Download (MP3)
Download (End card acoustic short: Friend Star / Friend Train)
Finally, it’s VOID TERMINA!!
(Note: the entirety of Void Termina / Soul / Astral Birth is officially titled Suite: The Star Conquering Traveler, but for simplicity I’ll mostly be referring to it as simply Void.)
Not doing Void had become the meme of 2019 GaMetal: it was by far the most requested GaMetal song, placing #1 on the song ballot, and even outside of the ballot, it had the highest number of requests from comments of any song I’ve done, by a significant margin, it had about 50% more requests than the previous most requested songs: Megalovania and Hopes & Dreams. But I kept putting it off, both for dramatic effect and because I thought it was funny. Sorry.
I had actually planned on doing this song much sooner, but always ended up rolling it back because I wanted to get to some other things first and I knew Void would take me a while to complete. Some examples:
- Considered doing it after Side-Quests 2 songs were finished/released, however had May Madness coming up meaning I had 7 other songs to finish. Did Heavy Lobster in it’s place.
- Was going to do it at the end of May Madness, but wanted to do Dancing Mad last and knew that was going to be a long one.
- Planned on doing it around September but got hungry and ordered a pizza instead.
- Decided I was probably going to do it after the GaMetal album songs were all finished and released, but with it already being near December, decided it’d be a more effective finale than Nintendo 64 Medley which would’ve been the finale otherwise.
I was also initially unsure whether or not to include Astral Birth Void (the fifth movement, officially titled Shimmering Star), as most requests were calling for Void Termina / Soul. It’s also super long (half of this remix is the fifth movement alone) and far on the softer side, but I decided it just wouldn’t be right to do this remix without including it.
Suite: The Star Conquering Traveler is comprised of five movements: Star-Destroying Playing, The Embryo’s Vessel, Wings of Sorrow and All Heavens, The Hope of Birth, and Shimmering Star. The first 3 are all very similar, but they do have enough difference for the 3 to be considered separate. There’s a bit of a groove change in Embryo’s Vessel (1:42), while Wings of Sorrow and All Heavens (2:42) brings in the pipe organ.
The Hope of Birth (4:08) is when things really start to change up, kicking it into high gear with a higher tempo rendition of the Green Greens and Void lines.
The final movement, Shimming Star (aka Astral Birth Void), comes in at 5:35 (though, as far as I can tell, the original also includes a loop of the fourth movement), and is where things slow down dramatically.
If you examine Void by melody alone, you might find that this is a very repetitive song. It mainly plays on two lines: what I refer to as the Void Termina melody (IE: 0:16 – 0:40), and the Green Greens melody (first time is in the fourth movement, 4:28-4:52). After we first hear Green Greens, it starts to switch back and forth between the Void Termina melody and Green Greens melody all the way to the end of the song. This happens several times.
So yes, on the surface, the melodies are very repetitive. The secret to this song is in the sauce: the instrumentation. Unlike the lead melodies, the instrumentation of this song is CONSTANTLY changing. Very rarely do the rhythm sections repeat what they were previously doing moments before, for a whole 12 minutes, making this a truly progressive song.
The original Astral Birth Void is actually the same general composition looped 3 times, but with slight changes each time. More and more 8-bit stuff is added each time, culminating with what most people refer to as the “Green Greens Section” from around 9:50-10:18.
I applied even more instrumentation changes during Astral Birth Void to differentiate the 3 loops even more, the first 2 loops swapping which sections are heavy/soft, and wrapping up with a guitar solo (I think my longest in a GaMetal song to date) over the entire 3rd loop.
I’ve seen a few people say this almost sounds like a Dream Theater song, and that makes me happy because that’s exactly how I approached it. I knew this was going to be long remix, so I treated it like a Prog Metal song.
Now that this song has finally been completed, there’s one question weighing in heavily on everyone’s minds: what will the next most requested GaMetal song be?
I guess we’ll have to wait to find out in the 2020 GaMetal Song Ballot… coming soon! 🙂