v0.8.9 (Bugfixes + translations) released to Google Play!

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Music

Discussions of the development process of the game.
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pikurasa
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Music

Post by pikurasa »

Hi,

I am a musician and free software enthusiast.

I have some music that I made a few years ago that I thought would be great for a video/computer game. It has an "upbeat renaissance feel" and may be appropriate for certain sections of Andor's trail (Maybe during a battle?). It could be re-orchestrated in a number of different ways, but the main gist is HERE: http://www.devinulibarri.com/Music_File ... hestra.ogg

I offer it under CC SA 4.0--just give me credit as originator and do the musical idea justice, please!

I also have some canons (actually, I have a LOT of 16th-century style canons!) for filler music and could probably come up with some Gregorian Chant-like stuff, which would be great for the church. We could also make midi-arrangements of music from great 15th/16th century composers that are in the public domain and put it on a Creative Commons License for use in Andor's Trail. What do you think?

Having fun with the game. It is totally my style of RPG. Keep up the great work!

Devin
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Zukero
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Re: Music

Post by Zukero »

Hello Devin, and thank you for your kind words regarding the game.

Thanks a lot for your offer. Having support from a professional musician/composer would be highly appreciated in giving Andor's Trail a soundtrack, even more so when said musician 1° offers his music under CC SA 4.0 (CC BY-SA would be fine with us, even CC BY-SA-NC, and would "force" us, and potential "forkers", to comply with with your credit request :p ) and 2° uses free software to make said music.

I had something completely different in mind when it comes to orchestration than what you sent, but relying on classical compositions (or at least using their main themes) is a great idea IMHO, and I believe composing a track based on some starting material makes life easier.

In terms of production, I had envisionned (enheard ?) something like this:
- Simple tunes/themes. One for each ambiance (cave, dungeon, town, wilderness, mountain, churches...). Actually, one theme could be re-arranged to match severals, like the "moutain" tunes being a variation of the "wilderness" one, changing the couterpoint. To preserve appeal to the widest audience, avoiding the delightful dissonnances and weird time signatures seems necessary.
- Chiptune-influenced orchestration. At least a part of the orchestration should be made with instruments that sound like they come from the 8-bit and 16-bit consoles era (Game Boy, Mega Drive/Genesis...), to match with the retro-gaming inspirations in AT.
- Modern production. I prefer to do without music than have a few poorly mastered tracks that most players will want to disable after a short while.

For an example of how I'd love AT to sound like (production-wise, not composition-wise), you can check out AdhesiveWombat on http://soundcloud.com/ , with track "8 bit adventure" for example. However, I could be easily convinced by something else entirely.

I feel like I'm a blind man waiting to see the light, while having some hopes already about what light looks like :D

I read on your blog that you are using Ubuntu Studio. I'm an amateur musician (nothing even remotely comparable to a professional one), and also use Ubuntu Studio for both music and AT development.

Ubuntu Studio contains great tools to make a track sound better without too much effort (Ardour output fed to Jamin comes to mind), and great synths to make tracks more colorful than with a typical MIDI synth (ZynAddSubFX and Phasex are my favorites, and DIN, while on a completely different approach, gives awesome sound designing tools).

If you wish to discuss more in-depth about AT, music and/or Ubuntu Studio, you can PM me anytime, or just keep posting here.

Again, thanks a lot for even being interested in contributing music to AT.
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pikurasa
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Re: Music

Post by pikurasa »

Zukero wrote:Thanks a lot for your offer. Having support from a professional musician/composer would be highly appreciated in giving Andor's Trail a soundtrack, even more so when said musician 1° offers his music under CC SA 4.0 (CC BY-SA would be fine with us, even CC BY-SA-NC, and would "force" us, and potential "forkers", to comply with with your credit request :p ) and 2° uses free software to make said music.
Thank you so much for pointing this out. I meant CC BY SA 4.0. I do not want a non-commercial (NC) license, since that would limit its portability. I have fixed the language on my website and even added it to the file's meta-data.
Zukero wrote:For an example of how I'd love AT to sound like (production-wise, not composition-wise), you can check out AdhesiveWombat on http://soundcloud.com/ , with track "8 bit adventure" for example. However, I could be easily convinced by something else entirely.
Okay, I listened to it and I get your idea. Has a mix of old-school video game and modern sounds. That sounds like a good idea for this game since it is retro, but our modern ears have come to expect more.
Zukero wrote:Ubuntu Studio contains great tools to make a track sound better without too much effort (Ardour output fed to Jamin comes to mind), and great synths to make tracks more colorful than with a typical MIDI synth (ZynAddSubFX and Phasex are my favorites, and DIN, while on a completely different approach, gives awesome sound designing tools).
I am in transition from using almost all proprietary software (pro tools, finale, etc.) to using as much libre software as possible (because I do think it is a better choice). What I sent to you was made with Finale and Garmin (I think that was the name??? It had the sound fonts). I am still learning my way around the technology, so these tips are helpful. Any additional advice on helpful tutorials etc. is appreciated.

Which sound fonts sound like the 8 bit you are envisioning? ZynAddSubFX and Phasex?

For starters, I think that I will put the midi from this "Renaissance Orchestra" idea into Arduour (I will try Jamin, if I can figure it out) and see what I can do in terms of production with this. To be honest, "production" is not my strongest suit. I do have a friend who is pretty good at production, if I can convince him to do it (he would not be using free software, however, and he may or may not know much about Creative Commons licensing) but he is pretty good. I will contact him, too, and see what comes of it.
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Zukero
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Re: Music

Post by Zukero »

pikurasa wrote: I am in transition from using almost all proprietary software (pro tools, finale, etc.) to using as much libre software as possible (because I do think it is a better choice). What I sent to you was made with Finale and Garmin (I think that was the name??? It had the sound fonts). I am still learning my way around the technology, so these tips are helpful. Any additional advice on helpful tutorials etc. is appreciated.
I honestly don't know enough about the proprietary tools to give transitional advice, nor really helpful tutorials beyond each tool's documentation (more helpful for some than for others). Here are a couple of advice though:
- True to the UNIX philosophy, most Jack-based tools are simple, single-purpose tools, meant to work by connecting to other tools.
- Patchage is an awesome tool to visually connect sources & sinks. It is sometimes wrapped in other apps, like Gladish IIRC.
- Ardour is the DAW, quite powerful, and seems to borrow principles from popular tools on proprietary platforms. It has a good documentation too. However, I couldn't find enough time to dig very deep in it, and mainly used it as a multi-track recorder/mixer.
- Musescore is a score editing software, so coming from a classical background, you should find it helpful.

Also, it seemed to me that although there are some wonderful and unique tools in Linux for music, it also lags far behind Mac OS and even Windows when it comes to the number of plugins (VST or the likes) for effects and synths etc... available on the net. Or maybe I just didn't find them.
pikurasa wrote: Which sound fonts sound like the 8 bit you are envisioning? ZynAddSubFX and Phasex?
Well, neither ZynAddSubFX nor Phasex are actually sound fonts. They're software synthesizers, so basically, they're "sound font" edition tools. If you ever played with analog synths (Moog, Yamaha CS or DX series, or a myriad others), that's what they are emulating. I believe there's also a Yamaha DX7 emulator, able to more or less accurately reproduce the sound of that mythical synth by using the very same sound files (find sound banks for the DX7 and they'll work as is in that tool).
To be honest, I haven't (yet ?) found any convincing way of getting 8-bit sounds out of Ubuntu studio, but I think I only have myself to blame for this: time commitment, tools knowledge, and sound designer abilities were all way below what I guess is the required threshold.
I did try a few cool synths that were bundled as Windows VST plugins, and thus were very unstable (actually, barely usable).
I think ZynAddSubFX should be a perfect tool for this, but it's too complicated for me as of today.
pikurasa wrote: For starters, I think that I will put the midi from this "Renaissance Orchestra" idea into Arduour (I will try Jamin, if I can figure it out) and see what I can do in terms of production with this. To be honest, "production" is not my strongest suit. I do have a friend who is pretty good at production, if I can convince him to do it (he would not be using free software, however, and he may or may not know much about Creative Commons licensing) but he is pretty good. I will contact him, too, and see what comes of it.
Well, I'm no good at production either. I just noticed that when I feed my mixes to Jamin, even with the default settings, they tended to sound better. A true sound engineer would surely make some great use of that tool (you can find some video tutorials that seem helpful) and get way better results than I have. I don't have enough experience with MIDI to give you any advice, I only used my master keyboard to make Phasex & co play the notes I asked for.
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pikurasa
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Re: Music

Post by pikurasa »

[Quest Updated]

Okay. I will see what I can do! Looks like an opportunity to learn some more.

May the shadow be forever on your side, or whatever they say. Hahaha...
pikurasa
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Re: Music

Post by pikurasa »

Quick Update:

I have tried out Rosegarden--I think I get it.

I tried Phasex, but I don't really understand how to patch any sound through it. I will keep at it.

A friend of mine gave me a collection of free as in freedom sound fonts (a few gigs worth!) that I can rummage through.

Question: Other than the production/orchestration, did you like the general feel of the music I sent (compositionally)?

Also, my friend does not seem interested (long hiatus from music--which is too bad because he does great work), but I have others that I plan to ask.

Devin
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Zukero
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Re: Music

Post by Zukero »

Phasex (and ZynAddSubFX as far as I can tell) is a software synthesizer. You feed it with a MIDI stream (like a master keyboard, or maybe some rosegarden playback), create your sound with the bazillion knobs, and it gives you an audio signal.
For tools that patch sounds pushed through them, I only used effects like rakkarak and guitarix. There must be others too.

Cool for your free sound fonts. I hope you find what you wish in this. By the way, I remember having tried something called JSampler that helps creating/using audio samples as instruments, interpolating the missing notes by changing the pitch of the closest sample. You could also be very precise by using several samples for each note, and I remember finding a preset for it made by recording a grand piano in a concert room with high quality equipments. That piano alone used over 2GB worth of samples.

For your song, I really liked it on a personal standpoint, but I don't see it fitting the current maps of Andor's Trail. Maybe for one of the future, larger cities like Feygard. I also liked your other "FreeSoftwareSong_ClassicalGuitar_Ulibarri_Devin_Beta.ogg", that one could fit in taverns I think.

Cheers.
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