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FamiTracker
I was going around the internet, doing what I normally do, and it just hit me... With the experience I've gotten since I made my last version of Beware the Forest's Mushrooms, I thought now would be a great time to rebuild it one last time. It took me about four hours with some interruptions in between, but I'm finally done. Fixed tempo and no percussion, yet no emptiness: just what I'd like to call a cover of the original. It's faithful, but not exactly the same. I'm so happy with this result. This goes out to Mr_Master, CheeseGuy99 and Glenntai who all gave me some advice on forest_maze_twopointzero, the last version I uploaded. It's a few pages back. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoy and I hope this is a sign of what else I can do when I learn more and become more experienced.
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Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio...
Better than before, indeed. However, I'm rather sad because if I remember correctly, the song had some more accompaniment in it, specially at the end. Also, some fading out notes would be good. You have plenty of channels to make some processing of the song to turn it into something better.
You have certainly improved, but bear in mind that the more channels you have, the less excuses you have to not do something awesome. More echo, more fades and in general more processing would be good. No percussions is fine, the original didn't have them and it would not sound the same if it had any.
I'm sure you can add some more techniques to this song. Keep it up and try to add something to it and see what comes of it.
I think what irks me about the final version is that the end is so empty after everything else had been so full.
If you were using multiple channels to bring out chords, you could have taken the time to make the ending more properly fleshed out. The ost version kept so busy right before it looped and, imo, I felt that was in itself the essence of why the song was so contagious. It was an always-busy song that had plenty to focus on.
If you were to plan out how it was going to look and sound in the tracker, the lead in frame 8 is supposed to change to the accompaniment the moment frame 9 starts as a new, similar lead in the second vrc6 pulse comes into play... repeating, echoing chords in the fami pulse channels fill in the otherwise blank space... While I fully understand how it can feel overwhelming when you're starting out (holy shit, guilty as charged and then some,) I had higher expectations of how you could tackle the end of this track.
That being said, you've put in a good amount of effort in a song you've liked. I'm also glad to see you've taken the advice to heart and continued on! Take what you've learned and what you can learn and expand it in ways possible, get awesome and go to town with it!
It's a bit better, but I have to ask you something:
What method do you use to transcribe these covers? Do you do them by ear, sheet music, MIDI, channel splitting or something?
I, for instance, use channel splitting whenever possible. It makes your life easier, but you still have to transcribe each channel by ear. In any other cases, I'd say (not knowing about how it really is) that maybe both sheet music and MIDI might not be as faithful to the original songs, and doing it completely by ear is an extreme challenge.
It doesn't really matter as long as it works for you, but I was just curious. When you split each channel of a game song into a WAV file, you can get basically every single sound in the music, thus allowing you to know how many channels are used, where will they go, all the melodies in the song, etc.
When you make a cover, you must make it feel like everything flows together and interacts with the rest of the music. Basses and/or percussions define the beat of the song, background chords give it a bit more feedback and make the song feel less empty, and the lead carries the whole action.
When you make your next cover, check if everything that could be necessary is there, and if it lacks something, you can always fill with some chords or harmonies to complement the song.
This doesn't mean your cover is bad, not at all! You have certainly improved since you arrived, but you must still learn a couple things and become better. It would be neat to see you can apply many cool techniques into your modules to give them a special charm. The best of this is that anything you make is unique, and your watermark will be left on each single note and effect you put in there.
Thanks a lot. That really helps, knowing that I have you behind my back.
Anyway, I've been starting to use MIDIs, but the first two versions of this were made with sheet music. I DO have Audio Overload and know how to use it, but I suck at composing by ear. However, we've been singing in band lately, and I've noticed that I've been better at figuring out pitches. I'll try it on my next cover, whatever that may be. Probably an SNES game. I like having the eight SPC channels corresponding to VRC6, if that makes any sense. I can "map" each channel to FT's channels and it makes it much more straightforward.
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Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio...
For channel map you may need that the song has each channel assigned to the same functions the 2A03+VRC6 can handle, like two percussion channels, six melodic channels, one of which can't have volume control and lots of other things. It's usually better to adapt the song to what you are given, like I did with a Super Mario World Overworld cover, which I made as a beginner. I used 5 out of 8 channels because some of them were less important and I ran out of space.
You are singing in a band you say? That's cool, and the more you practice with music, the easier it will become to recognize each note and put it into the tracker or whatever else you do. It's pretty neat to be able to do that. For instance, I've been a musician for the last 10 years (I'm 18 now, and I started when I was 8 years old). Maybe that's not very relevant, but along these years I have developed the capability of recognizing each note in a song (more lately, to be exact), but I still have more to go. It's not something that flows too slow, in fact, it grows pretty quickly and in a natural way, so you don't need to force yourself to learn it. Just listen to the music, grab any instrument you wish (or even computer software) and try to play the same notes in it, and you'll see that maybe you hit the G-3 note, which was the one playing in the music, and so on.
Mastering something, whatever it is, takes a lot of time, patience and dedication. Just love what you do and you'll have a natural domination of that art when you get more skilled. Some are slower, some are faster, but what really matters is how you do things. Now go and do something awesome, I want to see you polish every little thing in your music and make something really good out of it! I'm sure you have the skills to do so, you just have to develop them!
