Open Hatch

[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.

(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.

(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.

(Download .mp3 ~4.1MB)

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

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.

(download mp3, ~4MB)

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

Hear what Wing has to sing.

What should I say?