Analyzing "Vitas Corrodens Pestis" Genshin Impact OST | Basterd's LFA (Layman-Friendly Analysis)

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Next up, we have Vitas Corrodens Pestis from the Genshin Impact Radiance of Flame soundtrack. Once again, everybody, this is a bastard Ella Faye, 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 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 turn on your news, like the video, share the video, 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. Thank you again for 500 subscribers here. I appreciate it really much. 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 than 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.

[00:00:51]Otherwise, please be patient with me. I am acoustic and guitarded, so please keep that in mind. With that, let's do this. Vitas Corrodens Pestis. Let's go.

[00:01:09]>> [music] >> Okay, so we start with um a female chorus and the uh nail order requests are no longer here. You were late. Uh we start with a bell, a bass drum, and then we have Where's the yapperest of yappers? Thank you. I try my best. So, we're having this and we're having the female We're having female choir over here, uh sopranos and altos giving us that initial um melody, which I believe contains our initial motive. Motive being the smallest version of your musical idea. This is the essence from which everything else comes from. So, um choir, right? We're bringing in a choir, a chorus. So, chorus, uh a choir, uh choral. Same concept, different words, right? Which is basically a big group of people singing. Uh usually this is then subdivided into the different vocal ranges that humans have, so that you can categorize them because the purpose of a chorus or choir or choral is to uh turn the individual vocalists, collectivize them into one big instrument. So, the way it works is that we use the SATB. The SATB stands for soprano, um soprano, alto, um tenor and bass. Right. So, soprano is going to be the higher range for women, alto, the lower range for women, then we have the gender divide, tenor is going to be the higher range for men, still lower than alto, and bass is going to be the lower range for men.

[00:02:42]Uh these are generalities and that's just how it works, right? You account for these, you're going to have anywhere between 90 and maybe 95% of the world population. Uh it's fairly rare to meet anybody outside of these. Right now, we're having the sopranos and the altos singing this whole thing. There are two more ranges that you can get, it's a bit difficult to get, but you can get it, right? Between the sopranos and the altos, you can get the mezzo, um mezzo soprano, and the between the tenor and the bass, you can get the baritone. Uh these, the principle is going to be the same, it's going to be either the full range of the surrounding um ranges or somewhere in between. So, this the mezzo soprano is going to be either the full range of the soprano and the alto or somewhere in between, and the baritone is going to be the full range of the tenor and the bass or somewhere in between. For example, in my case, I am a baritone. I have a good chunk of the range of the tenor, a good chunk of the range of the bass, just not quite getting to either extreme.

[00:03:36]So, once you take these into account, you go from being 90 to 95% of the world population to upwards of 99.99% of the world of the world population. Extremely rare to meet anybody outside of these vocal ranges. Not impossible, but just very rare. So, yeah, we're having that we're having that and see where it goes.

[00:03:55]Bringing the rest of the orchestra and Okay, so we bring in a piano. We have a ticking clock as well. So, we bring in the piano giving us now this new version of of a bassline engaging in an ostinato.

[00:04:20]Um ostinato being that you're repeating something over and over again with little to no variation. This one has a lot of accents going on, which is basically we are having a bunch of notes playing, right? Like we're having a bunch of notes, but every time we repeat this phrase, we are basically changing which of the notes we are accentuating and effectively changing how the entire um the entire phrase feels. So, basically if um we have that B duel is accepted automatically. It's B arena the one that you have to accept manually. So, let's say we have this phrase over here.

[00:04:59]If I then change the accented note, if we have the first one >> [music] >> if I then start repeating it, but I start changing which of the notes is accentuated So, we can have that phrasing going on and I'm going to do even more extreme, right? So, >> [music] >> So, you can really feel how if you just change the accent, where you accentuate the note, you can completely change the feeling. We are then bringing in some violins high very, very high up giving us some very, very quick notes. Let's see where this goes. Let's go to the head of the group.

[00:05:49]There it is.

[00:05:52]Okay, there we go. We bring in percussion and what sounds to be uh another instrument, might be like French horns or something. Those are giving us a variation of the motif, but this time we are relying on the art of the polyrhythm for this. So, a uh polyrhythm, which means multiple rhythms, what we usually refer to it when you have multiple rhythms playing at the same time that conflict with one another, and these conflicts is what makes it sound cool.

[00:06:21]Excuse me. The simplest motif uh the simplest polyrhythm out there being the 3 versus 2, or at least the easiest one to understand. Where you have one part doing twos, 1 2 1 2, and the other one doing threes, 1 2 3 1 2 3. You play them together, and that polyrhythm is that that contrast is what makes it sound cool.

[00:06:42]We're doing that to a more complex degree over here. Let's see where this goes.

[00:06:50]Okay, so the string it's the strings, percussion, and I think there's uh tuba and French horn there as well. We're having an orchestral arrangement over here. We are having, of course, the piano giving us that ostinato. We are having violins. We're having percussion, sounds like a snare and a um and some cymbals. And I think we might have a French horn um maybe a tuba there, uh maybe some cellos giving us those same stingers. It's so quick that it's a little bit difficult to tell which one is which. Let's see where this goes.

[00:07:26]>> [music] >> Okay, we switched things around. We now have the double basses holding down the baseline. We have now what sounds to be maybe the cellos and the violas um giving us now what seems to be an inversion of the motif um with the arpeggiating part of the chords, right?

[00:07:48]So, because the original version of the motif was basically two lines being played in tandem, now the cellos are basically going back and forth between the notes as part of the motif.

[00:08:04]Um We're doing that and I think we're doing an inversion of the motif. Inversion being a way that you can develop your material in which you in melody at least you take a melody and you play an upside down reflection of what you got.

[00:08:18]Classical music, welcome back. How you doing? After this is the giveaway and then we're playing Limbs Company. So, an inversion, if I have this over here the inversion would then be an upside down reflection of this melody, which would be basically going the opposite way.

[00:08:37]So, yeah, we're having what I think would be a uh inversion over here, arpeggiated. And of course, arpeggio being when you play a chord one note at a time. For example, here is C minor.

[00:08:48]Here's arpeggiated.

[00:08:50]So, yeah, let's see where this goes.

[00:08:53]Oh, the timpani they're giving some hits.

[00:08:57]We have Okay, so we're slowly bringing in the violins holding in the notes. We are having the tuba and trombones very, very low giving us some extra hits as well as the timpani. The timpani being these drums over here which hold a very special place in the orchestra. Because most drums, most membrane drums, percussion you know, regular drums, they are not going to be able to play a pitch, not that easily at least, not at least accessible. So, you are left having just the pure texture.

[00:09:29]Whereas the timpani themselves, they can fulfill the role both of a bass and a bass drum. The only downside is tuning the drums is extremely difficult. Um you can do this in some of the contemporary, like some modern uh timpani nowadays, you can use this pedal down here to change the note that you are using. It is just extremely difficult to get it right and to lock it in place properly.

[00:09:56]So, in order to go around this, what people do is that they will have a timpani set instead of just having one drum. You're going to have multiple and you are going to and you're going to play one at a time and each of them is going to be tuned to a single note. Now, the challenge to composing for a live timpani is that you might get in a regular orchestra, like unless you're dealing with like the the New York Philharmonic or something like that, you're going to be dealing at best with two timpani drums. Which means for the entire composition, you have two notes to play with with the timpani.

[00:10:38]Maybe a third one if you get lucky. You can see over here, this is the New England Conservatory Philharmonic, which is four.

[00:10:46]This is like at almost as good as it gets. Some ensembles, like if we are talking some of the biggest ensembles out there, might give you a fifth drum.

[00:10:57]Usually, it's going to be two or three.

[00:11:00]Which means composing for this is going to be quite the challenge. Um which is part of the craft, you know, it's part of the skill set that comes with being a composer. You have to be able to figure these things out and overcome these challenges with the limitations that you have. So, we're having that. Let's see where this goes.

[00:11:21]There's the chorus back. Now, it's the full chorus.

[00:11:27]Okay, so we have the violins here now giving us a counter melody and we are having the chorus now giving us an elongation of the motif. Elongation being a way that you can develop your material in which you play a slower version of something you've done before.

[00:11:42]In this case, we are having these notes being very, very slowly. It started off at a certain speed, and now we're just going very, very slow, iterating that motif with the chorus while we're having a different melody on top. Let's hear how this goes.

[00:12:00]There's the French horns [music] with the counter melody.

[00:12:04]Nice.

[00:12:10]Now the Now Okay, we bring we bring in the bells, which are going to be tubular bells, by the way. Uh tubular bells are these ones over here. They are a bunch of tubes that sound like bells, and that are arranged like a xylophone or another mallet instrument. We're having these over here. They sound like bells, uh but instead of having to bring in, you know, a full church bell, you just get them over here. They sound just the same, and it works just as nicely. We're having that. We are now having the chorus slowly deviating a little bit from the uh original motif, giving us the initial strike of the motif, and then moving on away from that while holding the notes.

[00:12:55]Uh while holding the breath, right? So, with a single breath, we are moving from that. At Pixel Rain, welcome to the Aydrian. Yes. So, basically, what we are doing, right? The original motif was basically a Excuse me. Uh basically, these repetitions of notes, and then we had the repetitions of notes. And what we are now doing is one, we are doing elongation. So, we are taking this part over here, and we are instead of doing it like this, we are now giving us a lot longer notes for this. And now for the next iteration of it, we are taking these and then we are going away in the different notes while the the first notes are still hit the same. The motive is still there. We are slowly obfuscating it. Let's see where this goes.

[00:13:51]>> [music] >> Violins. Okay, so we have the second violins start arpeggiating. We have the first violins giving us a doubling to what the chorus is doing. Doubling is when you have more than one instrument doing the same thing at the same time.

[00:14:04]Uh then we have the um the French horns there giving us another doubling of that. We have the bells jumping in and all that.

[00:14:15]Um Logs, welcome back. How you doing? And uh then Viction, you also have duels on stream avatars. And if the system works the way that we want it to work, you will be able to exchange points between stream avatars and Botrix if we can get it if if we can get if if it's possible because there might there's a possibility that it won't work, but hopefully it will. Let's see where this goes.

[00:14:44]Okay, so off the ramp we go. First off, off the ramp being a colloquial term that I use, right? 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 a particular type of transition that makes your listener feel suspended up in the air at the mercy of inertia waiting to see where you land.

[00:15:05]Kind of kind of like going off a ramp.

[00:15:06]How do you do this? Remove the drums, maybe the bass as well.

[00:15:10]Um so Pixel, we are not taking any more requests today. Next live request is going to be tomorrow. We do have the offline queue, but that one's kind of abandoned right now. So, yeah, it's the last one of the day.

[00:15:20]We're having a giveaway and then we're doing the um we're moving on to Limbus Company. But yeah, next requests are going to be tomorrow. So, um we are having this going on. We are bringing back what the piano was doing. We're doing a reduction of what the piano was doing. Reduction being the opposite of elongation. You're doing a faster version of something you've done before. Instead of bringing the clock ticking, we are having the violins giving filling that purpose and we're having the lower end. It sounds like the violas and cellos giving us a variation of what the piano was doing earlier. Let's see how this goes.

[00:15:56]There's the trombones in the background, the chorus.

[00:16:00]Variation land.

[00:16:06]>> [music] >> Okay, we bring in the full chorus. The chorus now is the men's side of the chorus giving us its variations of the motif singing more lyrics this time around. We bring in the snare drum and we now have a what sounds to be a piccolo flute giving us some upward glissandos, right?

[00:16:26]A glissando basically being a slide of some form. It's usually a run that is going really fast one way or another.

[00:16:33]Usually you can see this on the piano like you are hearing like the piano slide.

[00:16:39]That kind of thing or with a harp where you just see the person going in up and down the range. That kind of stuff.

[00:16:46]Nosh, welcome to today. How you doing?

[00:16:49]How's my sweetest soul doing? So, we are bringing these and of course we are bringing the snare drum.

[00:16:55]When you're talking orchestration or instrumentation, orchestration, instrumentation being the study, the art of picking the right instruments for the right sound, the right texture, sometimes the right psychological response. And in the case of a snare drum, the snare orchestral snare drum has a very very special place because snare drums as opposed to regular drums, a snare drum is going to have what are called wires. As you can see, the drum looks otherwise the same unless you flip it upside down and you will see this bit over here.

[00:17:36]These over here are little coils or wires that are then making contact with the rest of the drum giving it this kind of muted but kind of really sharp sound that you get from the snare drum. And the reason why this has a special place in our collective psyche is that snare drums were used a lot for marching bands, for armies. Cuz when it comes to armies, if you have a big army, this is before, you know, everybody had access to carriages or cars or horses or when you couldn't afford horses for everybody, what you would do is that you would have somebody taking a snare drum with a um setup like this and you would then have them beat the drum. Like before the the era of the Napoleonic wars, you would have war drums or something like that or you would just have the soldiers walk instead of march. Then it was discovered that if your soldiers march to a beat, they get less exhausted and they can march much further. So, they needed a solution.

[00:18:42]How do you How do you get all the soldiers to hear the beat? Well, one of the solutions was a snare drum. Snare drums don't need to be that loud but the sound travels really fast, meaning you didn't need that big a drums to be able to get through to the whole army. So, you would bring in a drum, you would bring also along a piccolo flute.

[00:19:06]Piccolo flute is a small flute. You can see these are tiny flutes but they sound really, really high-pitched, and their sound can travel very far, and you can just put this one in your pocket. So, you would have a snare drum, you would have a piccolo flute, and you would just march with the army. So, you're doing good. Hell yeah, Nosh. Glad to see that.

[00:19:28]So, yeah, we you bring that in, and now we get that sense of the march onto battle whenever you hear this kind of stuff. So, yeah, let's see where this goes.

[00:19:42]There you go.

[00:19:44]Response from Oh.

[00:19:46]>> [music] >> Okay, we switch it around. So, we have the French horns there in the back.

[00:19:53]French horns being these ones over here, uh going up and down. And look at Food Posting. Okay, 1 second. Um going up and down and that kind of stuff. Ooh, that looks really good.

[00:20:04]That looks really good, Nosh. Hell yeah.

[00:20:08]Hell yeah. So, we are um we are doing we bring those over here, and now we switch over from the men's side of the chorus to the women's side of the chorus, them giving us these variations, and pushing things forward.

[00:20:26]And you know what else we're pushing forward?

[00:20:28]>> [snorts] >> The Patreon. patreon.com/jamesrbastard.

[00:20:32]If you want to support this channel more than you already are, consider joining the Patreon today. Link in the description. And even if you don't um pledge any money, do join the Patreon in the free tier, because this is where the non-gaming LFAs are going. Thank you for hanging out, Nosh. You have yourself a wonderful day, my sweet salt. So, um patreon.com. Yeah, this is where the non-gaming LFAs are going. What are those? Anime, film, TV, label music, the kind of stuff that we usually don't do on the main channel on YouTube. Why?

[00:21:01]What we do on YouTube is inherently fair use. That does not stop bad actors, such as uh record labels, film studios, individual independent rat scammers out there from abusing the copyright system on YouTube uh for ill-gotten gains. So, in order to just not deal with that nightmare for this kind of stuff, we're putting them here on Patreon free for everyone to watch with paid members, citizens, and above getting early access to the content um for that. So, yeah. If you want to support this channel more than you already are, consider joining the Patreon today, patreon.com/jamesrbastard.

[00:21:33]Thank you to those who are already members, especially those who are paid members, particularly Real Nemesis, French Guy, and another random human, and Amir. Your support means the world to me. Thank you once again for your continued support. For everybody else, become a Patreon today, patreon.com/jamesrbastard.

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[00:21:50]Support this channel today. Linked in the description down below. All right.

[00:21:54]Let's go back to this. Let's see where this goes.

[00:21:59]Harps giving us some of the sound of the piano in the back.

[00:22:03]>> [music] >> Guys out of the chorus, off the ramp.

[00:22:09]New variation. Okay, so we bring in a new variation with rhythmic variation.

[00:22:13]Now we're doing what are called triplets with the violins. You can hear we're no longer going the one and two and. Now the violins one ta ta ta two ta ta three ta ta ta ta over the ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta We're getting that kind of feeling from the violins now while we are having the cellos doing that ticking clock feel. Let's see where this goes.

[00:22:32]>> [music] >> Bass drums in the background.

[00:22:35]Ooh.

[00:22:38]Reduction of the motif from the men.

[00:22:41]Full chorus jumping in.

[00:22:43]And >> [music] >> And we do one of my favorite things. We build up to this massive bombastic climax, and instead of resolving it with that one big boom, we fade we we resolve it with a whimper.

[00:23:06]Off the ramp and we resolve it with a nice gentle whisper instead.

[00:23:13]>> [laughter] >> No vibrato in that place. Oh god. There you go. Oh my god, this was this is beautiful.

[00:23:20]New variations.

[00:23:22]Oh, the bass drum in the back.

[00:23:26]Oh my god.

[00:23:28]Slowly bringing them back.

[00:23:32]And we're starting we're starting to do a bunch of other things. One, we are doing some neighboring tones um with the with the music. So, a neighboring tone is basically you extend a single note into three notes. The first and third would be the same note.

[00:23:50]And the one in between is going to be your neighboring tone, either the note above or the note below. So, in this case, let's say we have D.

[00:23:58]Then we extend that to over here and then in between we can add the note above or the note below. If it's the note above, it's called the upper neighboring tone.

[00:24:09]If it's the note below, the lower neighboring tone.

[00:24:12]So, we are now on top of that, we are also using some chromaticism. Chromaticism uh chromaticism is when you borrow from the chromatic scale. The chromatic scale being all the 12 tones of Western music.

[00:24:26]That's going to be all the white and black keys in your keyboard.

[00:24:31]Then if we take uh those, we can apply some formulas and we can get some um we can get what are called scales out of them, which are usually going to be seven. For example, if we're in the key of C major, that's all the white keys in the keyboard starting and ending in C.

[00:24:47]If we then engage in chromaticism, we're going to borrow the rema- any of the remaining five tones to engage in this. So, if we use some chromaticism with a neighboring tone, what we could have we can have this kind of feeling. You can add other kinds of feeling with chromaticism and neighboring tones. And we're basically adding that to extend the melody still keeping that motif. Let's see where this goes.

[00:25:16]Uh in the background, we have the reduction chromaticism there.

[00:25:21]Off the ramp. Again with the We bring back the polyrhythms. We bring back the percussion doing one. We're having now the motif being accentuated instead. We're doing that as a polyrhythm syncopated as well. You can just hear it, right? It's just going all the place. We're having the French horns jumping in.

[00:25:48]Oh my god.

[00:25:51]Ah, so good.

[00:25:55]Lower range of the men's chorus.

[00:25:59]Starting new variation with all the chromaticism and everything.

[00:26:05]>> [music] >> And we start a call and response. So, call and response again call and response musical conversation. You heard the men's side of the chorus starting it. They did the call, did their thing, and then we had the French horn as the response. We're including now the women.

[00:26:21]Let's hear where this goes.

[00:26:25]Finishing the phrase and continuing. Okay.

[00:26:31]Cadence.

[00:26:34]French horns taking the melody.

[00:26:37]Glissandos from the flutes up there.

[00:26:41]Switching to the triplet kind of march.

[00:26:44]Snare and the drums in the back.

[00:26:47]Oh god.

[00:26:49]Violins doing glissandos as well, up and down.

[00:26:54]Counterpoint and now we are starting to slowly divert the chorus into some counterpoint. 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 multiple melodies at the same time. And right now you can hear how the men are doing one thing, the women are doing another one, and like the everybody else is doing something else and that complexity and all those building some beautiful counterpoint.

[00:27:24]Let's see how this goes. What's this?

[00:27:27]And one more run.

[00:27:32]Violins with flutes there giving us another variation. Multiple versions of the motif playing at the same time.

[00:27:40]Oh my god. And Oh, with some silence, some rhythmic displacement, we build up. We resolve with one last hit and there you have it.

[00:27:56]That was awesome. There you go. That was Vitas Corrodens Pestis from the Genshin Impact Radiance of Flame soundtrack.

[00:28:06]That was insane, dude. That was awesome.

[00:28:09]Once again everybody, this has been a bastard elf fay, a layman friendly analysis of 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 happening here musically. So, if you're watching this on the YouTube video archive thing, thanks for watching. Make sure you're following the channel, subscribe to the channel, whatever I'm telling you to do.

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[00:30:24]James Reacts Bastard, linked in the description, or search on YouTube, same username as James R Bastard. Just extend the R to reacts, and you got it. Thank you again for 500 subscribers. I really do appreciate it. And uh yeah, there you have it. Vitas Corrodin's Pestis Genshin Impact. That was incredible, That was incredible, dude. Really good stuff, man. Really good stuff, but yeah, let's move on. Let's move on.