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Quintus

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1 hour ago, Disco Stu said:

This seems like a weird distinction to make.  The way I feel is that he wrote the music for the SNES soundchip so of course if there is a such a thing as an "intended score" for a 16-bit videogame like there might be for a film, it would be the music as he realized it for the game.  What makes the original samples interesting isn't that it's how the music is "supposed" to sound, but that we get a glimpse under the hood into Kondo's work process.

 

That depends, I suppose. The transition to samples (roughly "from 8 bit to 16 bit sound chips") was a big one and totally changed the way game music was created. It might even be comparable to the switch from analogue to digital recordings of "real" sounds. Anything before samples is basically defined by an algorithm and can be "remastered" by running the same algorithm on modern hardware, possibly with better quality or better options (e.g. stereo panning). (Although, as I mentioned before, especially on the SID, many techniques were based on leveraging hardware flaws, which aren't easy to replicate in emulators, so the original may still sound better, or some effects may be lost in translation).

 

(One trick on the SID consisted of quickly flipping the master channel volume, which on the original chip produced an unintended clicking noise. When done well this could be used to play low quality samples on a channel that didn't even "exist" in the hardware - it basically extended the native 3 synth channels with an additional 4th sampling channel)

 

Once the switch to samples was made, many of the original sound wizards embraced them. After all, they offered entirely new possibilities - new sounds, and also a way to put multiple sounds (e.g. chords) into a single sample. Nevertheless, the early chips (and the available memory at the time) often only allowed for rather low quality samples. So the switch to 16 bit also often meant trading crystal clear synth music for low bitrate/low frequency samples. And often these samples sound worse than I believe they would have if higher frequencies and larger sample values had been available. In these cases, the released music may well have been a compromise between the "original" composition and the available hardware.

 

How much of that applies always depends on the specific project, of course.

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46 minutes ago, Jay said:

Lol, Google just recommended this article to me and it perfectly explains the project, none of us would have been confused if it was posted at the start of all this! 

 

https://www.polygon.com/2021/2/5/22268601/super-mario-world-soundtrack-restored-remaster-gigaleak

Yeah, I saw it in a NintendoLife article, which I considered posting, but I wanted cut out the middleman and use the direct source

 

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The bit in the article about seeing "fantasy" in a sample name in the source code and them realizing it must be the "fantasia" sample from the Roland system kind of clicked everything into place for me about how this all works 

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As others have said, it's a really cool project, and also shows how sneaky these composers had to be sometimes (re-sampling propietary instrument sounds in some cases), but overall I prefer the original more often than not.

 

The SNES was notorios difficult to write music for, using a pain-in-the-ass programming language that required lots of trial and error...I believe Kondo was still the main programmer of his music until the N64 days, where he strictly focused on the composition and let someone else handle the technical nitty gritty of compiling and implementing the music in the hardware, so it's all but guaranteed he knew the compression of the samples and adjusted accordingly. This probably played a huge part in making all these disparate sound sources sound simpático with each other, and married them using the obscene DSP (reverb/echo) that was baked into the SPC700 soundchip.

 

Interestingly, while Nintendo massively bungled the GBA sound, it actually allowed for better, cleaning sounding samples than that of the SNES'.

 

 

6 hours ago, Marian Schedenig said:

After all, they offered entirely new possibilities - new sounds, and also a way to put multiple sounds (e.g. chords) into a single sample.

 

Tim Follins was a master of this, using these techniques to really push past boundaries and create music for the systems he worked on that you just don't hear anywhere else.

 

 

 

:o

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  • 2 weeks later...

1:00 - 1:50 Typical Uematsu :pfft: Beautiful melodies :lovethis:

 

 

Mmm I really like what they did here with one of my favorite tunes. Although the original is better, they brought the choir from the original track (the beginning) and dropped the melody over it.

 

 

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On 2/16/2021 at 7:58 PM, SilverTrumpet said:

Anyone catch that FF VII orchestral concert they streamed? 

 

I checked it out!  It was pretty good, but not great.

 

It partly suffered from the same problem the official FF VII Remake Orchestral Arrangement album has, which is taking pieces that were already purely orchestral on the FF VII Remake OST and basically playing them straight-forward with little adaptation - and them all being pieces done in a similar orchestral setting before the Remake existed anyway.  But this is so much longer they also do a ton of other selections, some of which are notably different from the OST versions.

 

The funniest one was Stand Up, which has a female vocal on the Remake OST and is sun by a hilarious deep male choir here.  That same choir did a good job on One Winged Angel though, and the vocalist for Hollow really put his heart and soul into that!

 

A lot of the arrangements and performance are pretty great, with a notable exception: The brass section frequently struggles and has these awful, shrill sounding renditions throughout the whole set.  Big bummer!  Everyone else is pretty great thought.

 

Thanks for posting about this, or I might have never known about it!

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If anybody here is curious about the music in Fire Emblem Heroes but doesn't want to actually play it, Nintendo made an official video with 100 minutes of score

 

The description has a clickable link to jump to each track

 

 

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  • 1 month later...
On 2/26/2021 at 10:07 AM, Jay said:

If anybody here is curious about the music in Fire Emblem Heroes but doesn't want to actually play it, Nintendo made an official video with 100 minutes of score

 

The description has a clickable link to jump to each track

 

 

 

Playing that game made me feel like I'd end up on a list, so I'm glad for this.

 

 

On 4/21/2021 at 8:03 AM, Disco Stu said:

One of the catchiest melodies ever written IMO

 

 

 

 

This has been stuck in my head for 20 years soooooo

 

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32 minutes ago, SilverTrumpet said:

Playing that game made me feel like I'd end up on a list, so I'm glad for this.

 

:lol:

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On 4/27/2021 at 6:19 AM, SilverTrumpet said:

 

Playing that game made me feel like I'd end up on a list, so I'm glad for this.

 

 

 

 

This has been stuck in my head for 20 years soooooo

 

 

I've written themes similar (and much better than this) where both melody and harmony follow a perfectly flowing trajectory but don't themselves match up every instance. It ends up working like a great puzzle, as though there exists a resolving counterpoint, however I'm not sure how to react to the above sample.

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On 4/21/2021 at 8:03 AM, Disco Stu said:

One of the catchiest melodies ever written IMO

 

 

Reminds me of this:

 

 

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2 minutes ago, Falco said:

Reminds me of this:

 

 

 

Oof, Minish Cap should get a remake just to rescue the soundtrack from the horrid GBA sound hardware.  Nice tune though.

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11 minutes ago, Disco Stu said:

 

Oof, Minish Cap should get a remake just to rescue the soundtrack from the horrid GBA sound hardware.  Nice tune though.

Can't find it now, but someone did put out a version that was rendered outside of the GBA hardware, using the original samples.

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  • 1 month later...

Re: SNES score remasters.

 

I first learned people were doing this when my boy Sam Miller started his DKC restoration project. Since then I've learned that people are doing it to N64 games as well. This Youtuber is doing an excellent job of restoring the scores in higher quality sound, but he's emulating how they are heard in game as best as he can as opposed to following official CD release mixes.

 

 

He answers questions about his process in this thread on ResetEra:

 

N64 Music Remastered in High Quality (Video-Game OST HQ) | ResetEra

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  • 4 weeks later...

WOOOOOOOOOOOW I can't wait to listen to this!

FFIV is easily my favorite video game score of all time, based purely on nostalgia reasons (like, I know it's not the best score ever written, but I love it more than any other score because of the impact it had on me at the time)

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It is a Masterpiece.

And I had a real hard time selecting the songs to create that medley, there is just so much goodness in that OST !

I just knew I had to cover all 4 battle themes ( which all sound FANTASTIC ) plus that majestic Ending Theme :D

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Finally checked it out Marc.  Amazing medley!  Fantastically performed!  I loved the instrument choices.  Great stuff

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12 hours ago, Jay said:

Finally checked it out Marc.  Amazing medley!  Fantastically performed!  I loved the instrument choices.  Great stuff

 

Thank you !

Always a fantastic experience for me to put these all together.

From arranging the whole thing to receiving all of the tracks from the musicians (and often being blown away by what they've just sent me ^^), mixing it and coming up with fun visuals for the video... I just love doing these !

 

17 hours ago, SilverTrumpet said:

#tbt to the three great FF4 arrangements from Game Music Concert:

 

Yeah those are beautiful !

I can only imagine Uematsu's reaction when hearing them back in 1991, must have been quite an overwhelming experience for him :)

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Nice!  I wish I had time to watch the visuals, but I could only listen.  I want to re-watch later

 

Hopefully you earn some kind of living off of all these great performances and accompanying videos?

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24 minutes ago, Jay said:

Hopefully you earn some kind of living off of all these great performances and accompanying videos?

 

Well, not that much to be honest !

I do receive Youtube earnings for them and a few donations now and then but not enough to make a living.

That said my Youtube channel is something I have on the side, my main job being session musician !

 

24 minutes ago, Jay said:

Nice!  I wish I had time to watch the visuals, but I could only listen.  I want to re-watch later

 

Here's a few screenshots from it :)

 

FF4-TEASER-mp4-snapshot-00-02-2021-07-21

 

FF4-TEASER-mp4-snapshot-00-32-2021-07-21

 

FF4-TEASER-mp4-snapshot-00-09-2021-07-21

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6 minutes ago, Marc said:

my main job being session musician !

 

Have you played on anything I might have heard?

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19 hours ago, karelm said:

 

 

Nice. We should have guessed you were involved. So in the end, my backer contribution on Fig paid part of your commission. ;) Looking forward to playing (and hearing) this, although I still haven't played the first one…

 

(Also, a whale appearing out of nowhere AND "don't panic"?)

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3 hours ago, Marian Schedenig said:

 

Nice. We should have guessed you were involved. So in the end, my backer contribution on Fig paid part of your commission. ;) Looking forward to playing (and hearing) this, although I still haven't played the first one…

 

(Also, a whale appearing out of nowhere AND "don't panic"?)

Not sure how you could have guessed that but I will say, I'm a huge fan of the score.  It's FANTASTIC!!  There were moments when I had to take a step back and thought "holy shit this is good".  Thank you for supporting the project and I very much believe you'll love it!   Tim, Peter, and all put everything in to their projects. We are all VERY passionate about what we do and push each other.  I think this will stand the test of time and I'm so proud to have been a part of it.  I don't know if I'll be able to play it because I get killed too easily but I'll happily own it.  If it's not obvious, Peter is also a very, very big JW fan and you'll clearly hear that in his score. 

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On 7/21/2021 at 3:42 PM, Jay said:

 

Have you played on anything I might have heard?

 

Maybe !

Here's my (partial) discography : https://www.marcpapeghin.com/about/

I've also played on a lot of stuff which wasn't officially released (like tv ads or musical/movie mockups !)

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