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Song Editing Issue


Deltre
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I'm a bit new to adding music to the game, so bear with me here.

I ripped the song Endless Battle straight from New Mystery and inserted it into FE8 without any problems from what I can tell. However, there don't seem to be any native instruments that work with some of my tracks. It's be easier to show my problem then try to describe it, so here's a video of what I'm talking about:

With the horns at the beginning, I figure I can probably just use a multi-instrument or something, since I really like the way they sound for the rest of the song. I have no idea what to do about the strings section though. I've tried throwing any instrument I can in that slot just to see what works, and it's usually an instrument that's hilariously inappropriate, if it even works correctly at all. There's some other things I'd like to change around too, of course, but honestly right now I'd be happy if I could get rid of that Proto-Man sounding part.

The part in question starts around 0:35 in the original song

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Edited by Deltre
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You've done a decent job but I have some notes for you.

First of all, FE11 and FE12 have a very unique way of setting up many of their instruments.

By this, I mean that many of the tracks have seemingly random notes shifted up/down several octaves for no good reason.

If you look at the .sf2 files you will actually find that these are set up to play different samples in a different octave, producing a different sound.

A good example is how the horn in FE12 works - the very high notes are actually a punchier horn sample thus producing the more staccato sounds heard in the first four bars of Endless Battle. They are set up so that they play two octaves lower than the actual note, which means that by pushing the notes up 2 octaves higher, you get the same pitch but a different sound.

In this same way you can use different octaves to make different samples play with different panning settings. The string section you are talking about in Endless Battle actually has 3 different settings. There is a low line, a middle line, and a top line. I would suggest opening this up in a MIDI editor so you can see what I'm talking about.

These are all the same string sample but the lowest it made to play from the left ear, the middle from dead center, and the top from the right.

I don't really know why this was done as it wasn't really necessary. Why didn't they just split them into different tracks? I have no idea.

Secondly, you will want to run most of your MIDIs through this program. There is an often unused feature in MIDI files called "expression". This allows for crescendo/decrescendo during a note. Many games don't use this but again, FE11/12 do, which is one of the reasons why the soundtrack sounds very emotive and... expressive.

By running your MIDIs through that program you are ensuring that you are getting all of the dynamics of the original tracks. Also, it fixes up the Velocity values. The GBA engine doesn't play Velocity values at their true level - rather, it adjusts them with a formula where the loudness increases exponentially with the Velocity value, which means some notes sound much louder than they should be.

To summarise:

  • You will need to manually adjust some of the tracks in a MIDI editor such as Anvil if you want them to play correctly. You may even need to separate some of them, particularly the string section in the bridge of the song.
  • Use midfix4agb to get the songs sounding EXACTLY as they do in the original.
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I had noticed before that FE12 uses a lot of different samples for the same track. Originally I wanted to directly import the samples, but I was afraid it would clash with GBA samples a little too much (not that it doesn't already with 16 tracks). Right about now I'm wondering if that was a good decision or not because using the GBA samples seems like a lot more work haha. That's a very strange way to handle samples though. I can't for the life of me think of a situation where that would be more useful than having all the octaves line up, unless you really just wanted to mess with hackers.

Anyways, I separated the tracks as you suggested and played around with them a bit. Success! Kinda. The highest part of that strings section hits you pretty hard when it first kicks in. Maybe a quick run or something would help, if I was feeling a little more ambitious. And of course, I have to redo the entire drum track...ugh...is there by chance a chart somewhere that maps out each of the drum notes (D1=Snare D#1=Snare Roll etc.) or have people generally been doing that by ear/trial and error?

9 hours ago, Agro said:

Secondly, you will want to run most of your MIDIs through this program. There is an often unused feature in MIDI files called "expression". This allows for crescendo/decrescendo during a note. Many games don't use this but again, FE11/12 do, which is one of the reasons why the soundtrack sounds very emotive and... expressive.

I'm also having a bit of trouble getting this to work. I have next to no background in programming other small things I've picked up from hacking FE8, but from what I've gathered, it needs to be compiled before it can be used correct? 

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https://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=329058

This has a broken Dropbox link, I have the program... somewhere. I'll see if I can dig it up.

Trial and error, but if you rip the sf2 using GBAMusRiper and open it up in Viena then you can view the percussion instruments just like everything else. You shouldn't have to "redo" it... just copy the drum track in the .s file so another blank text, then search and replace all of the notes with the desired new notes, then copy and paste back into the .s things.

Again, the strings hit hard because that track heavily uses expression which Sappy ignores unless you run it through ipatix's program, which integrates it with volume commands.

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Redo was probably the wrong word. Scan and replace is probably a better way to put it; I have a little musical background so I'm a lot more comfortable messing around with the notes on a staff than I am directly editing the .s file. 

Anyways, thanks for the help man. It's a shame the GBA developers got a bit lazy with the sound system, it really can do a lot more than you'd think. 

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By the way, I made this back in the days where we could only do 8 tracks. In my opinion, the imported strings sound pretty damn good next to the GBA samples. Just food for thought. They are heavily used in the FE12 soundtack so if you are going to use more FE12 songs, it wouldn't be such a bad idea to import them. Just a note, if you use any samples other than FE7/8/Advance Wars/Mother 3 you will have to manually turn up the volume by about 33% as FE samples on their own are quite loud (FE6 excepting).

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