Basilisk Mine Field is another song that marks a major sound change for GaMetal. I was getting ready to record the song when I had an absolutely crazy idea: bake the world’s largest chocolate chip cookie, then eat it.
After a failed attempt which led me to realize my oven was, is, or never will be big enough, I went back to recording game songs and tried something different: use only 1 rhythm guitar track.
For those of you that don’t know, the standard way to record rhythm guitar tracks in metal is to use multiple guitar tracks, one panned to the left and the other to the right, or sometimes 2 left and 2 right, or sometimes even more. I had been listening to some prog metal stuff that had (what sounded like) only one guitar track, panned slightly in one direction, and the bass panned slightly in the opposite, and thought it sounded pretty cool. So I gave it a shot.
The end result was pretty good, I liked it so much I used this method all the way until 2013. The benefit is you don’t have to worry about the rhythm not sounding tight cause.. it’s only one guitar. I wasn’t as good then as I am now so that was helpful for me. The drawback is, well, it might be a little less heavy, but I aim for more of a progressive sound anyways.
So anyways, I had been getting a lot of requests to do a Ninja Gaiden song. Basilisk Mine Field is one of my favorite songs from Ninja Gaiden, so I decided to give it a go. The intro here is the music played in some of the cutscenes (I’m not sure of the title). The cutscene theme makes a re-appearance as the bridge of the song in this remix.
One interesting thing about this remix is that it got a lot of attention from drummers. I had drummers asking me for a drumless backing track of this remix, and I saw one person actually map out this song pretty much perfectly on a Rock Band type game, which was really cool to see.