Following up on John’s brilliant article about the origins of “Project ASAKAZE”, I’ve been thinking. To summarise it, an exercise in curiosity thanks to the “Animal Crossing” video game series led him to experimenting around with the surf and country genres and applying the results to several instrumental cover songs. The insights gained from these experiments have gone on to be applied to our third original song, and having listened to the song in its current state, I daresay that they have turned out to be really useful.

In light of that, I’d like to share some background information on our second single, “Beneath the Waves”. As you may know, “Beneath the Waves” began life as the instrumental song “L’Éclat” (“The Radiance”), which has a bit of a fast-paced melodic punk rock feel to it.

“L’Éclat” itself was actually inspired by the 2006 Iron Maiden song “Different World”. In early 2020, I found myself listening to this song on repeat, and I started wondering about how things would play out if I were to write a song based on the structure of “Different World”. Curiosity stoked, I fired up Guitar Pro to work out the overall structure of the song, and applied what I found out to create a drum track using EZ-Drummer 2. With that out of the way, I decided on a key, and used that to create a backing piano track using EZ-Keys.

Of course, that was not all. I still had to create the bass and guitar parts, and I maintain to this day that “L’Éclat” is arguably the most cohesive thing I have ever written.

The rhythm guitar track was stock-standard, following the piano chords I had chosen. The bass track, however, was where things started to get really interesting, providing a driving force that worked brilliantly with the drum track. While simple in nature, there were little fills here and there to help break up the monotony, and the tone added a lot of body to the overall sound of the song.

However, I was not satisfied yet. The song was missing something to truly make it stand out. It needed a proper lead melody to tie everything together, and the piano part, while playing an important part in the song composition, was best used as a background lead.

Punk rock has always played an important part in my music background, especially if it’s on the melodic side. I’m not a great guitarist by any means, so I wanted to keep things simple. It was this mindset, combined with some of ShadyCicada’s early songwriting tutorial videos and the Circle of Fifths that inspired me to create an octave lead part, which helped to complement the base chords of the song. Finally, keeping in mind that there is only one guitarist in Roselia, I made the decision to mimic the live experience and edited the rhythm guitar part, cutting out parts where necessary in order to let the octave guitar parts shine.

The end result?

Something powerful and driving, with a hint of complexity in the background while allowing for the simple octave lead to represent an ode to life.

It’s pretty amazing what a random thought or a stray bout of curiosity can spark. While we at Roseburn Avenue do have another two songs in the skunkworks ready to be worked on, and John no doubt has a couple of ideas stashed away, I also have something rather unusual in mind.

What would happen if I were to adapt the song structure for “Embody the Invisible” by In Flames and use it as a foundation for a Liella/Roselia song?