I started playing around using the melody and chord progression that a huge number of people created together at CrowdSound, and ended up making this little arrangement for Bawami, my MIDI synth. It took a few hours over 3 nights.
CrowdSound is a site where people were given a chord progression and song structure, and were then allowed to vote note-by-note to make a melody. It’s an experiment to see if lots of people can work together to gradually make an entire song by voting on many tiny additions. Since people are making remixes already, I decided I’d try, too.
As of the 15th of August 2016, only the melody is complete, so I imported the MIDI of the melody (from here) into Sekaiju (the MIDI editor I use). From there, based on the chord progression, I made tracks for bass, percussion, overdriven and acoustic guitar parts, 2-part pad and a portamento synth sequence to liven things up a bit. Then I decided on how I’d switch between the various backing parts so they weren’t all fighting for the spotlight at the same time. After that, I changed the velocities of all the melody notes (since I’m using a velocity-sensitive lead instrument on Bawami), to make it sound less annoying and repetitive and to complement the beat. I also shortened some long notes (which is within CrowdSound’s rules for arranging) to let the lead stop for breath every now and then, added modulation (vibrato) sparingly, and decided to somtimes pitch-bend from one note to another during the conclusion instead of instantly jumping (I think this should be allowed, because a real human voice would have to do this all the time =P).
In keeping with the openness of CrowdSound, you can download my MIDI (designed to be played on Bawami rev.132 or later) here. It uses several GS “variation” instruments, so it will sound worse on GM synths. It also uses an instrument (12-string Guitar) which is not present in Bawami rev.131, the currently-released version, but it should still sound fine on that version (it’ll fall back to the “Acoustic Guitar (Steel)” instrument). That, along with many other changes, will be in the next version I release!
This MIDI is playing on BaWaMI, which is a freeware, retro-sounding MIDI synth that uses subtractive synthesis. I’ve been working on it every now and then since 2010. You can find out more (and grab the latest version) here (click its title to get to the download page).
The 3D scrolling view of notes is MIDITrail.