video game music thread

  On 11/12/2021 at 2:07 PM, Himelstein said:

https://www.hlj.com/figma-dobkeratops-r-type-fre29840
 

I really dig the music in R-Type, if my studio wasn’t strictly decorated with robots I would get this.

Do you have 13k lying around like that?

Classic.

The Yamaha YMF-262 (OPL3) Is hands down the best Chip for Video Game Music. 

Pure FM-Bliss! 
 

  On 5/26/2022 at 12:17 PM, jaderpansen said:

Expand  

@IOS what kind of tuplet is this? also it sounds to me like the last bar is shorter by a tuplet actually, if that makes sense. please explain.

Haven't seen this mentioned here, interesting compilation.

  On 5/26/2022 at 1:18 PM, brian trageskin said:

@IOS what kind of tuplet is this? also it sounds to me like the last bar is shorter by a tuplet actually, if that makes sense. please explain.

woah, the meter is in 6/4. quarter note speed around 147-150.

I'll do a piano roll transcription of the drums in a few hours when I get back.

  On 5/27/2022 at 10:10 PM, IOS said:

woah, the meter is in 6/4. quarter note speed around 147-150.

I'll do a piano roll transcription of the drums in a few hours when I get back.

haha cool. yeah i was asking about the snare rush in the last bar, not the time signature, idk if that was clear. apologies if you got that the 1st time and you just need time to analyze the tuplet thing and the meter trickery in the last bar. i mean i did slow down the audio in audacity and tried to figure it out myself but since i don't know the 1st thing about rhythms and have the attention span and patience of a 3-year-old, i quit after 30 seconds or so lol. anyway i'm curious to see what you come up with.

  On 5/27/2022 at 10:58 PM, brian trageskin said:

haha cool. yeah i was asking about the snare rush in the last bar, not the time signature, idk if that was clear. apologies if you got that the 1st time and you just need time to analyze the tuplet thing and the meter trickery in the last bar. i mean i did slow down the audio in audacity and tried to figure it out myself but since i don't know the 1st thing about rhythms and have the attention span and patience of a 3-year-old, i quit after 30 seconds or so lol. anyway i'm curious to see what you come up with.

sorry yeah! I understood you were referring to the snare rush at the end, I wrote my reply in a hurry and thought I'd quickly mention the metre first.

Now that I hear it more carefully, you're right, there's a few milliseconds missing from the end of the loop, the 'bell'-like pattern plays a bit faster the last couple of notes etc.

If we disregard the slight timing thing, then the snare rush is just 16th notes and the loop is 3 bars of 6/4 like this:

and the same thing with music notation:

HTH!

thanks for this! 

so if i understand you correctly, your explanation is that the tempo is slightly accelerated during the snare rush, nothing to do with odd-numbered tuplets or anything, correct? this is my current explanation btw. 

  On 5/28/2022 at 11:30 AM, brian trageskin said:

thanks for this! 

so if i understand you correctly, your explanation is that the tempo is slightly accelerated during the snare rush, nothing to do with odd-numbered tuplets or anything, correct? this is my current explanation btw. 

yep, ideally it's straightforward 16th notes (no odd-numbered tuplets), but it sounds odd and somewhat accelerating because the loop cuts a bit short at the end. I don't think the snare rush itself was played gradually faster. We probably perceive it as accelerating due to the whooshing sound on top as well.

I'm guessing what happened was, they composed several bars of the theme, but in the end they chose only those 3 bars, so they looped them over and over and bounced that as the final piece; but they chose a slightly shorter segment to loop, and that made it sound jumpy.

i meant "faster" actually, not "accelerating". the segment with the snare rush is at a faster tempo than the rest of the bar, which explains why the 3rd bar is slightly shorter than the other 2. i'm 300% sure of this. 

i don't know how to sync a click track to the tempo of an audio file so i just used my ears, but that tempo change is pretty easy to detect at normal speed, and it's even more obvious when you slow the audio down. can't you hear it? 

  On 5/28/2022 at 1:46 PM, brian trageskin said:

i meant "faster" actually, not "accelerating". the segment with the snare rush is at a faster tempo than the rest of the bar, which explains why the 3rd bar is slightly shorter than the other 2. i'm 300% sure of this. 

i don't know how to sync a click track to the tempo of an audio file so i just used my ears, but that tempo change is pretty easy to detect at normal speed, and it's even more obvious when you slow the audio down. can't you hear it? 

you're right, the snare rush is faster

Right up until the snare rush it aligns perfectly fine at 150bpm

Zooming in on the snare rush, we see it doesn't align 'properly' with the 16th note grid.

Here's the snare rush time-stretched to better match the 16th note grid - it requires a 0.83x time stretch to achieve this:

nice. i hope you now understand why i mentioned tuplets. but yeah, it's just a segment at a different tempo, not tuplets. anyway that was fun. thanks again for the notation.

holy crap, i just noticed this. it might be tuplets after all, combined with a time signature change - or something: 

6 16th notes fitting into the space of 5   coincidence? i think not.

the plot thickens.