Something Unreal

Here’s the Roland SC-88Pro synth being pushed quite hard by the power of moe (ending theme of the anime Moetan, “Skip!”, originally sung by Nomico, to my surprise). MIDITrail’s fancy 3D view is good for notes, but doesn’t show any control changes, so I included a scrolling view of those, too, next to the synth’s display. And hey, why not 60FPS for those who can view that? =)

[Watch in HD]

This MIDI took me about 5 days to make, plus a few hours of tweaking at the end. It sounded like it was nearly finished after 2 days, but the hardest stuff was still left to do at that point (I do hate struggling to transcribe barely-audible parts, but they really fill in the gaps and make it sound complete).

Firsts for me include the fast arpeggio effect (surprisingly, the 88P never complained about this), wah effect on the quiet guitar (on the right), and gratuitous use of “All Sound Off” whenever possible, to try to keep things running quickly enough. Also, 4 sound effects I’ve never used before!

3 channels get re-used for different instruments (16 channels has never been so insufficient), but more annoyingly, the synth’s update speed drops really low during the chorus because of all the playing voices, making pitch-bends sound jumpy, and it took a lot of tweaking and quite some luck to get a clean recording. I kind of wonder if it’s just my 88P which slows down so much when many notes are playing (even if there are not many MIDI messsages), or if it’s simply a limitation of its CPU speed. It might just be a coincidence, but it seemed to handle it better immediately after power-up, so perhaps it becomes worse as it gets hotter. In that case, maybe I could attach a heat sink to the CPU, or just put a fan in there (I don’t really want to drill holes, though). The case doesn’t really get very hot, though. I kind of wish I could limit it to playing only 32 voices at once, instead of letting it struggle with 64. Lowering release times only gets you so far.

Somehow, the fact that an anime of Moetan had been made eluded me for 8 years and I only recently discovered it. “YOU MAGGOTS ARE HUFFING AND PUFFING–” oh wait, wrong English-teaching mahou shoujo.

This sure was a fun one to make! And more trying to make the Sound Canvas synth sound like it’s speaking, yay! But unfortunately, I was pushing it so close to its limit that I actually had to cut notes at those points so that it could keep running smoothly. It’s also extremely tedious to do, so I don’t think I’ll be making a whole song like that any time soon.

[Watch in HD]

This is a MIDI I made for the Roland SC-88Pro of the opening theme to Kiss×sis OAD, originally sung by Taketatsu Ayana and Tatsumi Yuiko, written/arranged by Takahashi Nana. Despite being pretty complex and having a part that was incredibly hard to decipher beneath all the other instruments (I could only clearly make out half of one bar, and had to estimate what the rest was), this one only took me 5-6 days.

I decided to screenshot my MIDI player BaWaMI, chop it in half and re-arrange it into one long row of 16 MIDI channels at the bottom. I think this makes better use of the 16:9 video frame. Fun fact: Early versions of Bawami had the channels arranged like that, when they were narrower and didn’t have those blue bars.

I wonder if this synth is older than Ako or Riko.

I couldn’t resist trying to recreate the amusing dance at the end of the anime “Kill Me Baby” on this Sound Canvas’s LCD, so that meant I had to make a MIDI of the music, too! This is the ending theme, “Futari no Kimochi no Honto no Himitsu”, originally sung by Tamura Mutsumi and Akasaki Chinatsu.

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Never call a song simple until you’ve tried to make a MIDI of it. And trying to remake the inaccurate timings of the toms took a silly amount of effort. That said, this MIDI only took 2 days to make, and a third of that was spent on the animations. I ended up making a program to draw on which spits out the SysEx messages to control the synth’s LCD, because I didn’t fancy wearing out half of the buttons on the synth by drawing pictures on it (yes, the synth has a drawing mode – I guess Roland had some spare ROM to play with). Maybe I’ll release the program one day. Manually putting the commands to buffer and display every frame at the right time (there are 48 different frames) into the MIDI file was tedious.

If it starts with “Check Sum Error”, it’s gotta be good! This bug happens after using this MIDI interface for a long time. If I disconnect and reconnect it, it’s fine for several more hours, but I decided to record this trippy-sounding playback of this MIDI of mine. My favourite part is where the text at the end gets converted to a jingle bell.

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Here’s how it sounds when played correctly.

I decided to record how my “JUMPING!!” MIDI sounds when played in this state, too! This time, we have “No DRUM SET” _and_ “Check Sum Error” – this must be twice as good! Actually, it’s not.

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…And here’s how this one sounds when played correctly.

The synth is the Roland SC-88Pro, and the interface is a Roland Quad-Capture. I’m having to use an old driver (1.0.1) because the latest one is incompatible with a bad USB3 driver for my laptop. The bug might be fixed in later versions. The MIDI sequencer software is the wonderful Sekaiju.

Because I concentrated so much on the guitars while making this MIDI, here they are playing by themselves. Well, I also kept the bass because it’s fun, and the drums because I can. Full version is here.

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I tried to remake the opening theme of the anime “Kin-iro Mosaic” as a MIDI for the Roland SC-88Pro synth. The song is “JUMPING!!”, originally by Rhodanthe*. Bawami is playing the MIDI just so that you can see what’s going on, and it’s sending the MIDI messages to the SC-88Pro synth, whose display is shown in the top-right.

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This was roughly as hard to make as “Mii-tan no Mahou de Pon!!” (perhaps there’s something about songs that have two exclamation marks in the title). I put a lot of effort into making the guitars as accurate as I could, so here‘s a version with only the GUITARS, BASS and DRUMS playing.

I started working on this 4 months ago, then lost motivation, and then continued and finished it over the last week. Also, holy crap, I’m going to take YouTube’s matching of third-party content at 0:17 as a complement of how accurate the trumpet part is.

I finally completed this remix of 「ひそやかな欲望～ミサカは，発生させます～」, the character song of Misaka Imouto from the anime A Certain Magical Index. I think it shows off her more hardcore side, where the original showed a gentle side. I certainly tried to pack it with energy in the chorus.

[Watch in HD]

This was my first time using both the Roland SC-88Pro and Korg Radias synths together. The Radias is playing most percussion and a high-pitched lead, and also processing a guitar sound from the SC, while the SC plays everything else by itself (bass, pads, electric piano, lead synth, lead guitar, cymbals, etc). The 2 synths seem to work well together.

What genre could this be? I wasn’t aiming for anything, so I’m not sure. Hard dance, perhaps?

MP3 download (320kbps) is here, or you can watch on Niconico for scrolling comments.

It’s been 3 months since my last video. Wow.

This is my finished MIDI for the Roland SC-88Pro. The song is 「空想メソロギヰ」 (“Kuusou Mesorogiwi”), used for the opening of the anime Mirai Nikki, originally by Yousei Teikoku. I had great difficulty in making out the bass and the strings at times, so I may have (unintentionally) improvised at points, but I stayed as accurate as I possibly could.

[Watch in HD]

This is my first time controlling the Sound Canvas’s display via SysEx messages, and I ended up writing my own program to make messages to show the text. The MIDI also takes advantage of various other things the SC has to offer, such as a distortion insert effect with custom settings, cutoff frequency changes to make the down- and up-strokes of the guitar pick sound different, custom attack/decay/release times, and bank-changes for instruments such as palm-muted electric guitar, velocity-sensitive strings and explosion sound effect. Even though this sound module came out 15 years ago, it’s still quite capable of sounding modern. =D

MIDI sequencer program is Sekaiju (v3.0), originally by Kuzu.

Update: Please check FINISHED VERSION!

This is a MIDI I’m in the process of making for the Roland SC-88Pro. The song is 「空想メソロギヰ」 (“Kuusou Mesorogiwi”), used for the opening of the anime Mirai Nikki, originally by Yousei Teikoku. As you can see, I’ve still got a long way to go, but since I haven’t uploaded anything for a long time, I decided to upload this preview of sorts.

[Watch in HD]

As I’m making it for the Sound Canvas, I’m trying to take advantage of the various things it has to offer, such as a distortion insert effect with custom settings, cutoff frequency changes to make the down- and up-strokes of the guitar pick sound different, custom attack/decay/release times, and bank-changes for instruments such as palm-muted electric guitar and velocity-sensitive strings. Even though this sound module came out 15 years ago, it’s still quite capable of sounding modern. =D

I intend to continue working on this, although I’m having great difficulty discerning the individual notes of the strings, guitars, and even the drums, during the chorus. Also, I still have yet to start the bass, voice, backing vocal and “strange ambient sounds or maybe they’re just strings but it’s so hard to make them out properly” tracks.

I tried to create a voice based on samples of Misaka Imouto from the anime “A Certain Magical Index“. Then, I decided to make it sing the song that was stuck in my head at the moment, which happened to be Kyary Pamyu Pamyu‘s “PONPONPON” (I didn’t want to try to make such a crazy music video as the original, though). The key is lowered to suit the voice better.

[Watch in HD]

Massive thanks to DelTiger(でるたいがー) for the off-vocal version that I used here. The illustration is by tachi008.

I actually used samples from the PSP game rather than the anime, for clean recordings (so that there wasn’t music or sound effects in the background). It seems to be a long time since I’ve uploaded a video with a CG voice.

I first made a MIDI of the notes the voice sings in the original version using Anvil Studio. The voice was made with Virtual Singer (part of Melody Assistant). Screen-capturing was done with VirtualDub and the video edited in Magix Movie Edit, while the audio editing was done in Audacity.