It's been a while. I took Christmas off and also got used to some new software. This song, in particular, makes use of a new plug-in. Two of the instruments on the track use Pianoteq, which I purchased recently.
This song makes use of "porcupine" tuning available in 22 EDO, which uses 3 steps of 22 as a generator. In general, porcupine temperament makes use of a neutral second as a generator. It eventually leads to a 7L8s scale, but I made use only of the 1L6s precursor, which looks like 4 3 3 3 3 3 3. It has some interesting harmonic content, including a perfect fifth, a major third which is much closer to just than 12 EDO, and the 11th harmonic. It also hits the 5/3 major sixth fairly well, but is a little bit flat.
I used a decent amount of counterpoint with the keyboard instruments, a Bluethner Grand and an F.E. Blanchet Harpsichord. The harpsichord was manipulated so that it sounded almost guitar-like. I went for a vaguely Scottish sounding main theme, complete with bagpipes and Scottish snap rhythms, because dwarves = earth element and, for some reason, all dwarves in fantasy are invariably Scottish. ;-)
Image is a beautiful natural landscape from the Scottish highlands:
www.luxetravel.com/destinations/europe/great-britain/scotland/scottish-highlands/
