BLOODBORNE - Darkbeast Theme on Piano

Описание: Composer: Tsukasa Saitoh
Arrangement: Moonlapse Piano

Discord:   / discord  

Hi everyone, here is my first Bloodborne cover. I couldn't find any piano covers of this and it's one of my favorite tracks from the OST so I figured it would be a good one. It was challenging to figure out and also has a very peculiar harmony going on. I used a Tonitrus in Bloodborne for my first playthrough so Darkbeast Paarl feels special to me because he's also electrified. Thank you for watching!

Theory Breakdown

This is very complex and amazing piece of music. The main bassline goes like this:

F, F, D, C#

However, most of the melody notes follow a Gb Harmonic Minor scale. While true, the tonic Gb minor chord actually never is played, which is intriguing and (in my opinion) leans toward it being wrong to say the piece is 'in the key of' Gb minor.

The majority of the epic boss music I have listened to tends to be in a 'minor key' overall (with dark-sounding neighbor tones like the b2, b5, and raised 7th), and often uses the V-i cadence. It's an archetypal motif for this type of music - that epic and tense V7 (often with b9, 11, b13 extensions) resolving to a i or to a VI.

In this case, we hear C#7 with b9 and b13 extensions, which definitely pulls the listener's ear toward a V-i resolution to Gb minor. Instead, the song moves to various types of F and D chords. Because of this, it should be analyzed using harmonic minor modes. Let's look at the harmonic minor modes and chords that spawn from these root notes, based around Gb harmonic minor.

F Superlocrian
D Lydian#2
C# Phrygian Dominant

Note: Lydian#2 is an incredible mode, I highly suggest looking into some Lydian#2 backing tracks for improvisation if that's something you enjoy. It has a very distinct, cool, and gloomy sound.

Both Superlocrian and Lydian#2 contain the minor and major third in the scale. This leads to some really wacky and uncommon triads being 'resolved to' coming after our C#7. The composers in this track mix it up with which of these they choose.

For F we have F Ab C# (C# min/F), F Ab D (Fdim), F A C# (Faug), F A D (Dm/F).

For D we have D F Ab (Ddim), D F A (Dmin), D F# Ab (lydian triad), D F# A (Dmaj).

Resolving to something unstable like this really has an unsettling sense of continuation and hopelessness, like the fight is a slog that will never end and that you are having a tough time. It fits Paarl's malicious design.

What is so amazing to me is how with repeated listens and really being in the headspace of this track, the transition to these unusual chords sounds perfectly natural. This emphasizes how otherworldy music can sound when we play chords diatonically in a harmonic minor key, rather than only dipping into harmonic minor over the V7 chord. And it further shows how just like we can stick to diatonic chords in a major or minor key (like a lot of popular music), a similar distorted world exists for songs that STAY in a harmonic minor mode. It's just a bit more shocking, dissonant, and harder to digest for our ears, and so far appears to be more suited for beasts like Paarl than the radio top 40.

I would go as far to say that this track is in the key of F Superlocrian, as wild as that may sound. As a whole, it is highly diatonic to F Superlocrian with only a few neighbor tones being borrowed and F feels like home.

Another way to look at this is through the lens of chromatic mediants I saw Fm to Dm, and instantly thought, ok it's using mediants, jumping down a minor third from one minor chord to another. Classic evil vibe, we hear it all the time, right? And it's true, this does happen to be a mediant. But after analyzing the track fully, I realized this chromatic mediant (Fm-Dm) occurs naturally and diatonically in our parent F Superlocrian scale and I think that's where it is derived from.

Finally, to add to the complexity even further, there is an incredible reharm of the main melody in the middle of the song. The main melody remains the same, but less 'evil-sounding' chords are played under it. We see:

Dmaj7, Bmaj7, Amaj7, C#7.

This section would be rich and colorful enough with no upper extensions from Gb harmonic minor, but of course we have both. Bmaj7 also adds neighbor tone D# into the mix, which has a very unique color due to how bright it is.

To summarize what I got from this piece, it's that its perfectly valid and effective to compose within a harmonic minor-derived mode, using the chords diatonic to that mode. It gives me the confidence to go beyond just backing tracks for harmonic minor modes. This track is really a lot more foreboding, dark, and evil sounding that most of the Dark Souls and Elden Ring tracks, and after learning about this one and seeing that they basically wrote a whole song in Superlocrian, I now can see more clearly why.

Thank you for reading if you've made it this far, let me know if you have any thoughts.

Onto the next one!