"Good Riddance" Hades OST
Do you know the video game Hades ?
On our side, we've never played it. But as Twitch streamers, we've seen the hype it caused on the platform for a while. Many people were dedicating time to it. And some regulars shared some music from the soundtrack with us. One song in particular caught our attention. It's precisely this song that was the subject of this new Studio-Clip!
3rd donation goal launched on Twitch shortly after "Lemon Tree" and no poll to decide that we were going to cover this song. In fact, we wanted a title that had nothing to do with what we had produced so far: an acoustic song, vocal harmonies (so far, nothing new), but with an Irish bouzouki (ah!) and in a medieval-style (oh yes). Not to mention the fact that it remains an iconic music from a video game that only geeks and other players will know. Our usual audience may be quite surprised!
Mood: In the video game, there are two secondary characters, Orpheus and Eurydice. Here, the song originally performed by Orpheus was also adapted as a duet. And what a reading of the lyrics we can have! This song offered an absolutely incredible playground for our director Aalehx, hehe.
But before telling you about the production (in any case, as of now, we haven't shot anything yet), let me tell you about the recording and mixing phase which was not easy.
First, it's important to know that we didn't have a good Irish bouzouki at our disposal (in fact, in the original song, this instrument isn't used, but the sound is very similar). Thomas Blaise, a friend of ours and a musician in our former Irish music group, Blossom, had lent us his very first bouzouki a long time ago. It was a "Moon" bouzouki that he himself had bought from Les Culs Trempés (an instrument that had lived a good life since then ^^). He never got it back, having since acquired a better instrument. But the current Moon wasn't very suitable for the recording studio, so we had to search for another bouzouki to do the job. It wasn't easy to find the right one, even among the few musician friends in the area who owned one! Finally, despite the many kilometers that separated us, it was Thomas who once again saved the day (and for that, we really thank him, along with Clémence, a friend and fellow violinist who helped share the baby during the month of December). Be sure to check out the website for their lovely duo Pick & Bow 💖.
Okay, the first task was to find the life-saving bouzouki (or rather the big mandolin in this case). On December 17th and 18th, we invited Alex Haïkine to record with us. As usual, we turned Becky's room into a home studio, put down some blankets, placed the great microphones, and tried out some things. When faced with a new instrument, the challenge for a sound engineer is to "make it sound". And there, our Tritok worked some small miracles to bring out the best in the instrument. It wasn't easy for Cloud either to adapt to the touch of a mandolin that he had never held before (or a very long time ago). A-DAP-TA-TION!
Then we tackled the vocals. And once again, we were faced with choices. Especially regarding our interpretations. While the original version is very soft, we decided to "push" a little on the chorus. Thus, Cloud won't always stay with a weak head voice, but will use his mixed and more timbre voice for sounds with more harmonics. This has the effect of creating more dynamics than originally planned. And it's not a bad thing!
But we didn't stop there. As I sometimes play keyboard on it during our Twitch live streams, Tritok had fun adding some synth pads to enhance our arrangement! I won't say more for now. Only the people who participated in the third fundraiser were finally able to discover and hopefully enjoy this new version that we fine-tuned for days and days through editing, mixing, and mastering sessions.
And what's next?
Regarding the filming, there are still some questions that I need to sort out. If you only knew where we would like to embark! A well-crafted scenario, the NO REASON team by our side (you know, the ones who did our makeup for the special live for the 6666 followers), Aalehx completely in free wheeling mode, an incredible location, a photographer on site to capture it all! In short, we have our work cut out for us, and we need to hurry up and take advantage of the perfectly gloomy season for our filming 🖤.
Great, looking forward to seeing the updates! Don't hesitate to share with us when there's news. And for those who missed it, it's good to know that they can still catch up on the recording and filming process by checking out the archived stories on the band's Instagram.
And as usual, a little reminder: the fourth fundraiser for the future video is ongoing but ending soon! Contribute and receive the audio file regardless of the amount of your participation, as soon as it comes out of the studio + your name/pseudo accredited in the credits of the video on Youtube. And for donations of 5€ and above, you'll have a priority request during one of our live streams on Twitch: I PARTICIPATE BY SPECIFYING MY EMAIL ADDRESS.
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