How We Create Our Music

Since introducing original songs as part of our effort to offer new and engaging ways for visitors to explore the content of our website, we’ve been delighted by the positive feedback received. The music videos are designed to make our material more accessible, enjoyable, and shareable, and every lyric is written with care to reflect each subject accurately before being shaped into a finished track.

One of the most frequent questions we’re asked concerns the singers behind the songs. The answer is a little different from what many expect: the vocals and instrumentation aren’t performed by individual artists in the traditional sense. Instead, we use advanced creative tools to craft voices and musical arrangements tailored specifically for each piece. This allows us to match tone, style, and emotion precisely to the subject matter, placing the focus on enhancing the message rather than showcasing particular performers.

Our priority is always to support and enrich the themes presented on the site, and we’re pleased that this approach is resonating so strongly with visitors. We hope you’ll continue to return, as we have more original songs and videos currently in production—and look forward to sharing them soon.

You can now view all of our music videos on our YouTube channel.

‘Shadow Over Slains’ is an example of our growing library of unique music videos created especially for this website, read on to discover how we create our music and videos.

Step 1: Discovering the Narrative Theme

Our creative journey always begins with the rich repository of local history, folklore, and community stories already published on our website. To illustrate our process, we can look at “Shadow over Slains”, which takes its inspiration directly from our “Bram Stoker” page (https://crudenbay.life/bram-stoker/).

Step 1 of our approach is to establish highly engaging, well-researched content on our site within which there is an obvious, compelling theme.

When studying the Bram Stoker article, the “obvious theme” was immediately clear: the dramatic Gothic connection between the atmospheric clifftop ruins of Slains Castle, Stoker’s peaceful summer stays at the Kilmarnock Arms Hotel, and the creation of his masterpiece, Dracula.

By starting with a webpage that is already rich in local detail and historical facts, we ensure that our musical concepts are firmly grounded in real heritage rather than fictional generalities.

This pre-existing content provides the ultimate “creative spark” and narrative foundation, ensuring that every song we build serves a larger educational purpose. We don’t just invent stories out of thin air; we scan our existing pages for these powerful regional themes where legends linger in the stones.

This synergy means our music is never just superficial entertainment; it acts as an auditory gateway designed to inspire curiosity and draw people back to our primary written articles. By establishing great content on our site first, we ensure we have a solid foundation of local knowledge and editorial judgement before we write a single note.

Step 2: Lyric Development and Narrative Alignment

Once we have identified our obvious narrative theme, we transition to Step 2: developing a song lyric that tells the exact same story as the webpage itself.

For “Shadow over Slains”, this meant translating the historical facts from our Bram Stoker article into a poetic, rhythmic narrative. The lyrics were meticulously crafted to trace Stoker’s real-life connection to Cruden Bay—from his busy theatrical career in London to his productive stays at the Kilmarnock Arms and his walks to the windswept ruins of Slains Castle.

By keeping the song’s narrative closely aligned with the webpage, we ensure historical accuracy and preserve our local folklore. Crucially, we write these lyrics with today’s social media environment in mind. We design them so they can be easily excerpted into short, punchy ‘musical shorts’ for platforms like Facebook and TikTok.

These brief, engaging snippets are crafted to capture a viewer’s attention in just a few seconds, offering a vivid, atmospheric taste of the broader history. The core idea is that these musical shorts act as a hook.

By presenting a captivating, self-contained story within the song’s lyrics on social media, we spark immediate curiosity. We then invite viewers to click the accompanying link, which leads them directly back to the crudenbay.life Bram Stoker page for further information, detailed galleries, and interactive quizzes.

Through this approach, our lyrics become a creative bridge—hooking audiences online and steering them toward the deeper historical truths waiting on our website.

Step 3: Musical Composition and AI Integration

With the lyrics aligned to the webpage’s story, Step 3 is to create the music using a range of advanced creative tools, including artificial intelligence.

Rather than working with traditional individual performers, we use AI to build custom vocals, harmonies, and instrumentation from scratch. For “Shadow over Slains”, we spent a great deal of time and patience selecting the perfect musical style and vocal accompaniment to match the Gothic context of the Bram Stoker narrative. We knew that a standard modern pop track would fail to represent the eerie grandeur of Slains Castle. Instead, we carefully crafted a dark, atmospheric, and melancholy style with ghost-grey synth textures and haunting vocal styling that evokes the relentless North Sea and the shadows of the ruins.

This is a key part of our process and cannot be rushed; it often takes hours of fine-tuning, editing, and parameter adjustments to get the emotional tone just right. We tweak vocal inflections, adjust musical sweeps, and layer instruments to ensure the final track respects the dignity of our village’s heritage. By blending modern technology with local historical knowledge, we produce high-quality compositions that place the focus entirely on supporting and elevating the story.

This process ensures that the music of “Shadow over Slains” is not just a background track, but an organic, atmospheric extension of the Bram Stoker webpage, designed to make the historical narrative feel alive, evocative, and deeply memorable to the modern listener.

Step 4: Visual Storytelling and Video Production

After composing the track, Step 4 is to create compelling imagery to include in the video to set alongside the music. A great song requires a powerful visual narrative to help tell the story. For the “Shadow over Slains” music video, we used modern design tools to generate unique, high-quality digital still images.

These images were created in strict alignment with our lyrics, helping viewers visualize historical scenes where no photographs exist—such as Bram Stoker sitting with his notebook at the Kilmarnock Arms Hotel or imagining the Count climbing the walls of Slains Castle.

To enhance the storytelling, we also capture and incorporate actual high-definition video footage of our local landscape, showcasing the dramatic cliffs, crashing waves, and historic ruins of Cruden Bay.

Sometimes, we use a combination of both uniquely generated stills and real-world video footage to achieve the most engaging results. The imagery is edited to sync perfectly with the rhythm and emotional beats of the music, creating a cohesive, immersive digital experience.

Whether we are showing a custom-illustrated portrait of Stoker or real footage of the windswept coastline, every frame is designed to guide the viewer deeper into the narrative, reinforcing the history and making our heritage visually unforgettable.

These visual choices ensure that the video is not just decorative, but acts as a vivid historical window that connects viewers emotionally with the very landscapes they are learning about on our website.

Step 5: Sharing and Site Integration

The final step, Step 5, is sharing and site integration, bringing our digital creation full circle.

Once the “Shadow over Slains” music video is completed and uploaded to our channel, we add the track to our website’s dedicated Play List, allowing visitors to stream our growing collection of original music as they browse. We also catalog the finished video in our central Video Library and, most importantly, we embed the individual creation directly onto its relative page—in this case, our main Bram Stoker page .

This completes a highly cohesive creative and promotional cycle. A viewer on social media might first encounter a 30-second, high-impact musical short of “Shadow over Slains” while scrolling through their feed. Captivated by the evocative lyrics and atmospheric gothic music, they are invited to click the accompanying link to visit our Bram Stoker page for further information.

Once they arrive on the page, they can dive into our deeply researched historical articles, take interactive quizzes, view historical galleries, and watch the full-length music video embedded right alongside the written history. By weaving original songs directly into the fabric of our website, we transform traditional research into a living, multi-sensory digital archive that celebrates the rich heritage of Cruden Bay.

This structured approach to site integration ensures that our promotional shorts and our web content work in perfect harmony, making local history feel modern, engaging, and deeply accessible to everyone.