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Flipperwaldt
Nov 11, 2011

Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?



Listening to how it's supposed to sound in the game and taking the GM hint from the file name, I'm thinking these notes aren't supposed to produce sounds. Looking at the pattern, I'd say it's a metronome track with emphasis and section markers used while composing and then transposed out of the way.

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cruft
Oct 25, 2007

Skunkrocker posted:

I got a stupid question regarding MIDI, I've noticed some MIDI tracks have percussion parts that go from note F7 to note C8 (between notes 89 and 96 respectively) that not a single one of my soundfonts has any samples for, as well as a lack of samples for G#1 and A1 (Notes 20 and 21 that I have never seen be used. I have soundfonts that cover the rest of those notes in percussion just fine, so for the majority of songs I have imported into FL Studio I don't have a problem selecting a soundfont that works with them, but for these tracks in particular (Darkseed 2's midis are a perfect example of what I mean) I have no idea what instruments are supposed to correspond to these notes. Obviously they have to go to something, but there isn't a single documented instrumentation standard I can find that includes these notes at all. What am I missing here? Does anyone know what these notes correspond to?

Example shown below, the highlighted notes I have no idea what they are.



Notes don't have to map to particular drums, it's just a convention. Maybe they had some weird sample of, like, a rubber mallet hitting a package of uncooked spaghetti in a 20 gallon copper kettle, and figured G#1 was as good as anything else.

timp
Sep 19, 2007

Everything is in my control
Lipstick Apathy

cruft posted:

Notes don't have to map to particular drums, it's just a convention. Maybe they had some weird sample of, like, a rubber mallet hitting a package of uncooked spaghetti in a 20 gallon copper kettle, and figured G#1 was as good as anything else.

If you have this you’re legally required to share it with us

xzzy
Mar 5, 2009

It's probably a sample in one of the klevgrand plugins.

Skunkrocker
Jan 14, 2012

Your favorite furry wrestler.

cruft posted:

Notes don't have to map to particular drums, it's just a convention. Maybe they had some weird sample of, like, a rubber mallet hitting a package of uncooked spaghetti in a 20 gallon copper kettle, and figured G#1 was as good as anything else.

...well this midi is from Darkseed 2 so like... it'd be a package of cooked spaghetti, but your point is still valid.

I. M. Gei
Jun 26, 2005

CHIEFS

BITCH



So here's a loving insane question. How can I best emulate the sound of a piano using only marching wind instruments? My instinct tells me to use some combination of sax and clarinet, but I'm wondering if y'all have other ideas I might not have considered?

Crossposting this from the home recording thread because I'm afraid of cluttering that thread up with my insane questions.

cruft
Oct 25, 2007

I. M. Gei posted:

So here's a loving insane question.

:hmmyes:

I. M. Gei posted:

How can I best emulate the sound of a piano using only marching wind instruments?

My second thought about this question is that you're going to be hard pressed to emulate a piano's attack sound with wind instruments. It's just a fundamentally different profile.

My third thought is that maybe you could lash a dozen or so clarinets to each other, then string some piano wire from the mouthpieces to the bells, then strike it with a thumb rest.

My fourth thought is that you could get a couple hundred (thousand?) clarinets, which produce sound that's sort of close to a sine wave, and tune them all *just so*, in order to reproduce the complex waveform created by a note on a piano. A fast Fourier transform will help you figure out what to tune everything to, and how hard each clarinet player should blow. Precision is going to be very important here, you'll need players who can toot out a very stable pitch and have immaculate breath control.

I don't have a personal problem with clarinets, they just happen to be made of wood and used in marching bands.

cruft fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Mar 15, 2024

I. M. Gei
Jun 26, 2005

CHIEFS

BITCH



I'm not expecting it to be perfect. I know the waveforms are totally different and that the attack on a wind instrument is never gonna totally match that of a hammered-string keyboard instrument.

I'm just trying to figure out how to make it... uhh, similar. And how similar I can get.

webcams for christ
Nov 2, 2005
My vote is embrace your medium; don't resist it.

Listeners enjoy authenticy and being surprised.

Focusing on approximately imitating something is wasted effort that could instead be applied to making the arrangement more creative and interesting.

Nobody likes Tofurkey at Thanksgiving, but a crispy honey ginger gochujang tofu stir fry? Much more appetizing.

Otis Reddit
Nov 14, 2006
fill the saxophone with tofu

Jazz Marimba
Jan 4, 2012

webcams for christ posted:

My vote is embrace your medium; don't resist it.

Listeners enjoy authenticy and being surprised.

Focusing on approximately imitating something is wasted effort that could instead be applied to making the arrangement more creative and interesting.

Nobody likes Tofurkey at Thanksgiving, but a crispy honey ginger gochujang tofu stir fry? Much more appetizing.
:emptyquote:

Sweaty IT Nerd
Jul 13, 2007

Otis Reddit posted:

fill the saxophone with tofu

It is always the answer in this thread isn't it?

I. M. Gei
Jun 26, 2005

CHIEFS

BITCH



I went ahead and just added a piano. That at least gives me a place to write the notes in while I work on other poo poo. I can go back and re-map the notes to different instruments later if I want.

cruft
Oct 25, 2007

I like tofurkey on thanksgiving :colbert:

Kvlt!
May 19, 2012



cruft posted:

I like tofurkey on thanksgiving :colbert:

no you dont mr. simpson. nobody does.

I. M. Gei
Jun 26, 2005

CHIEFS

BITCH



Do I just...... need to accept that the playback on Sibelius is always gonna sound like audible aids no matter how correct the notes are?

I *think* I'm slowly inching closer to ID-ing the vocal notes in this chorus (although Transcribe! hasn't made it easy) but every time I play it back, and especially whenever I add in baritone and/or tenor sax parts, it sounds like a horrible Dr. Seuss diarrhea nightmare. Like the Grinch ate bad enchiladas and stuck some kooky Dr. Seuss wind instrument up his rear end and just... blasted the most heinous Bible story flood of shits and farts all over everything.

Jazz Marimba
Jan 4, 2012

I. M. Gei posted:

Do I just...... need to accept that the playback on Sibelius is always gonna sound like audible aids no matter how correct the notes are?

yeah, since it’s primarily a notation program it’s basically microsoft word for music + microsoft sam thrown in for sounds. if you want good sounds, export midi to the daw of your choice and adjust dynamics, note lengths, attacks/releases, etc.

Ruffian Price
Sep 17, 2016

NotePerformer is solid and by the maker of WIVI if you remember that. Won't ever sound as good as produced mockups but the playback is at least accurate.

I. M. Gei
Jun 26, 2005

CHIEFS

BITCH



Listening to this playback over and over and over again, wondering if the instrumentation is good, wondering if the notes are right, wondering if each instrument is pitched at the right octaves, wondering if I'm assigning the instruments to the singers' individual voices in a way that sounds good, is giving me major psychic damage and the godawful playback is not helping.

Jazz Marimba posted:

yeah, since it’s primarily a notation program it’s basically microsoft word for music + microsoft sam thrown in for sounds. if you want good sounds, export midi to the daw of your choice and adjust dynamics, note lengths, attacks/releases, etc.

What is a daw?

800peepee51doodoo
Mar 1, 2001

Volute the swarth, trawl betwixt phonotic
Scoff the festune

I. M. Gei posted:

Listening to this playback over and over and over again, wondering if the instrumentation is good, wondering if the notes are right, wondering if each instrument is pitched at the right octaves, wondering if I'm assigning the instruments to the singers' individual voices in a way that sounds good, is giving me major psychic damage and the godawful playback is not helping.

What is a daw?

Digital Audio Workstation eg Ableton, Reason, Logic, Cubase, FL Studio, Bitwig, etc

If you don't have a DAW and are trying to write music, you should really look into getting one. Most have trial versions. Reason's trial is full featured and has no end point so you can use it forever if you want. Maybe look around at what people who make the kind of music you like use and give that a shot.

Flipperwaldt
Nov 11, 2011

Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?



Reason's trial is 30 days, it's Reaper whose trial can be extended indefinitely.

I. M. Gei
Jun 26, 2005

CHIEFS

BITCH



Ruffian Price posted:

NotePerformer is solid and by the maker of WIVI if you remember that. Won't ever sound as good as produced mockups but the playback is at least accurate.

800peepee51doodoo posted:

Digital Audio Workstation eg Ableton, Reason, Logic, Cubase, FL Studio, Bitwig, etc

If you don't have a DAW and are trying to write music, you should really look into getting one. Most have trial versions. Reason's trial is full featured and has no end point so you can use it forever if you want. Maybe look around at what people who make the kind of music you like use and give that a shot.

I assume these all work with Sibelius files?

800peepee51doodoo
Mar 1, 2001

Volute the swarth, trawl betwixt phonotic
Scoff the festune

Flipperwaldt posted:

Reason's trial is 30 days, it's Reaper whose trial can be extended indefinitely.

Oh whoops, yeah thats what I meant. I'm dumb

Flipperwaldt
Nov 11, 2011

Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?



I. M. Gei posted:

I assume these all work with Sibelius files?
lol no. Closest you'll get is Sibelius exporting your stuff as midi and the nice daws will assign a sound to it on import based on the general midi spec, but you shouldn't even take that as a given. You'll have tempo, note timing and length and probably not much else. The file will likely be split up back into different parts by midi channel at least, but if you used multiple tracks going to the same channel or had your stuff built up from shorter clips or phrases, that separation will be lost.

Also, if your end game is a human readable score, the tools for that in most daws are pretty crappy.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
DAWs are for making high-quality audio, and they are purpose-built for that task. You get very fine control over a ton of different parameters that change how things sound, but what you don't get is the kind of score-based composition help that you might expect as a musician. Scores don't let you control things like the character of the reverb, the attack/sustain/falloff on each note, potentially a lot of instrument-specific configurations, and on and on and on. There's honestly a lot to using a DAW, and it's made worse by the fact that they're very modular, with every module having its own, weird, bespoke user interface.

I. M. Gei
Jun 26, 2005

CHIEFS

BITCH



Flipperwaldt posted:

lol no. Closest you'll get is Sibelius exporting your stuff as midi and the nice daws will assign a sound to it on import based on the general midi spec, but you shouldn't even take that as a given. You'll have tempo, note timing and length and probably not much else. The file will likely be split up back into different parts by midi channel at least, but if you used multiple tracks going to the same channel or had your stuff built up from shorter clips or phrases, that separation will be lost.

Also, if your end game is a human readable score, the tools for that in most daws are pretty crappy.

So what I'm hearing is I'm never gonna get a good-sounding, accurate playback short of an actual band playing the music I'm writing.





well gently caress :smith:

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe

I. M. Gei posted:

So what I'm hearing is I'm never gonna get a good-sounding, accurate playback short of an actual band playing the music I'm writing.





well gently caress :smith:

You can also learn to use a DAW, it's not impossible. Or you can record the individual (real-life) instruments yourself, separately, and then combine the separate audio tracks to make the complete piece.

I. M. Gei
Jun 26, 2005

CHIEFS

BITCH



TooMuchAbstraction posted:

You can also learn to use a DAW, it's not impossible. Or you can record the individual (real-life) instruments yourself, separately, and then combine the separate audio tracks to make the complete piece.

I mean... I could learn a DAW, but just transcribing this score is a lot of work already. I'm doing the whole entire 3-minute 55-second song and not just a part of it (I'm gonna cut it up, remix the sections, and shrink it down into smaller arrangements later).



I have thought about recording real-life instruments separately and combining them, but it's a lot of instruments and I only play one instrument myself. Also I don't have any recording equipment. I could go around asking my old band directors to play individual parts for me and let me record them (I already got one guy to agree to help me figure out how to write the percussion), but that's a lot of coordination and I don't even know if any of THEM have recording equipment.

I miiiiiiiiiight be able to sweet-talk a local junior college band into playing parts of the score for me if they don't have any other concerts coming up. If nothing else I may be able to use that to see how well the instrumentation syncs up on stuff like the vocal solo parts and the orchestra hits, although getting enough people together to play the chorus and other harmony parts so I can check for chord note accuracy might be trickier.

Flipperwaldt
Nov 11, 2011

Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?



I. M. Gei posted:

So what I'm hearing is I'm never gonna get a good-sounding, accurate playback short of an actual band playing the music I'm writing.





well gently caress :smith:
Nah, I'm saying that thanks to vendor lock-in, switching over (between any of these programs) will be a hassle and will possibly take some rework. You can't expect to be going back and forth between programs. So maybe it's right to also look at what Sibelius' vst support can do to pretty up your sounds. Or maybe you should think of it as different stages of a project, where you finish up the score first and then migrate to other software for possibly better sound. Or maybe you start out with some low stakes toying around in some daw to see if you can make sense of it, before committing to anything.

syntaxfunction
Oct 27, 2010
I bounce between MuseScore and Reaper all the time, I just export the midi and they co-operate well. I assume Sibelius has a midi export/import function too.

Makes it a lot easier to hear things in a full setup if I'm using things that aren't easily doable.in MuseScore.

Ruffian Price
Sep 17, 2016

I. M. Gei posted:

I assume these all work with Sibelius files?


Sibelius is a DAW, with VST/AU hosting and a mixer, it's just more hassle to wrangle articulations and expression for virtual instruments from a score view without a playback engine balancing it for you (for example, mp can translate to vastly different CC1 ranges between libraries). I see that NotePerformer has DLC that interfaces with other plugins now, but I've never played with that, while their non-brass models aren't super realistic they're perfectly okay to get a "how will these parts sound together" feel without loving around with MIDI, you literally install it and pick from a list :v:

I. M. Gei
Jun 26, 2005

CHIEFS

BITCH



Okay I'm curious. How long does it normally take people to transcribe the vocal part of a song?

I think I spent about 2 hours today doing the back 3/8ths of the first verse of Motownphilly with the swapping Wanya and Nate solo parts, and that was only about 6 or 7 bars. I know this is my first score and maybe I started on hard mode with this particular song, but drat I thought I'd be moving faster than that. Vocals are kind of a bitch to transcribe.

Earwicker
Jan 6, 2003

Flipperwaldt posted:

Also, if your end game is a human readable score, the tools for that in most daws are pretty crappy.

i agree with this for the most part except logic. im mainly an ableton and audition guy and do 95% of my work in those two daw's, but i have successfully used logic on multiple occasions for the specific task of converting midi parts into human readable parts.

i'm a very improvisational sort of composer and not at all a theory guy, when i try to think about that stuff its like dusting off old parts of my brain. so the first time i did it i took a look at the parts i'd printed and thought "hmm.. i dunno." but when i handed the parts to the string trio i'd hired, they played exactly what i'd written and it sounded great. so that's how i've been doing it for years, just composing stuff in ableton and occasionally importing stuff into logic and using the notation tool to print out parts for people. it's not exactly the most professional approach and every once in a while some minor corrections are needed but mostly.. its pretty solid.

Jazz Marimba
Jan 4, 2012

I. M. Gei posted:

Okay I'm curious. How long does it normally take people to transcribe the vocal part of a song?

I think I spent about 2 hours today doing the back 3/8ths of the first verse of Motownphilly with the swapping Wanya and Nate solo parts, and that was only about 6 or 7 bars. I know this is my first score and maybe I started on hard mode with this particular song, but drat I thought I'd be moving faster than that. Vocals are kind of a bitch to transcribe.

depends on the song and the transcriber. i’m guessing you haven’t done much, so it’s gonna take you longer. and yeah, that song’s got a lot going on in the verse; start with an an easier section (e.g. the chorus), or maybe even an easier song (e.g. one that doesn’t have what’s basically baroque counterpoint going on)

and re: getting a realistic sound without human performers, it’s not only possible but done regularly in the film world…if you’re willing to drop 10k+$ on VSTs, meticulously learn performance practice for all the instruments you want, play the parts in with a midi controller or edit all the notes manually, and then hire a professional to play the melody

but you can get good enough with way less money and stress by doing half that, or just not care that it doesn’t sound like humans playing instruments cuz it’s not that and never will be, especially on what seems to be your first transcription/arrangement for (marching?) band

I. M. Gei
Jun 26, 2005

CHIEFS

BITCH



... there's no way to copy/paste passages from one file to another in Sibelius for iPad, is there?

I gotta type this whole 3-page, 8-part bitch out by hand all over again in another file, don't I? :smith:



EDIT: To clarify, I'm doing the vocals and accompaniment/background parts in two separate files so I can work on them and play them back independently, but I did that partly because I thought I could just copy/paste parts of one file over to the other, and I'm not finding a way to do that.

I. M. Gei fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Mar 28, 2024

webcams for christ
Nov 2, 2005

I. M. Gei posted:

... there's no way to copy/paste passages from one file to another in Sibelius for iPad, is there?

I gotta type this whole 3-page, 8-part bitch out by hand all over again in another file, don't I? :smith:



EDIT: To clarify, I'm doing the vocals and accompaniment/background parts in two separate files so I can work on them and play them back independently, but I did that partly because I thought I could just copy/paste parts of one file over to the other, and I'm not finding a way to do that.

Avid has a Sibelius Tech Support forum that will have more users with domain-specific knowledge.

But could you not copy a save file entirely and then add or remove instruments as needed? It's cruder than highlighting specific measures to c/p but would likely still save time.

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I. M. Gei
Jun 26, 2005

CHIEFS

BITCH



webcams for christ posted:

But could you not copy a save file entirely and then add or remove instruments as needed? It's cruder than highlighting specific measures to c/p but would likely still save time.

That was how I split the vocals and accompaniment to start with. And then I added stuff to them both separately, and now, well...

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