Raid's video: Toby Fox - Hopes and Dreams Piano and Drumset Cover

I'm back again much sooner than expected! With a cover of a track from… Undertale? Yeah. Undertale has gained a lotta notoriety for having an incredibly overwhelming fanbase (reminds me a lot of the radical sects of the Homestuck fanbase from back in the day), but honestly, is there a single game/show/film/band/person/piece of media that doesn't have a bunch of extreme, overwhelming fans? Hell, Jesus had 12 extreme fans who carried his legacy on for him. And I'd bet that we'd consider them a lot more extreme than any member of any online fandom today. So just accept the fact that that's how people are sometimes. Well, whatever. Ignore all that for a second and just appreciate the truth: that this game's soundtrack is fucking fire. Toby Fox simply does not miss. He dropped banger after banger on the Homestuck music team, and it sounds like taking on a creative project all by himself hasn't dulled this composer's spirit one bit. His awesome usage of character-specific motifs, his embracing of the limitations of audio samples, his unhealthy love for 7th chords and melodies involving the 7th, his creative thought process towards sound design… I'm a fan of all of it. The compression and mixing in general might sound a little odd or different this time around. First of all, I never have any idea how to mix any audio ever! So there's that. But second, I switched the position of my drum kit's "overhead" microphone (it's a standard cell phone mic) to better capture the right side of the kit. It used to be on the shelf near the hi-hats, but this time I moved it over to rest on top of a chair next to my floor tom. The previous cover I released, of The Killers' "Jenny Was a Friend of Mine," totally lacked any representation from the floor tom. I wanted to experiment with a different mic placement this time and see if it helped make the toms louder. Did it work? You tell me. This track is my favorite off the OST. It's harmonically simplistic, yet is still enrapturing for too many reasons to name. So of course I'm going to try and name them. The grand strings, the crisp, airy bells, the synergic cooperation of the light, flowery, synthetic wind instruments with the roaring, growling, overdriven guitars, the slight detuning of voices in order to induce a nostalgic, old-video-gamey effect, the sort-of-quiet-but-not-too-quiet drums that just keep pushing us forward, the wide array of timbres all clashing and merging in glorious counterpoint, the LFO-modulated square wave that soars in at the end of the track and sounds just like an emotionally charged vocal vibrato, the way certain instruments suddenly appear and disappear in the highly compressed sea of sound---I need to shut up. I've never even played this game myself! But I know the OST goes hard as fuck. Prior to last year, I'd heard of Undertale, but never had quality exposure to it. Then I tuned in to see Mang0 play through the whole game in December of 2019. Unfortunately, the VODs have vanished by now, but it was the most hilarious shit ever. At one point, Mang0 kept walking into the same hole in the ruins over and over again because he had no clue what he was doing. I'd kill to have those VODs back on Twitch again. My roommate is super duper into this game. He got pretty excited when I let him know I thought the soundtrack was dope. After winter came, I drove us back down to Oakland from school, and we fucking blasted this OST on high volume with the windows open as I tore down Interstate 80. That was fun as shit. God, we're such nerds. Apparently the 5th anniversary of Undertale's release happened pretty recently. I had no clue. I just planned to play some music this week, since summer classes ended, and fall quarter hasn't started yet. It just happened to be some music from Undertale. That's sick, though. It's really been 5 entire years since Toby Fox emerged from Andrew Hussie's basement and dropped a brilliant indie game that shattered the Internet? Man, I'm old. Wow. I talk too much. If you've made it this far into the description, congratulations! I'm proud of you. Remember to wear a mask and stay several feet away from others.