Music 30/30 – Day 4
Ok, some actual music today, just for fun:
Just a little playing around with the LMMS DAW.
As far as actual work and progress goes, I feel like I learned a decent amount today. I learned that I still have a lot of practicing to do before I can hit the right keys without looking at them, which is a bit problematic if you are trying to keep proper time with notes moving across a screen on your laptop. If I watch the screen in synthesia too closely I tend to get all messed up on where my fingers are and miss everything. And if I watch the keyboard to play the right notes, my timing is atrocious. But, that’s why we practice.
In theory class I learned, or relearned, a lot about keys, scales, and chords, getting into triads and inversions, and a bit into how to analyze a piece of sheet music. Of course, I need to practice, so I set out on the internet in search of some for one of my favorite composers of all time: Nobuo Uematsu. In particular I found someone’s arrangement of his piece “To Zanakand” from Final Fantasy X. It seems like a good choice, haunting and powerful while still being a relatively simple piece overall. I think it will be a great starter exercise.
Other
In other news, well, I don’t have much other news. I did a couple of quick sketches today, and some sculpting practice before dinner, but nothing actionable. Reviews are coming in on my game jam submission, and looking generally positive so far, though everyone seems to hate the music. It’s understandable, I kind of slapped the version that’s on the game together relatively quickly, with only the minimal musical understanding that I had going into it, and having never used the program that I used to write it in before. It was meant to be placeholder music, but when it came time to add in the real music, I found that I couldn’t actually do it.
You see, the game’s music is designed to play more or less randomly, following a fairly standard chord progression chart, meaning that the root chord can be followed up by any of the others, but the other chords have certain places that they are allowed to go. The game was designed around this concept, with the obstacles in the game fitting into shapes that matched that same pattern. I had a section of music designed around each chord, and each time a section finished playing the game would choose the next one randomly based on the chord progression, and send out the appropriate matching obstacles as the song played on.
The problem came in with my general lack of understanding of Unity’s sound system. No matter what I tried I couldn’t quite figure out how to get the next section to play exactly on time. There were random sub-second delays in the playback as it would switch from one section to the next. Occasionally it would even go the other direction, and start playing the next one very slightly early, or skip a part of one, or other weird results. I’m sure there are ways to smooth things out, but I certainly couldn’t find them in the short time allotted for the game jam, so the problem persisted.
Unfortunately, the “enhanced” soundtrack that I wrote for the game, to replace my quick placeholder music, made these odd audio sputters really stand out. The placeholder music was already kind of wild and chaotic, so it tended to mask it more, but the “real” soundtrack was much more organized, had a tighter flow and was more rhythmic. It even had a percussion track to it. In this case better was actually far far worse. Even though it sounded great when played together as a whole, when put into the random generator with it’s timing issues, it sounded awful.
So, since I’m sharing music today, I’ll share that one too. The soundtrack to Flight of Light that never saw the light of day. Enjoy!