I noticed a certain pattern. When I am RL busy, I tend to neglect this project, and it tends to stall. But when after a stressful period I suddenly have some free time, I tend to blurt out music scores containing lots of excitement and energy and inside jokes between myself and myself.
All this to say... I had some free time, but still feeling quite tired and not up to tackling Heart again (which I would have to re-study again - and also not sure yet which key works best), I thought I would sketch Luthien's next song. And then I thought I'd play around with some instruments to see what I would want for the score. And, while playing around, I kinda scored the whole thing:
The Sons of Feanor.
On the whole? Not bad, but has less pizzazz than it did in my head, so I have a low threshold for redoing all of it or bits of it as needed. I like the ending, I think that was the best part. I struggled with Luthien's melody in the bloodzoning proper ("I respect your proud and ancient blood"), it didn't seem to be able to fit. Eventually I got the first and last lines down with certainty, but the second line seemed to fit three notes into the space of two, and I still don't know how. I just elected to change up her melody for that line. But to get to this stage, I reverted to listening to the recordings at 0.5 speed. Do not recommend. It's horrible. I tried 0.25 first, and you cannot even make out the note at this speed, it's just all the little imperfections magnified to the point where all you hear is imperfections. Fun.
(PS: only 2 and a half minutes long - I think this is the shortest piece we've done in a while!)
(PPS: random observation - I've noticed for a long time that the music sounds very different based on which headphones I'm wearing. And this one sounds absolutely awful in my new earphones. Ugh. I hate that my good comfortable earphones keep breaking down on me, and I need to jump around with the audio devices.)