Dalmasca Estersands
Guys!!! Listen to this!!! Please!!! I spent a few days working on this MIDI and I am extremely pleased about how it turned out.
This song’s from Final Fantasy XII, by the new composer Hitoshi Sakimoto. The guy’s really good. I might be wrong but I think this guy might actually have some formal music training. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s better than Uematsu, but his stuff seems just a bit more complex.
Listen to the original MP3 to compare.
Hitoshi Sakimoto is my favorite video game music composer 🙂
It’s a really solid transcription, and good music too – I’m liking the FFXII score a lot more than what’s in the previous games. (didn’t ever worship Uematsu) Although compared to the original, yours still sounds like a sketch…I think much of that can be attributed to their using a real orchestra(looked it up on Wikipedia). There are a few things you could still try if you were up to spending twice as much time on it – I’m mainly thinking of pitch-bending and volume-changing effects…stuff beyond the main dynamics to emulate the use of eg. legato. The little expressive bits that would have been brought out by the orchestra’s conductor.
How did he use a real orchestra for this piece? It’s very easy to tell that despite the great amount of reverb, the piece uses samples, and the entire thing is basically a MIDI itself.
Also I’m not really sure how I would be able to incorporate pitch bending into the piece. Since it wasn’t recorded live (I am completely sure about this), not a lot of pitch bending was added – and as for reverb, that’s something I can’t really do with a general MIDI file – or at least something that PC synthesizers won’t emulate.
As for legato, do you mean sustained notes, as if a pedal was being held down? I used a good amount of slurs for legato passages but that’s about as good as I could get.
Keep in mind that I had stayed up all night and then wrote that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_XII_Original_Soundtrack
Read the credits. Although you may hear samples, that could be post-recording production work. It’s very obvious that the sound is not real – it’s larger than life and overly flawless. But in many cases, game developers have found that it is cheaper to hire an orchestra for a few days than it is for the producer to spend his time recreating a convincing one entirely from samples. Or perhaps he would have worked the other way around, started from samples and then added the live group on top. But having listening to it a few dozen times(and being familiar with what live sounds can do) I don’t believe for a moment that he would do the entire piece from samples. The tools for doing it that way efficiently, and attaining a final result with that much richness, aren’t quite there yet.
Some of what I had in mind is really kind of hard to explain. Mainly I was thinking of modifying the attack phase by not restarting the note and toying directly with the volume instead.
I read that article too. I believe most of it corresponds to the obligatory “pop song,” and maybe the intro and ending themes. The samples in the piece are very nice, though, but I’m pretty sure that they are of individual notes, rather than phrases.
I understand what you mean – there are some notes at some points that are a bit too abrupt and not very flowing. Especially the trumpet and string ensemble parts at times.
The thing about modifying a MIDI file to perfection, though, is that at some point it’ll only sound good on one synthesizer. So something that sounds good on Microsoft’s software synth might not sound as good on QuickTime’s, or WinGroove’s, or sound card hardware synths’, etc. It just gets to a certain point where I could do more but then I would have to designate the piece for a specific kind of synthesizer to get it exact.
But definitely thanks for the input.
This is GG!
You should post more :). This is really good. Try the Opening Theme next, heh.