StarCraft "Saving Private Raynor"

Happy Earth Day! Let's celebrate honoring Earth-spinoffs the Terrans, as jnWake, Jabo & Ivan Hakštok collaboratively rock out StarCraft's "Terran Two"!

"Yet another Dwelling of Duels track by me, a progressive metal remix of "Terran Two" from the original StarCraft. This one comes from February 2025's Katajun Month, where it placed 5th of 37 tunes! Katajun is DoD's former director, who recently left that position. He's a big fan of PC games and even has a cover band himself, so the theme was PC Games! One of my favorite games as a kid, and also one of few primarily PC games I've played, is StarCraft, so I took this month as an opportunity to finally cover a track from it. StarCraft music covers a couple different styles for its playable races, with the human race (called Terran) featuring a mix of progressive rock and spacy synths. Since the game is a RTS, the music isn't super melodic and is more meant as background. Still, each track is quite long and varied, so there's a lot of material for remixing!

Source is already kind of prog. rock-ish, so for my cover I went with a straight prog. metal style. Adapting it to this style came naturally. There's heavy guitars, bass riffs, time signature and tempo changes, sudden transitions into a completely different genre and a lot of synths! My main inspiration was Symphony X, but DoD compared it more to Dream Theater. I guess DT is similar-ish, hehe.

Track features 2 collaborators. On guitar, we have my usual collaborator, the awesome Jabo, who happens to be a big StarCraft just like myself (he's even covered "Terran One" himself for DoD before!). Like always, he did a great job playing all sort of guitar parts, particularly the leads, which are always a high point of Jabo's playing. He also helped me find silly samples for one particular transition. On bass, we have another usual collaborator in the amazing Ivan Hakštok. This track was actually produced in a tight timeframe, so we recruited a bass player instead of having Jabo play the bass. Naturally, Ivan completely nailed the part in a couple of days, adding the super-fun slap section around the middle. Thanks a ton to both for great performances! [...] Hope you enjoy!"

prophetik music's play-by-play paid respect to the trio's plentiful prog musicianship:

"opening is indeed adjacent but not quite the same as the intro. that ascending string riff into the melody line is pretty recognizable though! 7/8 for 0:29 is a revelation, i love that change - it emphasizes the already heavily rhythmic approach of the original. i liked the backing feel of the solo especially, and felt that was very Metropolis in feel at least initially.

1:46's new chord progression made a lot of sense and sounds great, especially when it gets harmonized. [...]

2:37's transition was surprising but does make some sense based on how the Terran campaign's music works. [...] i liked the solo line over it, especially starting at 3:30. [...]

i like the transition into the 4:07 section, and that section does a great job of providing some different textures that we haven't really felt. there's a jump into 4:22 as the tempo picks up, and then there's an outro section recapping the 7/8 section from before.

what a fun arrangement overall! the track is so obviously Starcraft that it was very easy to grab onto the arrangement elements and just enjoy the total package. [...] excellent work exploring a classic track."

Diggin' the piano at 2:36 (anything reminiscent of Streets of Rage is all good by me!), and then we get bwomp chicka sweetness along with added string synths at 2:44; fun little detour before going back to rocking out. Hitting the melody with the synth lead for the finish was the perfect nostalgia cap on this one. Just a fun treatment throughout with Jabo and Ivan adding tons of textural depth, and all the requisite Wake synth spices that bring forth life. :-D