[30] L'lasons de Aether ver Beinags #12

About 2/3 of this week was just dedicated to various types of research, mostly involving the music side of things. The only tangible thing I accomplished is something that I wouldn't show otherwise, but I don't have anything else worth showing, so here it goes.

I had some vague ideas on how to utilize the grain delay audio effect in Ableton, but I didn't really have much of an original melody to work with for practice. A specific version of the ending theme from the Yume 2kki soundtrack I thought might be a good fit for this, because of the way its pseudo delay feedback... thing is set up. I thought I could do a real version of this. Under closer inspection, the midi has three tracks tied to the lead, with the same note being repeated an additional 2 times with a slight delay to it.

This is what I meant by "pseudo delay feedback."

This is what the original song sounds like.

It sounds cohesive and proven, in that it wouldn't sound out of place if heard in-game.

Something of note about the non-midi version of this track you just heard: it's mono, and caps at 8kHz frequency-wise.

Some of the time, imperfections in composing and mixing can be hidden

with a low-pass filter of sorts, in the same way that those conspiracy video hoaxes hide compositing errors by making the video 144p.

In no way do I think they did this intentionally, rather that it's just a product of the game's time.

For a game almost old enough to drive, created on an engine well old enough to drink (RPG Maker 2000), the much more likely reason for the low-fidelity is for saving hard drive space. The majority of Yume 2kki's 878 tracks in the game's files are stored in uncompressed ".wav"s. Due to this, most of them are set up as relatively short, low-fidelity, seamless loops (even then, the music takes up ~55% of the game's size.)

Because I wanted to use this for mixing practice, I'd try to avoid intentionally taking this shortcut.

From initially plugging in the original midi with some mildly tweaked instruments, I got this thing, which is uncanny to me.

Not in how strikingly similar it is or anything (because it's not,) but the fact that there are some things not quite right with it.

The most noteworthy thing to me is that the three tracks sometimes cancel each other out or resonate in unpredictable ways. I half expected this to happen, as the echo effect was a product of the midi itself, and by just applying some flashy instruments to it, things became complicated quite fast.

The next attempt actually involved the usage of the grain delay (as well as the removal of the lead echo tracks, as they'd be redundant.) The grain delay seems to desync the track's audio by an amount proportional to the song's BPM and the delay timestep. The only way I could come up with to resync it is to manually shift the audio back over by some milliseconds. For example, the song's BPM is 85, so a beat would be 60000/85ms long. 1/4 of that would of course just be dividing by 4. So, for a grain delay with a 1/4 timestep in an 85 BPM song, you'd need to shift over the affected track by -176.47ms to resync it with the rest of the music.

So that's what I did.

It already sounds way better, but there were some small things I still didn't like, such as it not feeling as 'full' as it should.

I've known for a while now that you can create a new-sounding instrument with a different timbre by combining separate instruments that play the same melody, but I think I've only used this technique like once before. So, not wanting to waste another practice opportunity, that's exactly what I wanted to incorporate.

Shown above is 4 separate instruments that make up a single lead. I wanted to mess with all 4 of them simultaneously, so I funneled them through the same audio bus (known as a return track in Ableton.) I did this with the other 2 tracks to varying extents, but you should get the general idea.

This leads to the current version of the my arrangement:

With my current skill set, I don't know how to make this better in any meaningful way, so I'll leave it like this for now.

As I stated previously, whenever I do mixing and arrangement practice like this, I don't spread it around much, as it's a little embarrassing if the song's patterns aren't my own. Regardless, I don't have much else to show, so I have to show this in some capacity.

That's it for this week.