Gravity (arc-gravity.it)

 Completed in October 1997.

Gravity was easily my best song to date, and it was not close. Of all my songs composed between 1996-1999, it’s certainly in the top ten, and possibly in the top five. My best song before this was Panoramic, and Gravity is well beyond Panoramic in quality.

Gravity was the first song of a new era in my music composition: Every song from Gravity onward was better than every song before Gravity, with no exceptions. Even the weakest songs after Gravity, like An Arcturus Christmas, Outback Twilight, or These Animals Hunt Back, were still better than anything before Gravity.

My song before this was Light of the World, and the gap between them was three months, an unusually long period for me to make a new song. There were a few reasons for this delay: First, our hard drive had crashed that summer so I was unable to use the computer until we replaced the hard drive and recovered. The sound card didn’t work for a while, too, so obviously I couldn’t make any music until we fixed it. I also got distracted with a lot of Warcraft 2 once the computer recovered, and that led to me joining Operation CWAL later (though that was after this song).

My goal in Gravity’s intro was to have it sound a little less of a robotic 4/4 time signature, and I think I achieved that. My older brother had commented once that my music sounded too uniform, so I tried to make it flow a little bit more smoothly. While I couldn’t keep that up for the whole song, it at least worked for the intro. The song transitions from a slow intro into a guitar and beatloop-driven main theme. The guitars were well-known samples to me by this point, having used them in several past songs including Sorrow’s Undoing and Outcast the Third. The beat loop sample came from mechanism eight - necros/fm. Other percussion inspiration came from Mountain Breeze and Little Green Men.

The main melody is a theme I had thought of some weeks prior to beginning work on the song, but needed to find the right sample to play it on. Usually I would just come up with the tune as I was working on it on a computer, but there were exceptions to this even as far back as my earliest songs, like The Arcturus Theme Song. The lead sample comes from Blue Flame and probably isn’t meant to be used as a lead, but it works for this song. The fingered bass guitar sample is my own work, recorded on my brother’s bass guitar.

Some trivia: A few months later, I wrote the melody down on a musical score and used it to complete my music merit badge in scouting. This was the very last requirement I needed to get my Eagle Scout award, so this song helped me finish that accomplishment (for those unfamiliar with scouting, earning the Eagle award is actually pretty hard to do). Another trivia fact: I later wrote some lyrics to the song’s melody, but they were bad so I didn’t do anything with them. The only thing I recall was that the first words were “take me higher.” I wasn’t much of a lyricist.

The only thing I don’t like about Gravity is my vocal sample saying “Break yourself!” right before the final chorus, which I think is silly and out-of-place in this song. It’s a reference to the movie “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood” which my friends and I would quote ceaselessly at the time. Fun memories, but doesn’t fit in this song at all.

That small complaint aside, I was proud of this song when I finished it and I’m still proud of it now. My friends raved about it, too. It won’t go down as a demoscene classic, but it holds up well, has a good structure, and flows pretty well. When somebody asks to hear some of the music I used to compose, this is frequently one of the songs I play.
- arcturus