Golden Diva


Composed by Festerd_Jester for "HARD PLATFORMER II", some Hard Level on LBP2 that I watched my brother and Charger play through. This song was so dope when I heard it that I recorded audio of it the following day (yesterday morning) through SC's shitty fuckin' recorder and spent a good several hours trying to decode everything despite the shitty mic quality. My initial intention was to have it replace Hurry Up!!, but at MarioSpore's suggestion I realized that yeah, this song fits Golden Diva more. That brief lull with the EP makes me think of her swaying motions especially.


You can download the MIDI here, too! Posting it directly with the SC audio because VGMusic doesn't really smile upon tracks that are "unofficial", so to speak. The only real exception that I can think of is The Halloween Hack, and that's only because every-goddamn-body knows what that is (to the point where I probably didn't even have to tell you what it's a hack of and you still probably knew what I was talking about).
 
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I think an interesting gimmick to have in the new Pinball Zone would be to incorporate other aspects of The Building into it, like perhaps one of the rooms could have a Frozen Tundra background, with bits of frosty sky blue and white, like a Penguin habitat at a zoo has its walls painted, knowwhatemsayen-- bits of 40 Below Fridge sort of leaking in, this part of the machine has a Snowman Wario puzzle as part of it, perhaps, and the Yeti monsters from Fiery Cavern's second half could play a part as well? Maybe a Flat Wario puzzle for one of the lower levels, to represent Curious Factory, and the lowest level could have those Archer guys and Fat Wario to represent Toxic Landfill.
The walls in the BG could change the theme from desert to space, or w/e, to "deep underground where the bunker's plumbing is to deep inside a bunker to the arctic circle".

I've always felt that the entire Ruby Passage consisted of different floors of the same building, even the Pinball Zone, and there's a decent amount of evidence to back it up, so this would be a good chance to bring that theory to light in a more obvious way. Plus, this would work as a nice antithesis to OG Pinball Zone's "bright colors getting darker, start in a desert" with its "dark colors getting lighter, end up in the ice equivalent of a desert"

 
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Okay, dudes-- which version of this song do you think should be used as Domino Row for the hack, because I can't decide which I prefer atm:

Original key, 110bpm
Domino key, 116bpm (-300 cents)
 

Attachments

  • I'm Only Sleeping in the Row.mp3
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  • I'm Only Sleeping in the Row -300.mp3
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Both sound great, but if I had to pick, I'd say the first (110bpm). The slower drawl to it feels more reminiscent of Domino Row's track.
 
Both sound great, but if I had to pick, I'd say the first (110bpm). The slower drawl to it feels more reminiscent of Domino Row's track.
Bwokay
i might get some second opinions, but even one source of input is cool, thanks

((the irony is both of these tracks are slower than the real domino row))
 
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Okay, dudes-- which version of this song do you think should be used as Domino Row for the hack, because I can't decide which I prefer atm:

Original key, 110bpm
Domino key, 116bpm (-300 cents)
Personally, I like the Domino key, the key and the notes seem to play a lot more jazzier and calmer than the original key.
 

I finally did what I said I was going to do, and fixed the vocals, tried to get as close as possible to John's cadence and pitch bending, I think I did rather well. I ALSO fixed the Swing, so instead of playing the swing notes on the 4th sixteenths (2 blocks from the next measure as I would know it), they now play about 2 and 1/2 blocks from the next measure, give or take depending on the point in the song.

As a clever way of getting around Wario Land 4's limited simultaneous instrument capacity (that rhythm guitar is LAYERED my negro), I made a separate project file dedicated to splitting the rhythm guitar into its individual components-- on average, every chord sees about 6 notes played at once (due to some number of harmonics heard irl, I'd imagine, or possibly because, since George wasn't particularly busy outside of some pre-recorded guitar solos, he played as a second rhythm guitar-- it'd certainly explain why there was more than 3 notes playing on one channel, but anyway). I split the rhythm guitar(s?) into six separate channels, then spent the next little while arranging them like a good puppet master.

What I ended up going with was a compromise between Direct and Indirect Sounds to make sure that as many of the chords' notes were retained as possible. The highest and lowest layers were made indirect sounds, a 12.5% pulse and 50% pulse, respectively. The fourth, fifth, and third layers (in terms of bottom to top) were made indirect sounds.
The Fourth and Fifth layers were placed in one channel together (aptly named "4th 'n 5th"), set to [63,2] Hotel Horror Strings, the original sound that all these chords'd been set to, and because I'm such a Clever Trevor, I set the Third layer to [30,2] Arabian Nights BG (similar to [63,2], this instrument's sample is a "double sample", so to speak-- it plays whatever note, but ALSO that same note one octave higher), and then I moved this layer one octave lower than it technically should've been, so as to give off the illusion that more notes were being played than there actually were. This is because a given chord for IOS's Rhythm Guitars will vary between having 2-3 iterations of the same note (usually D#/Eb) but on different octaves.
After all that was done, I updated the chords' color-coded "echo notes" to have the proper swing, used the scroll wheel in conjunction with the shift key to give it that strum effect, changed the fine pitch for the Highest to be -6 cents, the Third to be +3 cents, and First to be +3 cents. The end result was something fabulous, and a really sneaky marvel if I do say so myself. PLUS, because of these techniques being employed, you'd have to be really paying attention to know when the Second layer was even missing.

also it's in the wrong key lol

If a bunch'a cats come out of the woodwork and say they prefer the other version, I may still change it, but at the moment I'm less inclined to, as I've shared it a bunch of places already, in its current form.

Update: if you want the very original version, the one that plays at the original 106 BPM, you can get it here
Besides being in the proper key and at the proper speed, it features echo reverb channels for the reverse guitar, which in addition to being played by a [20,2] Percussive Organ uses an elongated Attack Time to actually sound like it's playing in reverse, and on top of that the Fine Pitch for the rhythm section is much more crisp and vigorous, though the latter of these adjectives is more-so due to being in a different key: the pitches blend together differently.
 
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110 BPM for no reason other than that it sounds just so damn good.
If you go to the SoundCloud page for it there's a link to the pre-Sappy version on Google Drive that has more of the original FX, and the rhythm section sounds more crisp imo, but that's because of FL
 
Wario? More like WariOKE.
wario lawl.png
 
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