Open Hatch

Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

I find track 06 from this old Nintendo game uniquely interesting and cool.

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(download mp3, ~2.39 MB, 2:44)

Also track 26, though maybe it gets older faster (still, it’s really a crime against my hardcore Nintendo music roots to even suggest that any such music could be redundant).

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(download mp3, ~2.04 MB, 2:44)

I’d pick and choose other cool tracks to post here, but I’d be uploading half the game’s music. Or all of it.

I’m far overdue posting how to rip these tracks to mp3 files for those interested

But this wouldn’t be complete without the games’ title/screen/opening.. anthem?

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(download mp3, ~1.94 MB, 2:44)

I’ve been playing through an old favorite of mine, the game EARTHBOUND, with my very young son, reading everything to him (and he likes the game very much). As I’ve been playing I’ve grabbed screen shots of what reminds me why I love the game. This is a gallery of those screen grabs.

What I love about the game:

• It is the story of four children who conquer Giygas, the Cosmic Destroyer.
• Japanese wackiness. As you can see from the gallery, it is full of good-natured, daffy characters.
• It is incredibly musically versatile, prolific, expressive, and in my opinion, beautiful. Here is the track for your home.

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• The ultimate, world-saving weapon in the game is prayer. This is combined with the work of knocking back into their senses anyone or anything that has gone wild or insane (such as a Rowdy Mouse or Insane Cultist). Or, if they are a mortal enemy (such as a lil’ UFO, Spinning Robo, or Starman), destroying them.

Great news.  iTunes will drop copy protection on every song they sell.

If they also adopted LAME mp3 as their default encoder, added support for .ogg files to the iPod, reduced the software and memory footprint of iTunes by about half (it is such a hog!), and announced an iTunes extensibility/add-on API, I’d be wowed.

I use Winamp, but don’t really recommend it to people.  It’s a nerd’s music toy.  I use plugins with it that let me do a number of things:

• Rate songs, sort into cue folders (such as “edit”, “re-rip”, “audition”), send to recycle bin, etc. – using keyboard shortcuts (which really speeds up music tryouts)
• Auto-sort and rename files by my own custom preferences
• Rip from various video game music formats
• Play back a wide variety of music formats
• Navigate and cue music from a branching directory view
• Copy files anywhere merely by dragging them from the playlist
• Backup library and rating information
• Sync my collection (including “smart views” – which iTunes calls “smart playlists”, which for example will play all songs of genre x or y above a rating of 3, or everything with an “audition” comment in the tags, etc!) with my iPod.

That is all thanks to Winamp’s open plugin API, which invites the good will and genius of thousands of people who program so many plugins voluntarily.  iTunes can do only the last two on that list, and backing up the library never saved song ratings for me (that was several versions ago, so maybe they’ve clued into allowing that by now – I don’t know).

Winamp also has play/pause/rewind etc. keyboard shortcut capability “out of the box”.  It is also skinnable, meaning the way it looks can be very customized (thousands of skins have been created I’d guess), and optionally change at random with every played song.

[Update: this music has been revised and re-posted]

In reference to Pilcrow’s prescient request, I now present a remix of title in subject from the Nintendo 8-bit era of glory. The overlaying melody on this thing (I argue) makes the work substantially different enough from the original that this is a new work, which I provide for your download.

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(Download mp3, ~2.5MB)

This combines work done in Melodyne and Cakewalk with a nintendo sound font.

For an idea of this game (or a strange nostalgic glimpse), here are several YouTube videos -

I don’t like the weird video intro for this one, but it’s the only thing I find that gives the game title sequence (without a painfully elaborate or nerdy uber-over-narration) from which this title remix was built:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=hTl1gTTOFNA

Level 1 play-through:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Wakyt-KtoBU

For the excellent finale music and sequence, skip to 2:44 in this one:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Ct1Ins6oZY8

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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(Download mp3, ~1.7MB)

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.

- do.

This really got me.  Hard to find any other way to praise it – words fail.  Well done.

This beauty of insipidity emerged sighing and belting from the depths of an adventure game I played in my youth – King’s Quest V. We marveled at this tune. It filled us with wonder and despair. There was copy accompanying the game urging us to call radio stations and request that they play this song. We obliged. But nobody else could ever hear the wonders of the Girl in the Tower. We pretended to hate it, but deep down, it touched a core of secret pleasure – a bit of that glorious.. whatever this is. Aahh. So delicious. -ly. Terrible.

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(Download .mp3 ~4.1MB)

Found with a whole trove of like items here. These people are devoted to this.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.1MB)

I’ve been wanting to make this for a long time, ever since learning that this Google search will find mp3s or wmas in open web directories:

{-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “Twilight Zone”}

Where “Twilight Zone” would be a band or song title you’re looking for.

What I’ve wanted to do is make a search box which would pass all those paramaters to Google for you so that you don’t have to remember all that; just type the band or song title and go.

I Finally found this page which does the trick, looked at its source, and then customized it for myself. I’ve placed it in a page accessible from the “Menu” or Pages section of this blog in the upper-right. Here again is the direct link.

['Nother update 08-11: I just wandered back to his blog to download music and found that the side bar on the left of his blog contains links to pages where he organizes his downloadable portfolio. Nice Also, amid his blog is a link to his Professional Contact/Portfolio page, which itself I think has more (other?) music - I dunno, I'm using an automatic downloader to grab the music files but indicating that he has done a lot of scores to imagined, nonexistent games he made up. Ha ha! That's insane! That's awesome!]

[Update: a commenter corrects a mistaken fact; this musician didn't do the original original music on CONTRA; he did a lot of fan remixes of it. The rest of this is apparently correct.]

I just found this blog of a guy (by Googling the author and title of a file I nabbed from my brother; a chiptunes version of “Thriller”, in this post) who does freelance video-game music, including chiptunes (NES style). Apparently he worked on the original CONTRA, a huge (as in popular) Nintendo game; and he’s doing music for a new installment in the series fashioned closely after the old platform style. Awesome. Anyway his page of new chiptunes has awesome stuff, free for downloading and sharing with restrictions that wouldn’t affect most people.

So here’s his chiptunes version of Michael Jackson’s tune “Thriller” (this song is also at his page for downloading). Weird. Awesome.

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(download mp3, ~4MB)

I think I’m going to be downloading and enjoying a lot of his work

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.0MB)

Hear what Wing has to sing.

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What should I say?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (228.0KB)

The music happens when

I am ready for the next level,
A task has been accomplished,
Something evil and spooky might be going on, but I’m pretty okay with it,
I conquer evil,
It’s awesome,
I die, and when
It’s really, really over.

[Are you a nintendo junkie? Did you guess the game these are from? Castlevania 3. This is another pull from my aging wiki, originally posted April 28th 2005]