tahutoa:

  • Waa

    Votes: 11 61.1%
  • Naa

    Votes: 7 38.9%

  • Total voters
    18
  • Poll closed .
Well hopefully you can acquire enough skill to not have to rely on other people's MIDIs as crutches.
Okay, well that was rude.
1. At the moment, it's because I lack the time to create them from scratch, and 2. if I did have time, it would also come down to how much I liked the song they were asking for. I would still be making these things for free, you know.
3. I always strive for the highest level of quality possible when I start a project, so if a song turns out to be complex as fuck, to the point where it actually is beyond my capabilities, it may just end up never being published, because I refuse to half-ass the project like so many other MIDI-makers do. My ancient waarangement for Ghostly Garden, the FLP that I turned into a MIDI took me six goddamn days in a row to complete.
 
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Well then, what more do you do beyond changing the instrument sets of MIDIs in Synthfont if requests are something that requires as much time and effort as you say?
 
Well then, what more do you do beyond changing the instrument sets of MIDIs in SynthFont if requests are something that requires as much time and effort as you say?
Although I didn't really imply it all that well, I meant it in the sense that if they request a song, and I really like the song, I'm going to try to make a MIDI for it myself, because I would enjoy doing so. Because I don't have time at the moment, I'm stuck with only being able to draw from others' MIDIs, which isn't as satisfying, but hey, if I notice any discrepancies between the MIDI and the original song I'm FIXING IT GODDAMMIT. That's what I did for I'm Blue, that request JAWF made last week(?).
Other times, I do things like WL4II's Toy Block Tower, which is more in line with what most people think arranging is, and fuck around with the actual contents a whole bunch. It's also what I did for WL4II's Domino Row, though in both of these cases the nature of my changes were different.
 
Hmm alright then I think I misunderstood. I thought you meant something different but it seems I was mistaken. Carry on.
 
If you know where I can get some MIDIs for them, sure. Otherwise, it may be a little bit.
Just play it by ear, hermano, that's how I've learned to play a few. If you have D. I. Y. you can look into the microgames' music, I bet you can do a lot of interesting stuff with that!
 
@Just a Wario Fan I think I've found out what instrument [30,2] Arabian Nights BG might be. Do you know what the name of that instrument starting around Measures 15-16 is? The "Bleng gleng gleng gleng gleng gleng gleeenglelelelelelenggg" thing. It sounds like a sort of guitar-ish instrument...? The fuckin' strumento di gondolier.
but anyway, I am convinced that whatever that instrument is, Arabian Nights BG is made up of that. That, layered with a piano sound, MAYBE, although the quality of the sample makes it questionable as to A) what kind, B) to what extent, and 3) whether or not I'm right about this to begin with. Honestly I think it's just the lute(?) thing, because it's almost a perfect match just by itself

edit: goddammit i forgot to explicitly say "not the sitar". Oh well, at least dude confirmed the other thing as a mandolin.
 

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For my Pro Tools "video" project, I have to do editing on this commercial for Glad trash bags. Wouldn't you know it, fucking Tom Kane doing his Clone Wars narrator voice is the final screen's VO audio. BUT. By far, the highlight is the voice of the King. He's like Tommy Wiseau and Mr. Toad and a posh dandy at once.
 
Some questions:
MIDI's. What are they? (And yes, for plural abbreviations you use an apostrophe. Looking at YOU, hypocrites.)
Soundfonts. What?
How could I get into this kind of thing?
 
Some questions:
MIDI's. What are they? (And yes, for plural abbreviations you use an apostrophe. Looking at YOU, hypocrites.)
Musical Instrument Digital Interface. Files that utilize it work in exactly the same way as "piano rolls", the cylinders utilized by self-playing pianos, only they support automations such as pitch bend.
Soundfonts. What?
These are the files that give MIDIs their flavor (outside of any self-created synth sounds). Similar to how this font right here gives the text a different vibe to it, different soundfonts give songs a different sound. Compare the original Mario theme from SMB with the version from Mario All-Stars with the version from Super Mario Sunshine with the version from New Super Mario Bros. Those differences you hear (give or take artistic liberties such as All-Star's SNES drum samples and the Finger Snaps from Sunshine)
How could I get into this kind of thing?
Well, you could grab some of those .sf2's I posted, and go searching for SynthFont. Once you have all your soundfonts in your SynthFont's "soundfonts" folder, all you have to do is find some MIDI files and plug in the soundfont you want for each channel.
You can even make edits to the contents of the MIDI channels to change the drums around if they're incompatible. Take a look at this file.
Herein, I added in WL4's [127] preset for much of the drums because [128], the token drum preset, was lacking in the sounds I needed.

In short, MIDIs are wonderful, phenomenal things. I think you saw that link to my EarthBound remix of the Biolizard (right?). That was made using MIDI, it's just somewhat harder to tell because of the sounds I used. Believe it or not, Dark Souls uses MIDI for its soundtrack. So did Red Faction. It's just harder to tell because of the high quality sounds and the intensive amount of editing that went into making the instruments' "playing" sound more organic.
You know how Wario Land 4's music sounds really organic, like it was actually being played for real? That's because it probably was, on a MIDI controller, which took the details of the composer's playing and turned them into data. That's why songs like 40 Below Fridge sound so alive, even if the contents of the song make it seem like it shouldn't be quite to that level.
 

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Thanks! This was all very useful!
When I pull together something listen -worthy, I'll let you know! So, you know, in about three months.
Before I just had to use music makers like Bosca Ceoil!
 
Bleng gleng gleng gleng gleng gleng gleeenglelelelelelenggg

I think it's a mandoline, an instrument that does indeed look a bit like a guitar or a lute.

But the instrument used in Arabian Night is almost certainly a sitar, an Indian string instrument that VGM composers just love to put in their Arabian / desert / Arabian desert themes.
For example:


 
I think it's a mandoline, an instrument that does indeed look a bit like a guitar or a lute.

But the instrument used in Arabian Night is almost certainly a sitar, an Indian string instrument that VGM composers just love to put in their Arabian / desert / Arabian desert themes.
For example:





No, not the Sitar, the backing instrument. And yeah I actually was thinking to myself "is that what a mandolin is...?"
 
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I think it's a mandoline, an instrument that does indeed look a bit like a guitar or a lute.

But the instrument used in Arabian Night is almost certainly a sitar, an Indian string instrument that VGM composers just love to put in their Arabian / desert / Arabian desert themes.
For example:

dude, that pirate's tits are fuckin' enormous

Yeah, there's NO WAY it's not a Mandolin. I inserted the Touhou soundfont and felt around with the WL4 sample for the note it was probably recorded at. I lowered the Cut on the Touhou insert, and upon playing it back, I could now safely say that the only difference here besides compression level was the low string being played louder than the high string like in WL4's.
 

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Artistry Class had, as one of its final discussion boards, a prompt to go over any observations we'd made related to being an artist.
Not necessarily just the things talked about in the course, but relevant topics/observations/thought provokers. This is the post I made.

tahutoa said:
There are a few things I've picked up in the last couple years that I think are worth logging the observations I'd had.
Once, I saw an artist create a post on their Tumblr blog that talked about how they were all discouraged. The gist of it was: though they were doing what they enjoyed, they brought up how they'd been at it for two years or so, yet their follower count (at the time) was about 40 or so, if memory serves, and they wondered if continuing to create was even worth it.
I wrote something in the post's footnotes along the lines of "if you enjoy what you do, then you should keep doing it. Eventually you'll gain a following. Even if you don't, though, it's still worth pursuing because it's something you enjoy doing." My brain gave me an excellent analogy for what I was talking about and I wish I'd thought of it back then; "an audience is like dust. Give it enough time and it'll start to build up." I haven't looked at that person's page since, but for what it's worth, I hope they're more prosperous now, for their sake, because they were a quality act.

Another observation I made in the past; last summer, every day when I'd sit down at my computer, without fail, I would have absolutely no drive to do any work. If I just opened the program and fooled with it, though, within an hour I'd be brimming with inspiration.
What I took away from this was, even if you don't think there's any way you could get motivated to do something on that day, all you need to do is get that thing that gets your creative energy up. In my case, that would be as simple as making sure I'm at my computer. At that time especially, I only would've been doing stuff I could also do at the computer as it stood, so I didn't have anything to lose. Other times, I'd work on the project I lacked motivation for at the moment anyway. Sure enough, around twenty minutes in, I'm totally getting into it.

Some artists draw from their own personal life/history for creating their songs, but the idea of me myself going about it so "literally" rubs me the wrong way, if you take my meaning. A lot of chart toppers are essentially witness testimonies with a hook and bridge in between, and I don't understand why you'd feel the need to out someone like that. I can understand why so many songs tie into emotions and aesthetics, granted, but even for instrumentals I can't quite picture myself doing anything similar. However, that isn't to say that finding ways of "converting" the abstract to audio, so to speak, is something to sneeze at. The ethereal, the mystical, those sorts of vibes that don't entirely originate from within the human heart, those are a lot easier to envision "audio conversion" projects for. That's why songs like "Black Hole Sun" appeal to me more than "Angels Deserve to Die". They aren't entirely unlike each other, I think, but the former is a bit more detached, like an outside observer, whereas the latter comes off more like a "conversion" of the original emotion designed to cover its intricacies.

I've found, in my experience, that composers can take inspiration from much the same things that painters do. They can take a look at a box. Sure, it's an ordinary box, but it you think about it in terms of "what can I imagine is happening inside this box?", then you might think to yourself, "oh, that looks like a fun time, all those things these little people are getting up to in there". In my case I'd think about the next step in terms of video game soundtracks, so I would follow up on that sentiment with "I wonder what the stage theme for this area would sound like?"
I would then proceed to find a way of recreating that exact visual I'd thought of in audio form. By the time that I considered to be the end of the project, I know I would be satisfied with it, that it matched up with the imagery to the best of its ability.
 
tahutoa said:
Art represents truth in a way that facts can not. Facts are unbiased: as a result, some aspects of the "truth" are lost when a point is made to be absolutely objective with the final record. The inverse of this is also true: in the case of every event where "you had to be there" to truly have all the information, it is impossible to get the full picture if all you have are the objective facts. The reason so many curricula are terrible and horrifically boring is because they are little more than a collection of facts with the occasional bit of flavor text. They lack that human element that elevates "fact" to "truth".
To have a really good teacher is to have truth rather than facts. It's not that Mr. Wilson makes Math fun, what he does is he takes these things and looks at them from a subjective viewpoint. He looks at them from his actual, human perspective. Any way you look at it, facts do not become interesting until your humanity can form an opinion on them. You could see a fact about how long a lion's mane jellyfish is in your spare time and think "wow, that's really interesting", but chances are, you could have been fed those very same sentences by a teacher in class, but forgot because of the context the info was delivered in.
(...)
From a certain point of view, art can be seen as more "true" than the world we actually see before us. This is because the image combines both the real and the subjective; what was perceived, but also how it was perceived. The latter aspect is a valuable form of documentation in itself, because it is a reflection of how something "truly" was at the time. Toulouse-Lautrec's "At the Moulin Rouge" is a famous example of what I'm talking about. If it weren't for the painting, then for all we would know the joint could have been as prestigious and lovely as members of the high life would have the common man believe. However, we know because of analysis that the painting portrays the atmosphere, giving form to the very context of the situation, and suddenly the classy bar is caked in a surreal, green haze, jagged angles and inconsistent perspective activating the same feelings in our brain that we would've felt if we'd been there, in the actual bar as someone who had the full context of the situation. Similar to how a stressful situation can make unchanged objects somehow look completely different to our eyes, or people can "look" different after you learn something new about them, whether that be good or bad-- as if they suddenly had been painted in a different light.
Aristotle believed that, through imitation, through art, that people could come to understand concepts, feelings, situations, and ideas that they would otherwise not understand. (...) Aristotle believed that strong imitations of action—great art—provided an understanding of the world and of human society that was far more insightful, far truer, than a factual or historical accounting of the past.
Okay, so I accidentally came to the exact same conclusions as Aristotle.

What sucks is I did so through making my own observations, but because I have to include one of these quotes that I completely glossed over from the lesson, it'll look like I was explaining in more detail what the lesson alluded to instead of proposing an idea.

Edit: well, actually, what the first quote implies is a bit more vague than what I went over, so phew, my ego is saved.
 
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Okay, so I accidentally came to the exact same conclusions as Aristotle.

What sucks is I did so through making my own observations, but because I have to include one of these quotes that I completely glossed over from the lesson, it'll look like I was explaining in more detail what the lesson alluded to instead of proposing an idea.

Edit: well, actually, what the first quote implies is a bit more vague than what I went over, so phew, my ego is saved.
Here's the full essay, if you want to read it
Art represents truth in a way that facts can not. Facts are unbiased: as a result, some aspects of the "truth" are lost when a point is made to be absolutely objective with the final record. The inverse of this is also true: in the case of every event where "you had to be there" to truly have all the information, it is impossible to get the full picture if all you have are the objective facts. The reason so many curricula are terrible and horrifically boring is because they are little more than a collection of facts with the occasional bit of flavor text. They lack that human element that elevates "fact" to "truth".
To have a really good teacher is to have truth rather than facts. It's not that Mr. Wilson makes Math fun, what he does is he takes these things and looks at them from a subjective viewpoint. He looks at them from his actual, human perspective. Any way you look at it, facts do not become interesting until your humanity can form an opinion on them. You could see a fact about how long a lion's mane jellyfish is in your spare time and think "wow, that's really interesting", but chances are, you could have been fed those very same sentences by a teacher in class, but forgot because of the context the info was delivered in.

Picasso stated that his paintings are "of what he has found, not what he is looking for". He 'did not understand' the importance placed on research by modern art for one simple reason: he didunderstand that truth does not necessarily have to be factual. "Among the several sins that I have been accused of committing, none is more false than the one that I have, as the principal objective in my work, the spirit of research. When I paint, my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for." In other words, there could be several inaccuracies regarding the portrayed event. However, this is irrelevant to a certain degree, because he wasn't trying to paint facts, he was painting 'the facts as he saw them', because that is more or less the foundation of truth. Truth is a lens, and a lop-sided one at that: if one's bias is strong enough, it becomes possible to denystone-cold facts, based entirely on the grounds that they contradict "the truth". That the truth is very obviously so easily corrupted is why it is infinitely more dangerous. Facts are incorruptible, but Truth is infallible.

From a certain point of view, art can be seen as more "true" than the world we actually see before us. This is because the image combines both the real and the subjective; what was perceived, but also how it was perceived. The latter aspect is a valuable form of documentation in itself, because it is a reflection of how something "truly" was at the time. Toulouse-Lautrec's "At the Moulin Rouge" is a famous example of what I'm talking about. If it weren't for the painting, then for all we would know the joint could have been as prestigious and lovely as members of the high life would have the common man believe. However, we know because of analysis that the painting portrays the atmosphere, giving form to the very context of the situation, and suddenly the classy bar is caked in a surreal, green haze, jagged angles and inconsistent perspective activating the same feelings in our brain that we would've felt if we'd been there, in the actual bar as someone who had the full context of the situation. Similar to how a stressful situation can make unchanged objects somehow look completely different to our eyes, or people can "look" different after you learn something new about them, whether that be good or bad-- almost as if they suddenly had been painted in a different light. Aristotle believed in something similar: "through imitation, through art, (...) people could come to understand concepts, feelings, situations, and ideas that they would otherwise not understand."

On a personal level, these ideas that I've proposed I feel have some amount of hold on my work already. For example, my "Jungle Courtyard" composition is to its cover artwork what "At the Moulin Rouge" was to the artist's predispositions towards what the painting represented; I firmly believe that the song represents the image fully and totally. In my own mind, the combined visuals of the wooden fence enclosing all this lush plant life, the tree-like plant poking out from beneath a blanket of ivy leaves lining the dilapidated confines of the poolside area-- to me, this is what that sounded like. A sealed off ecosystem, born amongst evidence of a time long past, flourishing. Mysterious, a little sad, almost, but very mystical and intriguing.
My family's dilapidated poolside area just out the back of my house was the subject of the photo, and it looked the way it did because Summer hadn't yet started, so we didn't believe there was much need to do anything about it yet. The reason everything looks so lush and vibrant is we'd had one of those rainy days where for some reason the sky dials back on the blues and cranks the global red and green values up by eleven percent. Those are the facts. The effect that everything becoming so green after the rain had on the fence was it actually looked somewhat brown again, and almost waterlogged like a rainforest. The fact that everything was so green caused all these weeds and ivy leaves to look so beautiful and fantastic that I had to get a photo of the view. That is the truth. Neither of these things are technically incorrect, however only one of them is based on hard, statistical evidence. The other's basis lies entirely within personal beliefs, but because of its subjective nature can't technically be disproven. The same thing goes for the position I'd taken regarding the composition I created.

Art is inherently linked to the concept of truth, because both of them are rooted in the subjective. Because of this link, there are times when art can be "truer" than factual recordings. Art draws heavily from the observations the human mind makes about the world, combining the perceived and how the object was perceived. If the artist is skilled enough, they can find a way to give the viewer context without a single word, as with Toulouse-Lautrec's "Moulin Rouge" painting. It all comes down to that human element. With my own music, I have demonstrated that it is possible to do something similar using audio. In the future, I'd like to do something like that again, too.
 
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