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1

Music / Re: Favourite Soundtrack per platform

« on: October 30, 2023, 08:49:19 PM »

• N64: Mario Kart 64 (This game has dang memorable music. About the only tracks' themes I've never hummed are Bowser's Castle, Banshee Boardwalk, and DK's Jungle Parkway. I've even hummed the award ceremony theme before! Diddy Kong Racing isn't far behind, though, and I like F-Zero X's OST a lot.)

This is one I've listened to before, and it's one of my favourites too! I don't think I checked out the other two you mentioned.

• GCN: Mario Kart: Double Dash!! (It's possible that this OST is even better than Mario Kart 64's. More consonant tunes, still as lively as ever, and not-completely standard chord progressions and senses of key!)

I am a big fan of the music of the Mario Kart series in general, but Double Dash!! is one of the entries I appreciate less. It's certainly a good soundtrack, it just doesn't speak to me as much.

• PC: The Incredible Machine (OK, I may be cheating by naming a series instead of a single game, but the sheer number of different genres covered by the first few games' OSTs is incredible. Want anything from ragtime, Latin, classical, progressive rock, techno, and New Age to bluegrass? You've got it. The quality of each piece stays surprisingly even throughout, IMO, and it's intriguing to hear the differences in takes between the MIDI-generated versions and the CD versions of each song.)

I evaded your cheat by only listening to the soundtrack from the first game. I like it! Nice variety indeed, and they're all good, indeed.

• PS3: Hard Corps: Uprising (After learning of this game's soundtrack from a semi-random VGM website, I listened to the entire OST and was hooked. This has great, elaborate rock/metal music, complete with solos, and it's hard to go wrong with any of the songs if you're into that kind of stuff, IMO.)

I'm not too much into metal, but wow, this was very impressive! I loved the variety between the different tracks. If I'm looking for some 'rough' music in the future, I hope I'll remember this soundtrack!

2

Piano Arrangements / Re: 607's Arrangements

« on: November 28, 2022, 09:49:10 PM »

I'm still intending to submit the Wario Land arrangements/transcriptions at some point. However, in some kind of envy I don't want to do so before I publish my performances, and I have been practising very rarely lately (I've been playing worship instead). As mentioned before, I've arranged the entire Lucky Luke soundtrack for piano, and now and then I've been writing those down in MuseScore (I only did two during the arrangement process).
I might submit some of those soon, after getting into Finale Notepad. However, with quite some of them I find it challenging to figure out what rhythmic notation I should use. I might get into drumming, maybe that will give me more of a feel for it. I have most trouble with deciding between two speeds, e.g. 172 bpm with the melody in 8th notes or 86 bpm with the melody in 16th notes. Anyway, there are some where I was able to decide on a tempo to notate in! (and hopefully I was right )
Here's one of the scores, do you see any issues with it, other than the formatting?

Let me know if it'd be better to attach a pdf or MusicXML file, rather than an image.

3

Forum Games / Re: The NSM Guess-That-Melody Quiz!

« on: January 07, 2022, 11:05:40 AM »

This sounds fun!
I'll try to participate.

4

Piano Arrangements / Re: 607's Arrangements

« on: January 05, 2022, 01:45:46 PM »

[I had responded to the rest of Dekkadeci's post first, but it turned out to be useless due to the confusion hopefully cleared up below.]

If what you mean by "rip" is YouTube video, then I apologize. My understanding of the word "rip" is that it means any attempt at transcription or rearrangement that does not involve simply recording the audio from the game.

Okay, I should have read this before. That explains the confusion.
Here's some info!
A rip is data copied from another medium, such as a cd. In this case, the rips were done from Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges. This is generally more reliable than recording from the console, because when you are recording, you might also record static, or have sound effects obscure the recording, or just have poor equipment, etc. You mentioned nsf: this is a format for NES and Famicom rips. NES rips are almost always accurate, in my experience, as long as you get them from a reliable source (eg. Zophar's Domain). So are Game Boy rips (gbs), which is relevant here. Of course it is still indeed important to check against the original console, as for example, all rips you'll find of The Smurfs for Game Boy are in mono, while in the game there is an option to have the music play in stereo instead. Note that ripping is only reliable for platforms that have a sound chip. It is very hard to rip GBA games, and when you do manage, the result often ends up sounding slightly different (mostly higher quality) than it does in game. This is because the GBA does not have a sound chip, and sound is managed by the CPU.

If your arrangements are accepted, it seems likely that mine would too! Especially because you also use slowing down of the video.
It could still be that my arrangements are too accurate, though. You mention arrangement choices, but I don't have to make these in this case, as I'm arranging tracks that can be played on piano with two hands without leaving out any notes (except the percussion on tracks that have it), so it's probably more of a transcription than an arrangement.

5

Piano Arrangements / Re: 607's Arrangements

« on: January 03, 2022, 05:09:07 PM »

The only rips I trust for transcription purposes are ones straight from the makers (e.g. the OST for the original Shovel Knight, the OST of early Incredible Machine games, Team Fortress 2 OST music, La-Mulana's OST, Cohen's Masterpiece from Bioshock, whatever .nsf's you can find at www.zophar.net). If the rip was fan-made, treat it with several grains of salt, especially the moment it diverges from the original music. (Let's put it this way: I generally cannot trust MIDIs from VGMusic after repeatedly finding inaccuracies in them.)

Music you find at Zophar's Domain isn't straight from the makers. Nevertheless, in my experience Game Boy rips from Zophar are usually accurate, and I have no doubt that these are. Also, VGMusic doesn't host rips, only fan-made MIDIs. These are not useful in the arrangement process except to novices, as indeed they usually are inaccurate.
That's not relevant to my question, though. When I previously used a rip in an arrangement, Levi and Maestro explained that this was not allowed. However, in that case I directly used the rip in my arrangement. This time, I 'only' used a WAV render of it. I did not even listen to the separate channels, let alone use MIDI data obtained from them. So I'm wondering if maybe this is allowed.
And if not, I would be curious what is, even though I don't think I'm ever going to do arrangements by listening to the tracks in the game itself once or twice, and then doing everything from memory.

6

Piano Arrangements / Re: 607's Arrangements

« on: January 01, 2022, 06:05:10 PM »

Well, here we go again.
I have got back to my old Wario Land medley, starting by redoing all my arrangements by ear and making transcriptions.
I'm wondering if NinSheetMusic would be interested in the transcriptions?
I didn't look at note data, this time, or even listen to individual channels: I did listen to a rip very many times, including replaying one part a few times in a row, and in some cases playing back at half speed using Audacity's 'Change Tempo' effect. Also, as far as I know, my transcriptions are accurate. I do not take artistic liberties unless needed.
Here is an example of part of a recently done arrangement.

Through the Thorny Maze from Wario Land II

What do you think? Do these cross the line also?

7

Music / Re: Restored soundtracks

« on: November 27, 2021, 08:51:55 PM »

I guess I'm confused are you doing some of the restorations?  I've definitely seen some restorations like One Winged Angel and Gangplank Galleon.

Is there anything for Super Metroid out there?

Nope, I haven't looked into it much.
Looks like someone's doing Super Metroid stuff!

8

Music / Restored soundtracks

« on: November 17, 2021, 06:45:17 PM »

Hi, it's me again!

For the past year or so, restored video game tracks (sometimes termed differently) have been popping up on YouTube. Have you noticed this?
For these projects, people ripped the song data from the game, looked for the samples used in synthesizers available at the time, and replaced the samples stored on the cartridge with uncompressed samples.
I am quite excited about it, but it also creates some tough decisions. For example, for your regular listening, will you listen to a high-quality rip of the Donkey Kong Country 2 soundtrack, or will you listen to a restored version?
More specifically to me, yesterday The Brickster uploaded a restored version of the entire Mario Kart: Super Circuit soundtrack. It's great, but the individual tracks often don't sound as great to me as they do in Cloou's version, who doesn't have the entire soundtrack available. What do I listen to?
Have you already looked up your favourite soundtrack with highly compressed samples to see if someone's already put restored tracks on YouTube?? Let me know what you're excited about!

9

Music / Re: What kind of music do you like?

« on: November 17, 2021, 06:21:33 PM »

I only listen to video game music or other electronic-type music but mostly just video game music

Yeah, but it's really hard to name, isn't it?
This might be interesting and relevant to discuss. Video game music isn't a genre, is it? I often say I compose chiptune when people ask me for the genre (or even 'music for old computers', as they won't know the term), but of course there are different genres in chiptune too. You can make DnB, dubstep, jazz... but what to call the vast majority of tracks, that don't sound like a 'main-stream' genre? Classical? Or just chiptune?
How about games that don't have chiptune soundtracks? Is soundtrack a genre? Maybe it is. But the average film soundtrack does seem to differ from the average video game soundtrack. What's the difference?
Lots of interesting questions, but I don't currently have any answers, I'm afraid...

10

Music / Re: Favourite Soundtrack per platform

« on: September 19, 2021, 08:12:12 PM »

Genesis: Sonic the Hedgehog 2

I'd heard most of the tracks before, but not the credits. Nice medley! All themes are great, with lots of catchy phrases, and very good basslines. I should probably listen to this one more often! What a classic.

Dreamcast: Sonic Adventure 2

I hadn't heard anything from this before, and it was quite an experience... It is quite varied, with as a common feature that most tracks are not fit for studying. I really hated Throw It All Away, and I didn't enjoy the hip hop tracks either. Maybe mostly because I don't like that style of music. However, I in fact didn't like any of the lyrics in the soundtrack. I enjoyed the instrumental versions a lot better! Nice sounds, quite groovy, and good drums and bass. Event: The Base was a pleasant surprise. Very chill!
It's interesting how different this is from the Sonic soundtrack above.

XBOX 360: Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

I'm not sure if I even knew of the game before listening, but this is a great soundtrack! Typical Grant Kirkhope. It also reminds me of Chicken Run (which is good!). Exploring The Terrarium is really cool!

PS: Crash Bandicoot 2

I didn't enjoy this one a lot. For some reason it sounds very unnatural to me. Of course most of these soundtracks are programmed and not performed, but it somehow is a lot more jarring to me in this one. I liked some of the rhythms, but found the melodies uncaptivating.

PC: Neverhood

Well, that's quite unique. I love it, though! Really creative uses of vocals, especially. Some tracks were a bit too crazy for my liking, but there were lots that I could really appreciate.

Thanks for your recommendations, MaestroUGC! Took me two years to get through them.

11

Music / Re: What kind of music do you like?

« on: September 19, 2021, 07:04:53 PM »

Hm, I'm not sure how to understand 'what kind'... although if you would ask me what kind of music I didn't like, I would probably be able to answer. I tend to like minimalism, jazz, rock and metal, I guess... it's a bit hard to say, because I almost exclusively listen to video game and film music, and they often aren't in as clear-cut genres as pop music. Am I mistaken?

12

Music / Re: Helpful videos/channels for playing accordion

« on: August 08, 2021, 11:39:45 AM »

That's a lot of resources, thanks! Maybe I'll look at some of them when/if I get back into accordeon.

13

Gaming / Re: What are you playing right now?

« on: August 08, 2021, 11:38:13 AM »

I was playing quite some different games (7 at once), and was intending to not start playing new ones until I had beaten most of them. I beat two of them, but then did pick up Super Mario Bros. 2 (J) again. But then I signed up to the GP day at the Super Mario Kart Tournament (http://www.ffsmk.org/?task=agenda), unexpectedly, and since then I've only been playing that, in hopes to practise enough to at least stand a chance at beating the CPUs.

14

Music / Re: What Nintendo soundtracks would you most want to see released?

« on: December 30, 2020, 03:33:15 PM »

I would say Super Smash Bros. Brawl for sure. Anytime I look up SSBB CD it just comes up with the in-game item.

Oh yes, I can imagine wanting that one! It would have to be a big set, though, isn't the soundtrack rather long?

15

Music / Re: What Nintendo soundtracks would you most want to see released?

« on: December 23, 2020, 04:01:28 PM »

Given the way Nintendo acts I wish they would partner with someone and make a music streaming service.  I know that's hardly the same as owning soundtracks (and not likely considering how Nintendo likes to tie their soundtracks up in game players) but I feel like that would be the easiest way to access everything.

Hm, why do you think they would be more likely to do that? They do like to be special, don't they? :/ It would be a lot more convenient to have the soundtracks on YouTube and Spotify, though, and preferably available for purchase (cd and/or digital download) too...