LogFAQs > #955194999

[...continued]

-[strange sunset is EVBERYTHING WRONG WITH BOARD 8, what the fuck are all these painful sounds that are too loud they make me sad : ( why is a woman screaming at me? what did i do wrong : ( ( ( (( ( ( . street fighter exhimo45amtohi has the really cool super sweep jazz fusion. songs with the chill chords that i am traumatized by if the song is too much like "the good one that is ' the banger' " from the darkness of punkishmsned himo touch your lbraltm sim socunk the panning on this song is all waykcy . AYaKO SASO IS SO GOOD AT JAZZ FUSION and i agree, it's because of songs like this, and blood vessel of the city, she is always "in the shadow" of shinji hosoe who is more famous by 1% but they are both s o good. honestly i am bad at telling them apart but i think there's things i hear in saso songs i don't hear in hosoe songs which are mainly a rhythmic freedom, which you hear to a degree here. saso's stuff is more "alive" and more feels like it would be playing by the band "dimension" which has fun with tricking you into thinking their erratic hits are playing at specific times vs not or something]-

-{amazing pair...}-

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-(connxion is so epic and i wish i could vote for it. 6/8 is cool and cbouncy. SUPER full produced sound design. i like pretty much everything i've heard from girls frontline but i only listened to an arbitrary portion of the ost (well it's not that arbitrary; i focused on the basiscape contributions to it and then the ones that are in vgmc or were otherwise linked to me), but really like i like everything i heard. this does a lot of things i might not like if the instrumentation was different. progressions/melodies i'd cringe at if this was like, a chiptune, but it's not, it's big epic song with cool clicky electronic drums and dramatic vocals : ) and cool whispering and cool strings and cool tense pads in the background that don't change chords even when everything else in the song changes chords. this makes it feel like a DARKNESS (she said the word "darkness" in the lyrics when i typed that word so it felt fitting to type) it feels like the evil hum of a dark machine hlooming in the hbackground ready to eat your thoughts so that ytou become a soulless person whos eyes are the color red)-

-[shnabubula is in my top tier of favorite composers, in this song i'm actually less focused on his composition than usual for him, but actually more enthralled by the sound design. this might seem kinda backwards but i'm really interested in OPLL as a soundchip particularly. I probably place the entire OPL line (including vrc7 as seen in lagrange point) as my "tied favorite soundchip", so that includes this song! But i actually don't consider opll to be commonly used in an interesting way, part of that is it's very hard to! It's one of the most limited fm synth soundchips....arguably THE most limited fm format (the main competitor for "most limited" is VRC7, which is OPLL but with less channels and different sounds, but imo despite being cut down opll, you're still able to layer the entire nes soundchip on top of vrc7 though, so imo opll like this is actually more stifling...which...is cool! THE CHIPTUNE PUZZLE).
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OPLL as a format's limits boil down to:
1) you can only play 9 notes at hte same time
2) you can only play one user-defined FM patch at a time, and otherwise have to choose from a list of 15 hardcoded presets if you want more than one sound playing at once.
-------so basically if u want to make a song that is timbrally varied, you have to either carefully place where you use the custom patches in the composition of the music (since you can't play more than one at the same time as each other)...or you can just rely on using the 15 presets in interesting ways. This song does both!!! However there was one other major limit shnabubula had to work with on this game: the song could not take up more than ~4 kilobytes (caravan boomer barely had room to squeeze as much music into the game as it did), which is a huge, huge limitation for something as musically dense as this song.
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what's cool about shnabubula's approach to fm is a tendency to never stick to just one patch on a given layer. just jumping all around with repeating the same note but on every repetition having that note be on a different sound. This is all over his FM stuff tho most of the other examples i can think of of such a thing aren't in stuff that's easy to find online at the moment. i can upload/link examples if anyone is curious about other cases i'm talking about.
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obviously i still appreciate this compositionally, it has odd time and polymeter, the sorts strange parallel harmony stuff i dig. shnabubula's melodic style can be really addictive too! all extremely "me" things. but the real treat here is FM being used in a way i want FM to be used, that i rarely get to see it be used. i can go on about how it's impressive within the technical limitations, but MORE IMPORTANTLY "it sounds cool", these constantly changing fm patches like every note just sound fucking cool!!! every 16th is a different timbre...vibraphone-like timbres being quite common in the song too which makes me VERY happy
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being a homebrew game for a format that has few other methods to make music in said format: this song was written in the very 80s way of being made in a text editor using MML, and you can see the code for it here:
https://f.msxplay.com?id=bd55e405
if this sorta thing interests you in how it works, it's fun to mess with it and see how what changes you make to the text can alter the music
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-{sergio cornaga HATES me}-

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XaaaCi. (29th/238)
Sunjammer Midnight Special (57th/238)
Connexion (76th/238)
Strange Sunset (95th/238)
RoboCop Title (147th/238)
Cosmic Hero (159th/238)

Every match in this day of the contest feels close to a degree or at least "i love both songs" sorta thing. Very good day. Have very positive feelings about all 6 songs even if the ranking having 3 digit numbers might not make it look that way!
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