Keeper of the Forest, my ambient concept album, just turned six months old. I thought it would be fun to do a series of "liner notes", a behind-the-scenes look at the inspiration and making of the album. The album title is actually a rough translation of my last name, and also comes from growing up living in the woods.
If you’ve never heard my music before, I’m Tim Woodruff, an independent music producer making music inspired by my love of electronic, synthwave, alternative rock and film scores. Each album, I try to create a group of songs that fits a certain vibe and takes the listener on a musical journey. Check out my work on Spotify and BandCamp and other major streaming services.
To start with, I’ve written a short narrative for Keeper of the Forest that follows the album track by track:
Keeper of the Forest: The Story
Before The Dawn (5 AM)
From the darkness, the first sounds of dawn stir you from sleep. Around you, the forest where you slept wakes with the sounds of native birds. Stirring, you sit up and poke at the fire coals, and search for something to satisfy your hunger. The day has just begun, the forest is wide and yet unexplored. You have much ahead in your journey.
In The Pines, Beneath The Stars
The woods are still dark, but as you begin your trek, they come to life. The stars linger overhead, twinkling with their distant light, even as the sun peers over the eastern horizon before you.
The sunrise spills its majestic light across the miles ahead, painting mountains in shades of gold and red. For a moment, you pause to take in the beauty of creation, before setting off once again.
The Mountains (for Dungeons Deep)
The forest path gives way to enormous mountains, titans of stone holding untold secrets. Distant storm clouds loom overhead, and a clap of thunder reverberates to valleys below. Just for a moment, you hear the low mournful sound of singing, as if coming from a dungeon deep below the mountain, and you can’t say you’re entirely disappointed when it is behind you.
The Merchant
As you round a large tree, you see a mysterious figure in a long coat with a pack on his back and a large hat pulled low over his eyes. As you debate whether to engage him, he turns to face you.
The Merchant says, with a gleam in his eye, “What are you buying, stranger?”
The Forgotten Woods
The old forest seems to go on for miles, its acres untouched for ages. You sense that you are the first to tread these paths in quite some time. The thought at once gives you a sense of calming peace and of chilling isolation, as though no one would be able to find you if you never returned. You turn to leave, the journey home is long, but you always remember that place in the forgotten woods.
https://timwoodruff.bandcamp.com/track/the-forgotten-woods
Firefly Sunset
As evening approaches, fireflies begin to dance around you. Through the trees, the sky shines with radiant red and amber hues. You reach the lake and see the moon over the pounding waves. You take a moment to let the beauty sink in.
Wandering
You’ve been walking for days. Every direction you turn looks the same now. An endless cycle of wandering. Frustrated, you stop. And listen.
Through the quiet, you catch your breath, and remember to pace yourself. It’s not over. You will make it. There is hope.
When The Last Leaf Falls
You never meant to stay this long. It was spring when you arrived but now winter is approaching.
Just like the trees that shed their leaves, this journey has changed you. You're different now than when you entered. Reaching the edge of the forest, you turn back for a moment. One more time to glance before you leave. One last look, as the last leaf falls.
Into The Morning
Stepping into the sun, you've reached the end of the journey. And yet, it’s also the beginning.
There will be more challenges ahead. But today, you enjoy this moment in the morning sun.
Album Overview: Behind the Scenes
The idea behind Keeper of the Forest was to create an electronic album that focused more on earthy rural imagery. At the time, I was getting really deep into the synthwave genre, which heavily utilizes 1980s cityscape imagery. The sounds and textures of that genre are beautiful, but I grew up in the forests of the deep South, the giant hedge maze as I now refer to it. I was curious what it would sound like to take those synth textures and incorporate the sounds of rural woodland into it.
The album title is actually a rough translation of my last name, and also comes from growing up living in the woods. Even though the album is all instrumental, I envisioned the album as a journey through the nine tracks and wrote the track titles to evoke a sense of story:
- Before The Dawn (5 AM)
- In The Pines, Beneath The Stars
- The Mountains (for Dungeons Deep)
- The Merchant
- The Forgotten Woods
- Firefly Sunset
- Wandering
- When The Last Leaf Falls
- Into The Morning
At the same time, I discovered the beauty of sampled instruments, such as strings and brass, and wanted to incorporate more organic elements along with synthesizers. I also like the idea of utilizing ambient sounds into the songs, and I set a rule for myself that I had to mostly avoid standard drums and percussion. The instruments had to be responsible for the rhythm. Throughout the process, I realized that these constraints actually helped to focus my efforts and help me to move quickly.
A really big part of my musical process involves listening to a wide variety of music across many genres and eras. I love listening to all kinds of stuff: alternative rock, synthwave, acoustic guitar, electronic music, and even film scores. My philosophy is that the more influences you pull from, the more eclectic and original your music will feel. This album has allowed me to stretch and explore a lot of different musical areas including ambient, chillwave, vaporwave, IDM, post-rock, and even a little bit of dungeon synth.
This album is inspired by many different things. I wanted to create a relaxing environment, similar to the vibe I experience when I listen to the music for fantasy games like Skyrim or Oblivion or Elden Ring or even the soundtracks to movies like Lord of the Rings.
A lot of inspiration also came from indie electronic music that I was listening to at the time. A friend ( @dungeons_deep on Instagram ) recommended that I check out dungeon synth, which is a subgenre of hauntingly beautiful, minimalistic, medieval inspired music. My friends over at Wave React introduced me to a ton of great music, most notably Emancipator’s Safe In The Steep Cliffs album and Rüfüs Du Sol’s Surrender album. I also took inspiration from the chillsynth scene, with artists like OLD and Albatrauss being huge influences. A couple of these tracks were also inspired from creative exercises I learned from watching the YouTube channel of Venus Theory and S1gnsOfL1fe. The atmospheric textures that I picked up there led me in some very unexpected and exciting directions.
Just like synthwave, this album brought nostalgia to me, but for different reasons. Using virtual orchestral instruments took me back to my days on trombone in high school orchestra, playing themes from classical music, alongside movie themes like Braveheart, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Howard Shore’s themes from The Lord of the Rings, and more. On days after school, I used to go over to my grandmother’s house and spend hours playing The Fellowship Of The Ring theme on the strings preset on her Casio Keyboard. I also raided my grandpa’s massive CD collection, listening to countless hours of Boston and Cincinnati Pops renditions of favorite movie themes. In college, my girlfriend (now-wife and I) often went to classical music concerts on campus.
All of these things escaped me as musical influences, until I sat down to write this album. Writing almost entirely away from the guitar allowed me to channel a lot of this music that I love but could never emulate before. It made me feel like less of a songwriter, and more like a composer
Because of these varied influences, the album has a very eclectic feel, at least to my own ears. I've also found that my kids have really enjoyed listening to it (it has put them to sleep on car rides on multiple occasions).
Behind The Scenes (Track by Track)
Before The Dawn (5 AM)
This song started out as an improvised ambient jam, using the free Bandlab app on my android phone. As a father of a newborn, I was up at 5 AM (as the title suggests) to hold and feed the baby. While he was asleep, I pulled up the app on my phone and wrote the introduction using the touch-screen based keypad. For a while, I wasn’t sure what to do with it, but when I bought my Novation midi keyboard later that year, the ideas for the melodies started to come to me as I jammed along to this again.
The muted synthesizer on the track almost felt like a bugle trumpeting the arrival of dawn. When I listen to this track, I’m still transported back to the warm tired-but-happy feeling of holding my sleeping child. It’s a good memory.
With the album being a collection of these ambient textures set in a mysterious forest, it felt right for this one to open the collection.
In The Pines, Beneath The Stars
This song came about after playing around with this interesting online midi tool called Chord Player, that allows you to generate midi and arpeggios. I came up with the core structure of the song in an hour or two, and then spent the next week or so adding extra little ear candy.
I love how this song builds from the simple bells to the rhythmic pulse of the synthesizers in the middle section, culminating in the crescendo of flutes, strings and a trumpet solo at the end. This song especially reminds me of the years I played trombone in high school orchestra.
As I listen to this song now, my mind goes back to the days when I would go on camping trips, setting up a tent in the Appalachians. Friends would gather around a campfire to tell stories and sing songs. So many great life memories were made there, in the pines, beneath the stars.
This song is a tribute to those days.
The Mountains (for Dungeons Deep)
This track happened because of a really neat coincidence. A friend of mine from college who goes by @dungeons_deep on Instagram had started doing some really beautiful medieval fantasy artwork. I loved his work, and we reconnected and started talking about our art and music. After some talk of a collaboration, I ended up writing this song for him to use along with his artwork, and he created the artwork for this album.
Musically, this song takes a lot of cues from dungeon synth, a genre that is very beautifully understated and inspired by medieval films, music and literature. The song features vocal choir, classical guitar, and strings as virtual instruments and some beautiful thunder samples.
The Merchant
This song started life as this simple loop that I threw together in an afternoon. I loved how it felt like the music you would hear in a merchant scene in a video game. I tried to lengthen it into a full song several times, but in the end, I felt it would be best served as just this simple musical interlude.
After all, you never spend too long at the merchant’s shop anyway.
The Forgotten Woods
This song is another one of those jammed loops that very quickly turned into a full song. I had been experimenting with some of the free Decent Sampler instruments from David Hilowitz and Venus Theory. One of those instruments is actually David’s recording of a sonic toothbrush, which sounds like a low sine-wave bass synth.
Really, the basic song structure was completed pretty quickly, and then I spent some time separating out the layers, and turning it into a longer, more-complete song. In general, that’s how a lot of this album was made: reacting to sounds and then shaping the arrangements to where I felt the song wanted to go. It was liberating because I’m used to writing music mostly on guitar, so it was a nice change and led me to some interesting places.
Firefly Sunset
Firefly Sunset was inspired by two videos: one by Venus Theory on writing fugues (musical pieces that layer the same notes at various speeds to create evolving arrangements), and one by S1gnsOfL1fe on creating ambient arrangements. I took the ideas from both of them and created the starting loop at the beginning of the song. When the song felt like it needed a crescendo, I moved from the bell arps to the organ, and then released the tension to the string section outro. The song opens with the crackle of a record player, which I felt reminded me of a similar sound to a campfire, and closes with the sound of breaking waves on a shore.
Honestly, the later parts of this arrangement came together so spontaneously, just reacting to what I was hearing, that I don’t know that I could recreate it again if I tried. It felt like when I was done, the song had turned into something very pleasantly unexpected, and I’m grateful that I was able to create it.
Wandering
Wandering actually started out as a phone recording of a song idea that I had written on an acoustic guitar. Listening back to the song, I hated it and decided it was best to let that one be a learning experience. At that time, I was getting really inspired by Gotye’s Making Mirrors album and loved how he used samples to create melodic music. I wanted to see if I could sample something.
I chopped up the phone recording of the acoustic guitar, reversed it, added a bunch of effects, and tuned it to various pitches. This is the signature line at the beginning of the song. From there, it was just a process of figuring out where to add all the string and synth parts. This is another one of those songs that feel more like I discovered it than I wrote it.
When The Last Leaf Falls
This song was actually a collaboration with OLD, Tholos and Moure for OLD's "4 Producers, 1 Sample" project, inspired by Andrew Huang’s excellent video series. The project brought together artists from chillsynth, synthwave and other electronic projects, to collaborate in groups of four on creating different songs using the same sample.
We all built our tracks using the same audio clip as our starting point, allowing us to see how each producer interprets and iterates on musical ideas. It was fascinating to see how each of us branched off from the same starting point into vastly different finished songs. This has been such an amazing experience and I'm happy to have been involved.
This song is the first on the album to feature any real drum parts (besides maybe The Merchant), and the only song to feature any substantial guitar work (guitar samples aside). The song started as a simple arpeggio sample layered with some synthesizers. It was nice enough, but I wanted to make it better. So I did something I haven’t done yet in any other of my recordings: I wrote a key change.
Instantly, I was inspired. I wrote the first solo after the key change on a synthesizer using my midi keyboard and the pitch wheel. After listening back, I like it, but it still wasn’t quite right. I pulled out my Stratocaster guitar and copied the synth line note for note, which is an interesting way to come to a guitar line. As I was playing along, it struck me that it had a certain Stevie Ray Vaughn quality to it, so I tried to emulate as much of his playing as I know how (it’s limited). Then for the second solo section, I went the other way, trying to steer it towards a little bit of Dann Huff and Michael Landau (again my limited imitation of these session guitar giants).
Where I landed on this song was something that I really love. It’s one of my favorites on the album, and it really fits well within the context of the producer collaboration. It was really fun to pull together all these disparate influences into this song and make something unique.
Into The Morning
Into the Morning started by trying to emulate live drums from a song I was listening in the piano roll of my DAW. At some point, I started borrowing influences from Billy Joel and Bruce Hornsby to create some interesting piano parts. The song ended up morphing into this uptempo corporate elevator music. Which brought my mind to the obvious place: Vaporwave.
I slowed the song from 130 to 85 bpm, added a ton of reverb and instantly it was a vibe. I love that this ended up as the last track, because it has an uplifting quality, but with a bit more longing and emotion as well.
Conclusion
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading. It’s been fun to reminisce on how this album came to be and provide some more context for what inspired me and how it was made.
If you haven’t listened to Keeper Of The Forest yet, you can download and stream it on BandCamp, Soundcloud, Spotify and all the major streaming services.
If you want to keep up with what I’m doing, I’m active on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Threads, Mastodon and Tumblr.
Follow me on timwoodruff.bandcamp.com to be notified via email when I release new music.