that kind of like the kind of worship sessions that that you know like like black Christian churches going to have that is like the most fun you will ever have your life kind of thing. Um and then we have the singer over here singing this initial melody giving us what could potentially be our initial motif. Motif being the smallest version of a musical idea, the seed, the essence from which everything else comes from.

[00:02:11]As well as indicating that we are dealing with a song, right? So, I know we call everything a song, but there is a categorical distinction between songs and instrumental music, also known as pieces or tracks. Same name, different uh same concept, different names, right?

[00:02:25]Um so, songs are sung, duh. But, what does that What What does actually mean?

[00:02:30]That means that songs will have vocals, will have lyrics, and these vocals and lyrics will be the driving force of a substantial part of the music. So, no, your favorite dubstep um Deadmau5 electronic music that has a half-a-second audio sample of Britney Spears right before the drop doesn't automatically turn it into a song. Does that mean we're going to stop calling everything songs? No, but now now you know the difference. I see where this goes.

[00:02:59]There you go.

[00:03:04]>> [music] >> Okay, so we bring everything in full force, right? So, we now have our drums giving us this really, really cool drum beat. We have the bass giving us the bass line. Um we have the keyboard there playing those same chords we had before, and we now bring the vocals with um the same song, the way the same lyrics that before. Now, structurally speaking, it sounds like we could be dealing with a chorus as an intro. Um so, we have our intro, we're introducing everything, and we're using the chorus as the intro.

[00:03:41]Nowadays, songs will have two main components for everything. Like, there's two main building blocks for songs.

[00:03:47]There's your verse, and there's your chorus. Your verse is going to be your floor level of intensity, as I like to call it, the baseline, the foundation from which everything else is built upon.

[00:03:57]You're going to hold back on your lyrics. You're probably going to use You're going to hold back on your melodies. You're probably going to go through a bit more lyrics. And in general, you're going to hold back the music a little bit, as I said, to set the foundation. And then you have the chorus. The chorus is going to be the big bombastic moment of your music where you completely unleash.

[00:04:15]It is not uncommon to use chorus as intro, because then it established it establishes the high point, and then you go back to the foundation. Catch you around, Isaac.

[00:04:27]Thank you for hanging out. So, we're doing that. Let's hear how this goes.

[00:04:31]>> [music] >> Another thing Okay, so two more things to notice. One, the the synth went from being an organ to being violins, like a violin synth. And number two, we are dealing with some sort of funk going on over here.

[00:04:54]This could be funk, this could be R&B.

[00:04:56]I'm not entirely like I know jazz, I know funk, I know blues.

[00:05:00]R&B is something that I'm a little bit outside of, so I don't know too too much about that one.

[00:05:07]But it sounds like we could be somewhere around over there, but we are using a funky bass, right?

[00:05:12]Um When it comes to funk, we use the concept of groove. Groove this one of the things about music that shows that musical terms are just frozen in time. Cuz groove, groovy, this is this was a very common term back in the '60s and '70s. And when funk became a popular genre, the concept of groove became captured. If we put it in today's terms, it would be either mood or vibe, right?

[00:05:44]It's the same same concept, this kind of stuff. And usually, um grains of schizophrenia counselors, I have no idea. So, uh, groove will be that every individual part of the band, every individual part, every stem is technically doing something different. Like if you were to just extract the bass and listen to it by itself, you wouldn't be able to fully know what the other instruments are doing. But once everything comes in together, it all just adds up so perfectly to one another that it just makes sense. That is groove. So, yeah, if it was named nowadays, it would be called mood, it would be called vibe.

[00:06:23]This also helps explain why so many musical terms are in Italian, German, or French because these were, um, terms that were first created or coined when these languages were more spoken.

[00:06:36]So, yeah, uh, you can call this fusion.

[00:06:37]I think this is kind of like fusiony, so, yeah, that's where this goes.

[00:06:44]>> [music] >> So, there's other [ __ ] we're No, no, no, no, no, Ace, you misunderstood. Um, we don't use slurs over here because it's funnier for you to be creative, um, and because there's terms of service, right?

[00:06:57]But if you're a dude and you never called your friends, um, any slurs, did you really have friends?

[00:07:02]If you're If you're a dude and you have a group of dudes and between all of you you didn't call yourselves these seven different slurs, then your friends weren't real friends.

[00:07:10]Like it it it it I don't make the rules, I am describing, I am not prescribing, all right? So, um, Listen to this [ __ ] for a minute. You don't swear?

[00:07:20]Well, not in public. Not in public?

[00:07:24]Okay, well, that was like 9 years ago, so it did it still happened.

[00:07:27]It still happened. So, there you go.

[00:07:30]There you go.

[00:07:31]>> [laughter] >> You don't swear in general? I do.

[00:07:36]Let's continue.

[00:07:40]And there we go.

[00:07:41]And only IRL, not online, there you go.

[00:07:44]You are exhibiting non-friendless behavior, or whatever the opposite of friendless behavior is. So, you have friends, basically. Anyway, so we go now from this. We have a brief moment of off the ramp. We just hold back. We bring the trumpets, that kind of stuff. Yeah, we're dealing with with fusion. We're bring We're dealing with fusion and off the ramp we go. Off the ramp being a colloquial term that I use. 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. Um so, in off the ramp is what I like to call a particular type of transition where it or any type of transition that makes the listener feel suspended up in the air at the mercy of inertia, waiting to see where you land. Kind of like going off a ramp.

[00:08:23]How do you do this? Remove the drums, maybe the bass as well.

[00:08:27]Uh nice bait for engagement. Well, there you go. Um I mean, why swear even? Because I want to.

[00:08:34]It's that simple. Because I want to. If you don't want to, good for you. I want to. And that's that. All right, let's see. So, we're now switching over from We off the ramp we went We went from the intro chorus and now we're in our first verse. You can hear how everything kind of settled down a little bit more. Here we go.

[00:08:57]Mainly drums and bass.

[00:09:05]Oh, and we have a couple of other background vocals. It sounds like um like they're on the other side of the room, which it I think it's the same vocalist. So, there's two ways this could have happened. Number one, they recorded and just turned the volume down. Or number two, which would be the funnier one, they had the vocalist go to the other side of the room and just sing from there.

[00:09:30]Uh it's one of the two ways, but still.

[00:09:33]Uh every once in a while like we had um We have another synth right now, which just gave us an arpeggio, right?

[00:09:39]Arpeggio being when you play a chord one note at a time. For example, here's E major.

[00:09:43]Here's arpeggiated.

[00:09:45]So, yeah, we're doing that. Let's see where this goes. Cool.

[00:09:48]There we go.

[00:09:49]>> [music] >> Next section, pre-chorus.

[00:10:01]Okay, so I don't like her voice, but everything else we um we bring we bring in the violins over here um and now we have established the pre-chorus. If your verse is your floor, your chorus is your ceiling, your pre-chorus is going to be a connective tissue between the two. Um so, call it your wall, call it a ramp, call it ladders, call it stairs, whatever it is, but the idea is to help smooth in the transition between the verse and the chorus. And you can hear how we changed the rhythm a little bit.

[00:10:29]Um we changed the um the pace a little bit and then we brought in the violins. Consider those vocals panning. Um I don't I don't know really. I don't know.

[00:10:41]Because it was just further down in the back. It wouldn't really pan on either ear. Let's see where this goes.

[00:10:47]>> [music] >> Like the rest of the song is really good.

[00:10:56]Little moment pause there.

[00:11:00]And now we bring in the first chorus.

[00:11:02]Full force.

[00:11:05]Oh.

[00:11:09]>> [music] >> So, yeah, this time around we have the the violins doing their thing. I think I hear a guitar in the back. It's very very subtle, but I think I hear it. Um yeah, I I don't like the vocalist's voice. Very nasal voice. Uh very nasal.

[00:11:31]It it really drag down anything else. I just don't like the the the nasal voice um for this, but in general, it's still good. It's still good. I just don't like the I I I I am somebody who is very um I don't know. There's something like there is there's the one Japanese technique of singing like nasal singing.

[00:11:51]I always forget the name of this one.

[00:11:53]Uh, there's like super epic. And then This is just nasal voice. It's just Ah, you just can't I I just I don't know.

[00:12:04]It's one of those things that I just really don't like.

[00:12:07]Um, that bass is going crazy. Yes, usually when it comes to funk, fusion, jazz, this kind of stuff, the most talented the most talented musician in the band is tends to be the bass player.

[00:12:19]Like you go to you look at like Prague, you look at jazz, you look at all these.

[00:12:26]The bass player is going to have probably the fanciest equipment and is going to be doing the fanciest stuff.

[00:12:32]Like if you want to see an absolute machine when it comes to bass, there's Victor Wooten.

[00:12:39]And there's Charles Berthoud. Charles Berthoud.

[00:12:44]These two absolute beasts when it comes to to to bass. Two of the best in the world right now.

[00:12:53]Davie 504 Davie 504 is great. Davie 504 is great. He is not Victor Wooten great.

[00:13:00]He's not Charles Berthoud great. He is great. He is not Like if there was anybody that I would put on this level, it would have to be Pete Trewavas.

[00:13:10]Like Pete Trewavas, Peter Trewavas. This guy bass player of Seven Spires and Okay, Goodnight.

[00:13:16]Insane bass player. I would I would put him to the level of these two. Like I I think the guy has has There's probably a bunch of others, but these are the the ones.

[00:13:26]I love it when my double is walking for like 15 minutes. Yes. Um and yeah, no, like these are incredible, incredible bass players. Uh and usually when you have something like funk, the bass is going to be doing so much more than everybody else that it's not even funny at some points. Like everybody else is only like, you know, the drummer is holding this really nice beat and everything. The guitarist is doing his thing. Like the the synths are probably having the easiest job, like almost always just hanging hanging out, putting down the chord. And then the bass player is just going absolutely insane. This is very, very common in funk. It is very common in jazz. Where you have this one. Yanig uh Wizalda, I don't know who that is. So yeah, no. Um we're having that with the bass and of course the chorus is We already heard it in the intro this time around. We just get to hear it the whole way around from the very, very beginning. And you know what else has been around from the very, very beginning? Not really. The Patreon.

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[00:15:41]>> [music] >> Little break off the ramp.

[00:15:45]And straight to the next verse.

[00:15:51]Even less drums.

[00:15:54]Less drums, less bass.

[00:15:56]>> [music] >> And now we bring everybody. More aggressive verse, nice.

[00:16:03]We have two synths. Okay, we have two synths this time around. One of them has the violin sample and the other one is giving us some arpeggios in between.

[00:16:12]Nice.

[00:16:14]>> [music] >> Straight into the next pre-chorus.

[00:16:23]Chorus two.

[00:16:25]Ramp.

[00:16:26]Nice little break there from the pre-chorus.

[00:16:30]Very nice triplets there and and we get our bridge. So, instead of the chorus, we extend this over to what sound seems to be the bridge.

[00:16:44]Um bridge being if your verse is your floor, the chorus is your ceiling, your bridge is going to be a basement. It's a complete contrast from everything you've done um and it's going to be a complete change of intensity usually right before the chorus because then the distance between the floor and ceiling is going to be not as great as distance between the basement and the ceiling, which is going to make the trip to the ceiling feel that much more pronounced. So, we do something like that right now. We're having this very slow, like the whole time we've had a very nice groove going on and now we basically just stop it.

[00:17:17]Right? Look, we're we're we're completely almost fully hitting the brakes so that we can then bring us up to speed and that bringing back up the speed is going to feel that much more pronounced. Let's see where this goes.

[00:17:34]Nice. [crying] It's just her and the guitar, I think it was.

[00:17:39]And There you go. We use one of the most devastatingly effective instruments that you can possibly have.

[00:17:52]Silence.

[00:17:54]Silence can be the loudest instrument that you can have as we saw over here. 1 second of silence and it just So yeah, I think we're still building up that bridge. Like we're in the in a gray area between bridge and chorus. Let's see where this goes.

[00:18:12]Bring back the drums.

[00:18:14]I like the voice here.

[00:18:20]Nice. Shock, yeah.

[00:18:24]Again and >> [music] >> And there we go. Chorus number two.

[00:18:32]In four fours. You heard that change [music] from bridge to chorus.

[00:18:38]That was awesome.

[00:18:42]Guitar is more aggressive this time playing the four chords.

[00:18:47]>> [music] >> And we're having and we're having more backing vocals this time around. We're having a couple of more backing vocals.

[00:18:55]Um like in the background we're having more backing vocals.

[00:18:58]Um basically they're they're singing almost like chords kind of thing.

[00:19:02]Chords again.

[00:19:04]So it's the chorus.

[00:19:09]And now And now we're in outro territory.

[00:19:16]There we go.

[00:19:19]So yeah, we're now mostly improvising here, seems. [music] So now we have the backing vocals singing the chorus line, but now we're having the lead vocalist pretty much improvise this whole way over here, so yeah.

[00:19:35]We can listen to this again. Yeah, like the shouting the shouting works incredibly with her voice. Like for the verse and the chorus the sung stuff, I don't I I like I can't really get myself to like her voice with that, but with the one once we add the the screams, that's so good, dude. That is so good. Let's hear the screams.

[00:19:56]>> [music] >> There we go. Oh.

[00:20:12]Bosmeg.

[00:20:14]There we go. So we resolved the melody one more time. For a second I thought it was going to just going to end with that. We resolved the melody. We have one last time of silence. We resolve everything, and there you have it. That was really cool. Like yeah, like the voice of her singing I I couldn't get behind it was good.

[00:20:32]Um It was good and yeah, see, there you go.

[00:20:35]Uh it was good, but man, those screams were awesome.

[00:20:39]Like it's um real nice to Amy Winehouse. I never heard of I don't remember hearing Amy Winehouse ever.

[00:20:45]I got extremely uncultured when it comes to popular culture. Like pop I I lived under a rock.

[00:20:51]I really did live under a rock. Like you ask me of like most pop artists from like the last 30 years, I'm probably not going to be able to name much of in terms of that. Yeah, I know the screams were insanely good. The screams were insanely good. Like I'm not saying her voice is bad. I just didn't like it, but that's my taste. That's separate. So yeah, no, with that there you have it, Prophecy second anniversary theme song with lyrics over here from the Zenless Zone Zero 3.0 soundtrack. That was really good.

[00:21:24]That was really good. Like whenever you engage in like this kind of funk fusion, it's just so much fun, dude. It's just so much fun. Anyway, I just Oh, excuse me. I need to I need to burp.

[00:21:37]Once again, everybody, this has been the Bastard's LFA, a lame unfriendly 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 the YouTube video archive thing, thank you for watching. Make sure you're following the channel, subscribe to the channel, whatever the news, like the video, share it with a comment, turn on notifications, become a member. Once again, everyone, don't forget to join the Discord server. That's where everything is announced first, whether the stream is going live, the video is going up on the channels, updates, projects, giveaways, and everything is announced there first.

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[00:23:40]Or search on YouTube. Same as the name as James R Bastard. Extend the R to Reacts and you got it. And uh yeah, there you have it. Prophecy Zenless Zone Zero. That was good. That was good. That was good. Like even with me not fully liking her voice, that was good. I still enjoyed it. Good stuff, man. Good stuff.

[00:24:00]But uh yeah, let's move on. Let's move on.