Mother – Game Over – Remix
There’s this tune from the game Mother (the original Nintendo version of what later became the brilliant EARTHBOUND on Super Nintendo), evidently this is the music when you die. (Or that’s what the track ripper says; “Game Over”: I wouldn’t know because I never played the original. Also, the music when you die in EARTHBOUND is different but equally cool.) One day I was listening to this tune and I heard and started singing a high harmony melody. I’ve now re-rendered the music to include that melody, also altering the bass line enough that I can call this an original – if blatantly ripped off and extended – work, without conscience – so you can download it.
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How I made this was tricky – and yet produced results far faster than if I’d figured and re-did all the notes by hand. I’m kinda proud of it. I’ve mentioned Melodyne, which changes pitches very well. I used a Winamp plugin called NotSoFatso that lets you mute tracks in an .nsf (emulated nintendo music) file. I rendered each part (or instrument or harmony) to different wave files via Winamp’s wave writer – bass, lead, and lead echo. That was easier with NotSoFatso allowing me to “shadow” or list one of so many songs in the .nsf (right-click the song listing, click “file info”, then click “shadow->Winamp). I moved the notes of the bass wave file around a bit in Melodyne, and also copied it to another track and divided and moved around the notes and overtones (formants) to make this higher lead part (several of the notes were barely audible until I moved the formants).
Bingo.
Melodyne gave it a sing-song quality, if it is still very much a “nintendo” instrument – because Melodyne is designed to emulate the formants of the human voice in particular. It also made it too “clean” to be a “nintendo” instrument, so I processed the result in Audio Mulch using a “DigiGrunge” distortion decimator simulating a bit depth of 8. Then I mixed it all back together in Guitar Tracks Pro 3, and converted it to .mp3 with foobar2000′s “convert to same directory” right-click option.
Oh I like it a lot. Do something with Blaster Master next.
Also, you’ve made an instrument right there that sounds rather like a theramin. Awesome. Enchanting. Please keep sending me stuff like this.
Pilcrow, are you kidding? Doing something from Blaster Master next is exactly what I was already planning! I’ve had a harmony part in mind for the introduction sequence of that game, and if I’d had time I would have included a remix of that in this post!
We’re on the same period of the same sentence of the same page..
I found your blog via Google while searching for nintendo music, thank you for posting Mother – Game Over – Remix!