I might never get a chance like it again. I can’t tell you how many times I went back and listened and tweaked and listened and tweaked, partially because I wanted it to be right, but also because I know opportunities like this are rare in my job. Sneaking in Eclipsa’s theme after she first blasts Meteora was enormous fun, and then kicking it into full gear after her devastating “STOP” was a dream come true. So, you know, I had my fingers crossed.Īnd then I watched Conquer and was like yessssssssss. The sustained notes and general shape of her theme lent itself towards a big, soaring iteration, even if the first use of the theme was quite intimate. Did I hope for a big dramatic climax to her storyline? You bet. Did I know she’d have to make a crucial mid-battle decision about her estranged daughter? Nope. When I wrote Eclipsa’s theme, did I know that she’d eventually take Star’s wand? Nope. I can ask, and I can get general descriptions from Daron and the crew, but it’s really a guessing game for me. Second, I never really know what’s going to happen down the line. So that’s the first conundrum – the introduction of a character’s theme being somewhat dictated by the length and context of their first scenes. So the theme I wrote, and its initial instrumentation, was made specifically for that. In addition, the scenes conveyed a lot of what lies at the core of Eclipsa throughout season 3 – we don’t know if she’s good or bad, and she’s always a little sad, a woman thrust into a different time without her family. So this gave me a chance to actually use the beginning, middle, and end of her melody in one episode. Now, Eclipsa’s introduction into the present storyline (not in flashback), which is where I chose to introduce her theme, was in the castle rose garden, where she has a pretty lengthy conversation with Star, which is then continued later in another scene. I got flesh out Toffee’s theme in a myriad of ways later (which was awesome), but I had to play it pretty light at first. Like with Toffee, his introductory scene was with Ludo, and it was a job interview, and it wasn’t all that long, so I could only introduce a small part of his whole theme, and it was fairly minimal. First, the ability to initially communicate a full melody is dependent on how long that first scene with the character is and what’s happening in that scene. Scoring a serialized TV show poses conundrums when it comes to themes for recurring characters.

Here’s the score from the last 7-ish minutes of Conquer, the season 3 finale of Star vs.

(Trying something new here, streaming high-quality from Soundcloud instead of degrading the quality in order to fit within Tumblr’s file size constraints.

Conquer star vs the forces of evil