A Composer's Diary: Developing the Main Theme of SotP news - Sins of the Prophets mod for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion

Following my debut work of my first mod at New Dawn another Sins of a Solar Empire mod,
I was approached by Canadaman to write and score the music for SotP,
An opportunity I felt honoured to be given at the chance to succeed in.

Initially when i first started work, I drew up alot of inspiration from my first debut work at New Dawn.
As working from one Sins of a Solar Empire Mod to another; I was familiar with the space setting and the illustrious vastness of the universe that existed in the game.
However I realized that with the relation to the iconic franchise of Halo, I would have to create something so powerful, just and befitting to suit its reputable and epic world.

1. New Beginnings

This was my first and early attempt at making a main menu theme...

As well as using the conventional range of instruments which included your usual String Spiccatos and Horns what have you. I at that time after moving from New Dawn wanted this time to not use too many of the organic and conventional instruments i had used before.
I at that time was discovering a new string synth and chose to incorporate it to try and emulate the futurism and feel of a universe in space.
You can hear this quite promeniently after 0:25, and later it gets carried with the weight of the Horns underneath.
From 1:41 I involved a second alternate theme and put it right next to the first to give the menu music without a stern gap some diversity.
And in this second theme near the beginning I employed the inspiration of a familiar sound that I am sure Halo players would be all familiar with, the 1st Halo Main Theme.
At 1:54 you can hear the Horns playing a piece from the beginning of the Halo Theme Song which was sung by the choir at the beginning. I did this to give this piece some familiar grounding and keep it in line with Halo. As I was aware that most of the players may have wanted to hear some kind of consistency and connection between the music and the mod under Halo's name.
So I proceeded accordingly to implement this during the creational process of this piece.

Sadly, disaster struck and I lost the project files to this composition after a HDD meltdown...

2. Sins of the Prophets Suite 1

Following the painful loss of my first theme that I had so much more to build on,
I decided to not return and recreate it and instead embark upon what would be known as a "Suite" track.

A "Suite" track is usually a single composition that collates and encompasses extracts taken from other tracks that form the whole OST.
What I planned for my next piece; would be to create a track that not only involved the main theme, but also derivative themes of Battle and Ambience that would ultimately collate the entire SotP OST in this one track.
The Idea came when I realized; to make the OST I would have to make several tracks all consistent with one another. So I decided first, to make a "master" track to use as a main resource and inspiration for the rest of the OST, which wouldn't also be limited to just that one track.

This composition had me thinking outside the box in terms of my comfort zones, where I would usually have fancied a coherence in progression to my compositions. But with this track in mind, it was the process of coming up with numerous different parts and trying to jigsaw them all together side by side and somehow make it fit.
I think the best way to have described this experience would have been to call this composition the
"fruit salad" of SotP. Looking at the individual segments as different fruits, such as apples, pears, oranges, individually on their own these would have become their own compositions and had their own flavours in the OST. But together, in their culmination it formed an interesting extensive "fruit salad" of a suite track.

Initially what would follow would become a gradual step in development of the Main Theme as well as the rest of the SotP OST.

I have much more to talk about as well as revealing more compositions.
However If I were to continue it would have made this article too long a read.
So I will reserve them for you in the coming Part 2 Article.

Part 1|Part 2 |Part 3
Thank you for reading!
Waseem Faraz Butt