User avatar
By ZeeCount
#100932
hunter2 wrote:
ZeeCount wrote:
MrMasochism wrote:Yeah we've been debating removing it


Yeah, from the next update of Pixelmon the piece "A Simple Moment by the Sea" will no longer be in the mod. When I originally made this it was a nod towards the lugia theme for one of the other developers, but because I do not own the copyright for the piece, or have permission to produce a cover of it, we (Mr M and I) have decided to remove it from the mod.

Sorry for causing such a hullabaloo. To be fair, there's quite a few more legal concerns but trademarks are a bit more lenient than music copyrights~
You don't have to ax the piece completely, you could do what you did with Apteryx's Theme relative to MGS (don't think I didn't notice, you little rascal) and just play a different melody - could even just keep it in a minor chord, why not? (Though rather than what sounds like Vienna to me, I would suggest Symphobia 2's "legato flute" sample with close mic+tons of reverb to get that lugia feel - maybe add an low volume "legato low whistle" behind it to get that more Irish feel.)

Speaking of minor chords, I almost completely forgot what I originally asked about in this thread - the other music doesn't feel like pokemon/minecraft music, man.
Pokemon: Kids game, Japanese, Usually happy/bouncy, lots of marches (at least what I would call a "march", you should know what I mean), centered around bleeps and bloops, Major chords everywhere, battle themes are power chords (though implied major chords) using chromatic dissonance to build tension - rarely if ever minor chords (Find me a minor chord in this, go ahead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_YMW54XtjI, Lots of counterpoint
if Junichi Masuda (the old pokemon game composer) wrote it, it's VERY child-friendly, lots of major chords, lots of scales, lots of descending base notes that fit to major chord patterns, especially that one Pacabel's-canonesqe pattern that Japanese game composers seemed to love for a while in low bit music (Examples: 1 2 3)
If Shota Kageyama (the new "main" pokemon composer judging by soundtrack credits) wrote it: Either along the lines of Masuda's (kidfriendly, happy, bouncy, etc) or he seems to like RnB/Funk/"Jazz" (I don't just throw that word around) a lot - don't know what's up with that lately. Still tons of major chords

Minecraft: Minimalist, seems centered around piano, heavily relies on already existing samples (1 2 3 ), made to build atmosphere and has very little compositional merit but sounds nice, originally just placeholder music by a friend of notch's - but like the graphics that were supposed to be updated - was kept as is for preserving the atmosphere of minecraft.

Your music: Adventury (Very full, not minimalist at all), key changes out of nowhere, based around minor chords, seems to be centered around woodwinds (you're a flautist aren't you?), feels a lot like this, ii-IV-I-V everywhere (I'd like to point out, starting on a minor chord), generally feels a bit like you sat down and said "I need to think of something that feels desert-y" and that was it, one melody per section of a song, some songs have two unrelated melodies that don't seem to lead into each other, one song (think it's the night one) reminds me of a merger between the my little pony theme and the guitar part in this, which is very confusing - let me tell you, orchestrated like an arrangement to be played by a live orchestra - not like it was arranged to sound great using sample libraries.

I still like your music - really. Don't get me wrong here. But I don't understand how this all comes together.

P.S. If you're going to insist on using LASS ensemble patches as a pad (P.P.S. stop that - not what it was designed for at all) at least layer Expressive (trilayer, Full volume)+Sordino (full volume)+Tremolo (10%-25% volume), will sound much better than a single patch. That being said, just layer that behind single sections at REALLY LOW VOLUME, to add a sort of fullness feeling to what you should be doing with single patches from each section of strings having their own parts. (I also recommend putting Symphobia 1's Ensemble string patches (Exp+sordino, not tremolo - 5 things loaded in kontakt in total) at slightly lower volume - makes it feel even more full if you have it.)


Heh this is an interesting post for how close yet completely off the mark you are ;)

With regards to the lugia piece, this is a discussion Mr M and I had quite a while ago. We had already decided to remove it, I just thought that 3.0 was probably the best time to do it. The flute sample I used for this piece is by Embertone, and it's their Shire Whistle (an irish penny whistle), as I wasn't going for an orchestral flute sound.

For the Apteryx piece, I've never played a MGS game, or listened to any of their soundtracks, so it wasn't based on that. When I wrote that one I was inspired by the Crimson Tide, soundtrack by Hans Zimmer, but it's really just a generic remote control esque sounding piece.

I'm a classically trained oboist (so very close on that one), but I also think that woodwind is very underutilised in modern film music which is why I use so much of it.

I've only heard that metallica song once, but I can hear the similarities to it (awful album btw). As for songs having two unrelenting melodies, that's kinda the point. I'm approaching a lot of these pieces from my classical background, with using the idea of theme and counter theme (though I don't tend to go much into development sections for these pieces so I couldn't really call them sonata form based).

As for the stuff about minor chords, well, that's getting into subjective taste at this point. I use a lot of minor chords because I like the way they sound. I find that major keys tend to be not very flexible in terms of mood. As for using a lot of chord changes, that's mostly due to my studies, as I was fascinated by the idea of axial tone theory while doing my music degree. One of my big influences for composing is the orchestral works of Gustav Mahler, who I studied, and he uses a lot of axial tone shifts in his music.

As for the p.p.s. sorry, but while I do have LASS, I don't use any of the ensemble patches. For ensemble strings I usually use a combination of Albion and Logeria by Spitfire, which I then add things like the LASS smaller sized sections and solo strings to. I also tend to layer it with some of the strings patches by Embertone. Then again, I don't tend to use full ensemble strings unless I want to use them as a pad (which I find funny that you say they're not "designed for that"). As for symphobia, I've played around with it, but I've never liked the sound of that sample library. It's very much the american vs the european orchestral sound, and I must say I much prefer the sound of the Spitfire products.

By hunter2
#110378 I wrote this post 3 weeks ago. Going by the old "sleep on it" model since I was unsure if I should post it. Some parts were done today, much of it wasn't. I apologize for any confusion as a result of a lack of editing.

Quotes are getting to long, so I'm going to segment this a bit
ZeeCount wrote:With regards to the lugia piece, this is a discussion Mr M and I had quite a while ago. We had already decided to remove it, I just thought that 3.0 was probably the best time to do it.
Oh, well good. Glad I'm not that much of a troublemaker.
ZeeCount wrote:The flute sample I used for this piece is by Embertone, and it's their Shire Whistle (an irish penny whistle), as I wasn't going for an orchestral flute sound.
I know what that library is you sillybuns - my ears just said "European whistle that I am unfamiliar with but sounds decent quality" thus guessing vienna. I don't know most Embertone samples (but Friedlander Violin is AMAZING)
ZeeCount wrote:For the Apteryx piece, I've never played a MGS game, or listened to any of their soundtracks, so it wasn't based on that. When I wrote that one I was inspired by the Crimson Tide, soundtrack by Hans Zimmer, but it's really just a generic remote control esque sounding piece.
Ah, I can hear a bit of roll tide in there (haven't listened to that one since the YTMND days) but listen to thisand tell me it doesn't feel like Apteryx's theme from about 0:30-1:15. Gregson-Williams was a part of remote control back in the day I believe, so that makes sense.
ZeeCount wrote:I'm a classically trained oboist (so very close on that one), but I also think that woodwind is very underutilised in modern film music which is why I use so much of it.
I actually googled both "flautist" and "Oboist" (though I spelled it oboeist like an idiot) before posting that - to check for spelling mostly. When push came to shove and my brain was telling me "Just pick one", I went with flautist because it sounds more fun - I mean say it out loud, it's great. I'm a classically trained pianist and double bassist, thus my bias for picking out strings and "feel."
ZeeCount wrote:I've only heard that metallica song once, but I can hear the similarities to it (awful album btw).
I heard that song for the first time literally less than a week ago. Was on my girlfriend's old ipod touch that she keeps in her bathroom (with speakers.) I immediately said "what is this and why do I know it?" upon hearing it. Left me puzzled for at least an hour - then I put together from where it sounded familiar, from your piece. Wasn't expecting to recognize anything among her favorite tracks consisting of scooter (disgusting), aphex twin (slightly less disgusting but still quite so), and this masterpiece (I laughed for hours.)
ZeeCount wrote:As for songs having two unrelenting melodies, that's kinda the point. I'm approaching a lot of these pieces from my classical background, with using the idea of theme and counter theme (though I don't tend to go much into development sections for these pieces so I couldn't really call them sonata form based).

Theme is my my musical fetish, for lack of a better word. Can't get enough of themes being used over and over in creative and different ways (I especially love when composers sneak a leitmotif into another piece, oh goodness), blame the old DCAU cartoons and Shirley Walker (RIP) for my obsession with that. I get what you mean by having two melodies play off eachother but I have no idea why you are using the word theme - you keep your melodies to one song only and each section of each song is much too short, similar, and underveloped to be called a movement - and the transitions between sections are jarring to say the least. I can best explain this by going through each piece individually.
You do a wonderful job having different melodies play off each other in the beginning of "Distant Shores" - starts mysterious, tension starts building, gets more mysterious, theme becomes more heroic while still building and becoming more full, oh but wait we're teasing even more tension build build here and then suddenly around 55 seconds it's gone. All the tension suddenly stops when all the instruments abruptly stop, a key changed and a new bit is brought in to accompany the "main" melody - as a listener, I am confused here. It works itself back to being stable and quite nice, but I am now guarding myself against the previous betrayal of emotional investment. Good thing too, because at about 2:30 it happens again, bluff called. Even a bit at the end, though I'm used to it now and stopped paying attention.
Then there's "Across the desert" this one feels cool, in a strange middle eastern land with a hint of loneliness and a need to run because somebody might be chasing me, great stuff - oh wait what, a bit after a minute in everything stops abruptly again and suddenly I'm met with ANOTHER ii-IV-I-V (Implied V, at least) with a completely different feel and different melody. I remember this trick and am now guarding myself again. I do hope you understand what I'm trying to convey here, very difficult to describe right now for some reason.
None of these are bad melodies by themselves, but they tend to be a bit jarring being so split up and underdeveloped. Especially with being such short pieces.
That being said, theme is exactly what I was trying to get at when describing some things in the pokemon section. Pokemon has distinct thematic figures and motifs, you include none of them - you make callbacks to none of them and don't make pieces that lend themselves well to appealing to them.
ZeeCount wrote:As for the stuff about minor chords, well, that's getting into subjective taste at this point. I use a lot of minor chords because I like the way they sound. I find that major keys tend to be not very flexible in terms of mood. As for using a lot of chord changes, that's mostly due to my studies, as I was fascinated by the idea of axial tone theory while doing my music degree. One of my big influences for composing is the orchestral works of Gustav Mahler, who I studied, and he uses a lot of axial tone shifts in his music.

See now I know you're completely missing the point of my post - it wasn't to pick apart your music at all (that would be a much longer post - as long as this already is, and I am much too lazy and out of practice since it's been years since I took a theory class) instead, it was to establish a comparison between your music and the music of both minecraft and pokemon.
I'm afraid I don't understand the point of adding this music. I just don't know what you're going for here. It doesn't feel like minecraft music (which would be superfluous anyway), it doesn't feel like pokemon music, and it doesn't feel like a mix between the two.

After that, each section references the others indirectly ("based around minor chords" directly corresponds with "Usually happy/bouncy, lots of marches (at least what I would call a "march", you should know what I mean), centered around bleeps and bloops, Major chords everywhere" and in fact your little section was added after I felt already complete with the post because I didn't feel like it really nailed in the contrast between your music and the others well enough - the main focus was the Pokemon/Minecraft sections. Let me say that again: None of this was to criticize your music, but to establish a disconnect between your music and the music from both pokemon and from minecraft. However, I have given this post 3 weeks to fester in my brain to try to find a better way to say this - but I can't find one: this isn't music for a school project or a classical portfolio, this is music for a pokemon mod that you are making. When I listen to your music, I don't feel pokemon/minecraft so I get taken out of the game (then the choppiness of the pieces I described more takes me even more out of the game). You can say "it's a fanmade mod, we can do what we want" and you very well can - but since you call yourself a film composer, you should know that losing the audience at any point means death in the industry. It's apparently not me either, the second reply to this thread said the same thing. I would put your pieces more along the lines of a documentary/nature show or one of those silly new reality things I keep hearing about like "storage wars" or "pawn stars" and it looks like you've already done a nature documentary thing so if you want to carve out a niche in that market, power to you man - it just doesn't fit with pokemon.
ZeeCount wrote:As for the p.p.s. sorry, but while I do have LASS, I don't use any of the ensemble patches. For ensemble strings I usually use a combination of Albion and Logeria by Spitfire, which I then add things like the LASS smaller sized sections and solo strings to. I also tend to layer it with some of the strings patches by Embertone. Then again, I don't tend to use full ensemble strings unless I want to use them as a pad (which I find funny that you say they're not "designed for that"). As for symphobia, I've played around with it, but I've never liked the sound of that sample library. It's very much the american vs the european orchestral sound, and I must say I much prefer the sound of the Spitfire products.

I actually don't use LASS much anymore (for over a year or two), and if I do I use LASS2 or LASS FC, Symphobia was simply the most accurate sounding flute I could get to the Lugia's theme. The LASS/Symphobia mixing trick was actually taken from http://www.youtube.com/user/dazexus from a video he has apparently removed. You simply mentioned using LASS before and I made an assumption, my mistake. While I have Spitfire's Albion and Logeria (and solo strings, low brass, harp, etc.) I haven't really found anything in them that I particularly like. I tend to go for very specific sounds whenever I write a piece (best tool for the job viewpoint) and spitfire never seems to have the right sound for my ears (Nor does LASS most of the time for that matter - the solo cellos are particularly offensive.) They also provide an excellent explanation for the "pad" thing I was talking about. In those two libraries specifically, there is only "low strings" and "hi strings" not violinI/II/Viola/cello/bass - that is what my ear picked up. My orchestral string background has made me very sensitive to when sections are being blended together in a unison patch and it always sounds fake to me. You can honestly get away with this one though, most people won't notice it.
User avatar
By MrMasochism
#110428 You can blame me for it not sounding like pokemon. The first thing I ever do when playing a pokemon game is turn the sound off. I find the music horrifically repetitive and irritating in the extreme. However what I do suggest is that you start writing some music of your own. We can always use more music in the mod and if we find it fits in we'd be happy to use it. It's easy to criticise, hard to be part of a solution
User avatar
By ZeeCount
#110519 @hunter2

Well, what this is mainly coming down to is that my intention with this music has never been to try and replicate the style of the music from the pokemon games. Still thanks for all of your comments. I don't often meet people who like to look into how music is constructed, and it's always great when you see people engaging with your music to the point where they start looking at how the pieces fit together.

I'll definitely agree with you on the Friedlander Violin, it is stunning. I haven't tried the Cello they made, but i'm sure it will be amazing as well. I'm eagerly awaiting some of the new sample libraries that Embertone are putting out this year, as they look great.
By hunter2
#111031
MrMasochism wrote:You can blame me for it not sounding like pokemon. The first thing I ever do when playing a pokemon game is turn the sound off. I find the music horrifically repetitive and irritating in the extreme. However what I do suggest is that you start writing some music of your own. We can always use more music in the mod and if we find it fits in we'd be happy to use it. It's easy to criticise, hard to be part of a solution

I understand (I do too usually after listening to most of the songs once or twice.) I also understand that the director has as much say in what goes into the mod as the composer, and figured as much.~ However, I don't want to really take away the spotlight from zeecount and my schedule is a bit busy to be doing much of any hard work for free (and I do consider music hard work - though it may not have seemed it from my post, I have nothing but respect for zeecount's efforts.) That, and my specialties are in "mockups" where I take a piece, recreate it as best I can using my many sample libraries and either leave it or change the melody a bit to get around copyrights (when I said "You don't have to ax the piece completely, you could do what you did with Apteryx's Theme relative to MGS (don't think I didn't notice, you little rascal) and just play a different melody - could even just keep it in a minor chord, why not?" I was dead serious.) An example would be the background to this clip (clearly Dark Knight), though not my work at all and otherwise most of what I do is crappy piano improvs where I do silly things like mix"what kind of pokemon are you" and "never gonna give you up" into a more "jazzy" style melody (check the chord progressions, they work together nicely) as sick jokes or just flat out improvisations on the piano that I never actually record because I am an insecure sillybuns who just ends up crying while listening to myself if I ever do record them. None of these lend themselves well to this mod.
ZeeCount wrote:@hunter2

Well, what this is mainly coming down to is that my intention with this music has never been to try and replicate the style of the music from the pokemon games. Still thanks for all of your comments. I don't often meet people who like to look into how music is constructed, and it's always great when you see people engaging with your music to the point where they start looking at how the pieces fit together.

I'll definitely agree with you on the Friedlander Violin, it is stunning. I haven't tried the Cello they made, but i'm sure it will be amazing as well. I'm eagerly awaiting some of the new sample libraries that Embertone are putting out this year, as they look great.

I wouldn't approach it as replicating the style of the games either - I'd say go at the pieces from the perspective of the anime. Main game soundtracks are just one of the things to draw from. You could always draw from something weird like the best soundtrack of all the games that nobody remembers anymore because you're all youngins.
You know, I realize now that I missed a point that was buzzing in my head for well over a week (And was actually the reason I was going to finally post that monolith of a post, I meant to include the positive along with the criticism and I forgot):
You actually hit the nail on the head in terms of "feel" (I keep going back to that~) with a couple of pieces - though not the "main series" games. A couple weeks ago this video was posted and my immediate thought was "this reminds me/feels a lot like pokemon snap." (I'm still going to complain about the split-into-three parts, though.) And THEN after that, gloriously there is the music from this video which is amazingly similar (especially in feel) to the song from what is possibly my favorite level of pokemon snap. I mean just listen to that, glorious.

(And as an aside, if you're worried about the rule that protects against hyperlinking to youtube content for being a copyright violation the hyperlinking/embedding things on a website is now less restricted, yay)

Oh goodness, I just spent a large amount of time researching the embertone Blakus Cello library - I think you're really going to like it. I read on the official website "We bring to you the EMBERTONE BLAKUS CELLO, a collaboration with the mighty Blake Robinson, Australian composer/cellist extraordanaire" and my immediate response was "wait, I know that name - that's dummeh" While I don't personally like his style that much, (clearly I am hard to please~ Feels a bit "fuzzy" for my tastes and doesn't pack enough "punch" I would say, that and he has sort of cornered himself in one very specific style) he's a very talented composer with a huge youtube following. He's also part of the Spitfire team and worked on Albion so I think you'll really enjoy how it sounds.
User avatar
By ZeeCount
#114858 I'm sure everyone has heard this piece in pixelmon 3.0, but in case you haven't (and now that the artwork is finally done), I give you:

https://soundcloud.com/chrisgeddes/journey-to-the-sky

Journey to the Sky: the latest track in the pixelmon soundtrack for the extreme hills biome. Big thanks to Matt Caradus for playing fiddle, mandolin and dulcimer for the track.

Artwork by Ninja Jamal.
By AZTERIX_
#115046 Pixelmon is the only way you'll get nice music in Minecraft. In my opinion you should replace C418.
JOIN THE TEAM