Something Unreal

An attempt at remaking the Alstroemeria Records remix of “Bad Apple!!”, the stage 3 theme from Touhou 04: Lotus Land Story. It took about 8 days in total. I added a lot of improvisation during the main “chorus” part. Major thanks to my brother (Steeeven1 on YouTube) for playing the guitar part, and going from never having heard it before, learning it, and having it recorded in less than 2 hours.

[Watch in HD]

The looping backing part which I played on the keyboard is seriously annoying to play, so I put some lights on to annoy everyone else. …No, not really. I just thought they livened things up a bit. xD

This is a birthday present to someone who finds the original version of “Bad Apple!!” awesome. I hope this can live up to that…

High-quality MP3 is here, and link to the video on Niconico Douga for those who want to leave scrolling comments is here.

TECHNICAL RUBBISH: (more…)

Yeah… A rushed attempt by me of Chen Nyan Poi on the piano (well, keyboard). I had to have it done by a certain day for somone, and I guess I had been too lazy with practising, but being fail has never stopped other things of mine from being uploaded.

[Watch in HD]

“Chen Nyan Poi” is a remix by IOSYS of the theme of Chen (stage 2 boss in Touhou 07: Perfect Cherry Blossom). Anyway, not much more to say here, except that I actually recorded this over 3 weeks ago and had forgotten to upload it until now. orz

Here are my custom StepMania lights taped to my wall, to resemble the crystals on one of Flandre‘s wings, and I added a horizontal mirror to make the second wing. I made a simfile specifically for the 8 lights, just like I did back on Cirno Day.

[Watch with video/audio in sync]

I know that the lights don’t perfectly match up with the crystals on the drawing (by Kiyomin), but I thought of overlaying a drawing AFTER I’d set up the lights, and I couldn’t really move them because I’d measured the wires to be only as long as needed. I never thought I’d stumble upon even this good a picture of her (position-of-the-crystals-wise) – and she’s even wearing Christmassy clothes! So although they don’t line up perfectly, I thought it would be a wasted opportunity to leave out the drawing.

The tune is to the theme of Flandre Scarlet (extra-stage boss in Touhou 6: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil), called “U.N. Owen Was Her?”. Unfortunately, I don’t know the name (or even artist) of this Christmas-style arrangement of it.

The lights are being controlled by my own freeware program “StepMania Player”, which you can get from here. Lower-quality version on NicoNico Douga for those of you who want to leave scrolling comments is here. =P

This light show is for a special someone… nyan. x3

Dnstje, a friend of mine, made this remote-controlled yukkuri Reimu head, which also has a speaker for playing sound from things such as an iPhone connected to the controller. A bunch of Touhou fans formed around us, so Dnstje played some Touhou-related remixes on the yukkuri as we all chased it around the various rooms of the Abunai convention, seeing everyone’s reactions. =D

The alarms at 03:13 and 03:31 were set off by the FM transmitter (controller). xD

[Watch in HD]

Sorry for the many fast-forwarded clips, but it was VERY hard to squeeze about 25 minutes of footage down to the length of the song. I tried to completely remove the most boring parts, and I sped up the parts where it took a while for anything different to happen.

I’ve been lucky enough to be able to travel to the Netherlands to attend Abunai, a convention to do with anime, manga and other Japanese stuff. The con lasted 3 days (Friday to Sunday), and we had to camp at a nearby place and travel between there and the convention site each day, using bikes we’d rented from the camp site.

So… for now, photos! Click any photo to see the full-size version. Here are a few which I took…

…and here are a lot more which a friend of mine took (including a few of mine, since he wanted to fill up his PhotoBucket account):

Wow! It’s been a long time since my last video of my Bleeper Music Maker program playing music. This time I DIDN’T make the music – it’s just playing a MIDI which someone else has made and released here.

[Watch in HD]

This is the theme for when you’re fighting Satori (stage 4′s boss) in the 11th Touhou game (Subterranean Animism). I’ve increased the tempo, though, to try to make it sound more lively (my program plays 1-bit music, which is as basic as a waveform can get, and so long notes can sound very boring/tedious/headache-inducing).

My Bleeper Music Maker program is freeware, and you can grab the latest version of it and see more info on it here.

Also, I think I’ll be using this LED display in a lot of videos… if I can find a way to make it look less unstable/juddery on the camcorder. =/

Here’s a much-needed compilation video using some of the many videos I recorded at London MCM Expo (May 2009). It mainly focuses around cute things because this video was originally going to be for the Touhou cosplayers, and… well, you know, I didn’t think soldier or Alien cosplays would fit in very well. I wonder if you can call a Dalek cute though.

[Watch in HD]

The sudden song change is because Cirno’s Perfect Maths Class had so many different parts that it was too hard for me to be lazy while editing the video. I tried to at least change the song when it reached an appropriate place.

MCM Expo in London was held last Saturday and Sunday, and, quite awesomely, there was a group of people cosplaying as characters from Touhou Project! Here’s a bunch of pictures I took (some are screencaps from videos I recorded, so they generally don’t look as good). Please click an image to see a larger version of it.

In particular, the Suwako one is bad because that’s from the only video I ever got of her, from a distance while waiting in the ticket queue.

After seeing a box of doujinshi dedicated to the game series last October, but then not seeing a single piece of Touhou merchandise this May, I was disappointed, but these people more than made up for that. The group consisted of 3 guys cosplaying as Eirin, Yuyuko and Marisa, and 2 girls cosplaying as Sakuya and Iku (one of them was being Reimu on Saturday). There were also 2 other girls doing Suwako and Marisa, but they didn’t appear to be part of the group.

I may well upload some HD videos to YouTube, since videos just seem more realistic to me than photos, and I mentioned doing so on the Touhou Group thread on the MCM forum and no-one seems to be objecting to me doing so. However, that involves me not being lazy (at least cutting and joining the video files), so it will take me a while to do.

Oh, there were some cute Mikus too, which was cool to me, given that I’m pretty fond of her too.

I made this this slowish techno remix of Komachi Onozuka’s theme (Higan Retour ~ Riverside View) on the spur of the moment, some time last year. “Electric” since it’s techno, “River” due to Komachi’s job of ferrying souls along a river… that, and the whole electricity/water thing worked out nicely, heh.

I’ve finally recorded a video of me playing the simfile (along with my SM lights responding to my keypresses, and a random scythe which I’ve had since some halloween before I even knew about Touhou), so I can finally upload the music with the video to YouTube. Background image by Yuuki Eishi.

[Watch in HD]

It starts off sounding very electronic, but turns to techno with a few hints of rock (I guess). The ways in which I used the various melodies within Komachi’s theme is original (I didn’t base it on anything, unlike my Unlocked Girl re-make). Of course, there are some of my own fast harmonizing melodies in here too.

MP3 download link (~6.5 MB as ZIP) (320 kbps) (Sorry about the slow download speed…)

Simfile download link (Includes the same 320kbps MP3) (I’ll add a link on my own (slow) server for those without an account at Bemanistyle soon.)

I released a not-quite-finished version of this (here at my blog) near the end of last year, but I’ve improved on that version slightly (most significantly by changing a snare-like sound, and changing the volume levels of all of the instruments). The download link on the post for the old version now leads to this new version.

We were hit by a large amount of snow early this February in 2009 and I was eager to catch some shots with my HD camera to go along with a song which I’d recently got addicted to.

[Watch in HD]

The song used is a cut-down version of “FREEZING ON YOU” by “IOSYS” (I had to cut it down from 4m40s since I didn’t record enough different video to last that long without the finished video ending up uninteresting). It’s a remix of Cirno’s theme from Touhou Project, and with Cirno being an ice fairy and associated with the number 9, this was too perfect an opportunity for me to miss.