EPTskip to the TLDR at the end.
I love music in general, and one of the specific types of music I enjoy is video game music. People like Tim Follin show that even with limitations due to hardware or other things, you can still make creative and impressive pieces of music.
(Pictionary never sounded as badass as this!)
One of my favorite games as a kid was the Pokemon TCG on the GBC. One my favorite things from the game, however, was the music. I really loved the music from the game.
My uncle had some software called FL Studio. It's a digital audio workstation, which lets you make music on the computer.
Over the summer, I decided to give my self a little project partly to just keep busy, but also because I had a lot of time and was able to work on it a lot. The project was to make an arrangement of my favorite song from the Pokemon TCG soundtrack.
(An epic song for something so mundane as a card battle. Monsters don't even come out of the cards.)
(It's important to note one of the factors behind me posting this blog is that for a while, I won't be able to work on the song anymore. While working on the song, after I felt I had made a significant difference from an older version, I started saving this project as a new file, and made an mp3 of the old version. After getting a new motherboard, I had to re-install windows and because of that I lost a bunch of plugins I had been using to actually make the way the music sounds. Some time in the future if I ever find all the plugins I used to work on the project, I'd be able to continue, but for now it's as-is.)
At this point, I really had no musical experience. I could play the piano somewhat, but that was about it, and my sheet-reading speed was probably slower than that of a first grader's. I was determined to learn whatever I had to in order to make it sound good, though.
What I first was make a plan of what I was going to do in order to make my own version of the song. My basic plan was as follows:
- Recreate the song in fl studio using basic/premade instruments.
- Learn how to make nice sounding instruments for the basic arrangement.
- Make my own changes to the song so it isn't just the original song with different instruments anymore
- After the first three steps show to friends and ask opinions.
- Rework suggestions if they are applicable.
So, I started out with just an original sequencing of the song, as close to the original as I could get. FL keys, the piano plugin that was in the software, didn't really sound all that good, though. I used google to find tutorials on instruments so they would sound better.
Apparantly, FL studio uses plugins called VST plugins. So, what I did was looked for free plugins that would be useful, and I found one that was perfect for what I wanted to do.
http://www.tweakbench.com/triforce
You get 8-bit sounds, which was perfect for what I was working on.It took me a while to get close to what the arrangement in the video was, but I finally got something I was happy with.
http://soundcloud.com/shadefinale/original
What was next wasn't very hard at all for me to do. All I really did from "Original" to"Rev1" was change out the instruments. I found a bunch of free plugins to also achieve this, but I don't have them anymore, unfortunately.
http://soundcloud.com/shadefinale/rev1
It's quite the step up from what it was before. In fact, if I wasn't so much of a perfectionist, I'd likely leave it here and be done with it. However, there were three things that I wasn't happy with.
- There's no dynamics in the music.
- The drums, to be honest, suck really badly
- I really hadn't learned much, and I took the hard way in doing certain things so far at
this point.
One of the things I took the "hard way" in doing was the arpeggios in the guitar during the
"B section" of the song.
http://soundcloud.com/shadefinale/arpeggios
The nice echoing effect you hear was actually 100% notes. That's not a plugin and it took me a very long time to get it that way. It's just the basic broken chord, repeated multiple times slightly after the 100% volume broken chord with less volume every time. If I would've known about a delay plugin in advance, I probably wouldn't have needed to go through so much trouble to get this effect.
The next two revisions aren't much different, but they are still important to talk about. My progress over the next month and a half on the project was very slow, and not much had changed.
http://soundcloud.com/shadefinale/rev2
(You can find rev3 by yourself, they aren't much different but there for my own
documentation purposes.)
I still had the same problems as before.
- I had no idea how to make the drums sound "good."
- I still wasn't paying attention to dynamics in the song, which would've made it a stronger piece.
- The song itself still feels very stiff and harder to listen to.
At this point, I started looking up a bunch of tutorials. One of my favorite group of tutorials were the Warbeats tutorials. If you want some nice, free information on very basic but not always obvious things in FL studio or music making in general on the computer, I highly reccomend watching some of their tutorials.
After some more work, I was much happier with what I had, but not satisfied at all either. At this point, I really had gone much farther than the original summer I wanted to finish this by. It was already late december, and this project of mine was something I had done on and off every week since I had started. Due to all the work I had done, I decided to buy a copy of FL Studio to support Image-Line, since up until that point I was just using my uncle's copy of it. It just sits around, in a box within a box somewhere. Maybe I'll give it to someone else as a gift someday.
Things I had learned from rev3 to rev4 were things like the use of a lowpass-filter, and automation clips, and drums that were better but still not acceptable in my mind.
http://soundcloud.com/shadefinale/rev4
I was getting close to something I was happy with. At this point, I kept looking around for tutorials, and listening more closely to the music I always listened too. A lot of the time for me, I listened to music, but never tried to hear specific parts of the music. I was listening specifically to make drums that sounded good, because they were the weakest part of my project in my eyes.
I also learned about drum samples, and decided to go along with those because they sounded better. I wish I could've sampled my brother's own drums, since he is an avid musician himself, but the technology wasn't there for me.
http://soundcloud.com/shadefinale/drums
Those sounded much better than anything in the revisions I had done. The only other thing I had done was work around with the plugins I had, and mess around with channels in the mixer to make things sound better than they did before. Actually, that's not entirely true. I still made some revisions to the overall song's arrangement. One last thing I did learn was
about pitch bending in the event viewer of a pattern. It really helped me with humanizing of some of the guitar parts, which was pretty much the last thing I learned. At that point I already had did some humanizing through volume levels of individual notes in a pattern, but not of the pitches of the notes in the patterns.
http://soundcloud.com/shadefinale/draft1
I can't work on it anymore, at least not until I can find all the stuff I had used over months of work to make it in the first place.
It was a long process, and a whole lot of work, but I learned so much from doing it.
- Music isn't easy to make sometimes. (Or a lot of the time. Or all the time.)
- Making music is a lot of fun.
- A lot of work goes into making music on the computer, especially making it sound non-
robotic. - A lot of the music that I listen to personally has a lot of hidden nuances that you have
to specifically try to pick out to hear and appreciate. - I like making bulleted lists.
Overall it was a very fun project and I'm likely going to do something with either this or a new song with different instruments. I've been messing around with the zebra demo and it's amazing but since it's the demo it loves to start giving me random notes, which is annoying. If you have never done anything with music making, I highly reccomend it even if you have no experience but enjoy music, it was a blast and very much worth the time I spent on it.
TL;DR
Wanted to remix favorite song from one of favorite childhood games. Don't have much music experience and haven't even really finished but can't work on it anymore.
Started with this:
http://soundcloud.com/shadefinale/original
Ended with this:
http://soundcloud.com/shadefinale/draft1
Now there's something I wanted to put here after the TL;DR so even people who didn't read the blog could answer the question I'm going to ask. One of the things in the TL ten commandments is that everyone should contribute to the site. I lurk on TL all day long sometimes and don't really contribute anything to the site myself, and I'd like to change that. What I am planning on doing if people are interested is conducting a small game on TL.
The basic idea of the game is that someone would ask me to make an arrangement of a vg song, in a specific genre and I'd try to make it happen. Then, the first person who guesses the song correctly gets to choose a song+genre for everyone to listen to and guess as well, and so on. I don't have specifics on time frames for songs, but I'd like to practice more with making music as a hobby and this is one way that I CAN contribute back to such a great place.
Poll: Music game idea?
Interested. (2)
50%
Not interested. (2)
50%
4 total votes
Not interested. (2)
4 total votes
Your vote: Music game idea?
Thanks for reading!
