We’re working on a boss fight! Which means we need tense percussive music. In this boss fight, we’re focusing on anxiety, so the melody I’m creating establishes a pattern (a long–short, long–short pattern) and then breaks it at the end of the phrase with an anxious punch! It’s really fun to write music like this because I have to think about more than just the pitches and rhythms, I have to think about the shape of the whole phrase. In this case, I want the unease to grow louder and then ebb away in waves (basically a panic attack in music form). This practicing the phrase a bit to get the shape I want, and then making small adjustments to the note velocities (the ball-and-sticks in the lower half) to fine-tune the shape.
