Touhou Thread 6 - Fear and Loathing in Lunar Voyages by Hunter S. Clownpiece

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > VEGETA > Touhou Thread 6 - Fear and Loathing in Lunar Voyages by Hunter S. Clownpiece

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Pinguliten: Jan 8, 2007

So I recently got into playing midis again and finally got myself a few Roland Synths, among others the SC-88 which is quite close to what Zun used (SC-8850), at least on the earlier games. So you all remember when the demos came with midi files, thought it sounded like crap and then just switched to the WAVs once you got the full versions? Well it turns out the midis actually does sound rather OK if you got decent hardware:
Imperishable Night - Voyage 1969 in flac recorded off of my Roland SC-88.
I've always liked this one and the piano samples sounds quite good on the 88. Granted, it doesn't sound as good as the WAV but it's not that far off and it might be even closer if I got myself a SC-88Pro.
If you do a search for touhou and midi on youtube you'll pretty much just end up with bad synthesia so I thought it would be fun to post this.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2014 05:20

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# ¿ Jun 2, 2024 19:28

Pinguliten: Jan 8, 2007

Golden Battler posted:

This is actually really cool, kinda surprised me to hear how good it sounded.

What is really cool though is emulating the 1-6 games and play the midi through the synths, It's almost as playing 7 and on with WAVs.
I could record a few more if it is of any interest but then again there are good arrangements of the first games and to be honest the WAVs sounds better on 7-9.

Also for some content, mah meager stash!

# ¿ Dec 30, 2014 05:56

Pinguliten: Jan 8, 2007

Justus posted:

I own an SC-8850 myself - believe it or not, one I bought back in 2001 when they were actually actively in production, in order to use for actual music production.

This is a super nerdy thing for me to just randomly know, but ZUN actually had an SC-88pro, the ancestor of the SC-8850 and the descendant of your SC-88, in the 90s when he was working on the PC-98 games. He released MIDIs back then that contain sysex instructions specific to the pro.

By the time EoSD came out though, he had switched to the newer "Studio Canvas" SD-90 to make his recorded soundtracks. He still makes all of Touhou's music exclusively with that one synthesizer and Steinburg's Cubase software to this day, he's just gotten incrementally better at employing little production tricks the synth is capable of, though he has yet to really dig deep with what it can do, oddly enough.

Anyways, the MIDI that came with EoSD through PoFV targets "general GS device" as its synthesizer of choice. GS is Roland's exclusive instruction set extension for the MIDI protocol, so basically this means it should sound pretty good on any Roland synthesizer (including their software based ones) and maybe later Yamaha synths containing GS compatibility

Neat, I actually thought he had both a 88pro and a 8850. I want to upgrade myself when I see a good deal on any of the synths and have some cash to spare. The problem is that a lot of the good Roland synths needs to be imported from Japan with the expensive freight and the chance of getting caught in customs but having a 88pro instead of a 88 and a 55mkII instead of a 55 would be really nice.

Justus posted:

I will sometimes use the MIDI soundtrack for those games when I play, played through my SC-8850, just because it makes the music sound different, but still good, in order to change it up. It's nice to have an option for a subtle change after you've spent several dozen hours hearing the same thing. Sometimes the tracks are in a different key than the original. Sometimes the instrumentation is different, and sometimes there are different harmonization or homophonic elements compared to the WAV version, but it's usually a fairly subtle difference if you're playing it back on reference hardware like mine.

The SC-88 model in particular is actually a rather interesting piece of video game music history. It was used as a reference model for most video game soundtracks on the PC in the early 90s back when they only had MIDI music and no WAV soundtrack. This is the synth that e people creating the music used while composing it, and as such, is what most of those old MIDI soundtracks are "supposed to sound like". This includes pretty much every game by ID software, Apogee Games, Sierra, and even Blizzard. The CD soundtrack in Warcraft 2 was even just a recording of the MIDI version played through an SC-88!

I got a stack to play stuff on but I still need more synth, a Yamaha XG capable synth among others as well.

External sysex patches can be a headache for the MT-32 since they're not always present where you can download the midis themselves.
Another problem with the old Japanese midi files is the mojibake thanks to the old and hated shift-jis screwing up titles.

Justus posted:

Japanese game developers got into it later than the Americans did, as usual, so more people have actual heard the sound of it from Japanese games, since these used recordings, instead of MIDI files. The soundtracks for Megaman X4 - X6 all used an SC-88pro, as did everything Falcom made all the way through the mid-00s.

I've actually noticed that Xenogears sounds the same on my SC-88 as in the game as well.

http://www16.big.or.jp/~zun/html/music_old.html if you want those old midis, most are for the SC-88Pro but some are for the SC-8850 as well.
Also http://www.touhoumidi.altervista.org is a good visit.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2014 22:36

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