covers/transcription encouragement thread

157684

this thread serves as a way to encourage people (and myself) to do covers/transcriptions. if you make a new cover or transcription (must be completed after this post), post it here and i will comment on it and give you 32 boons (until i feel i've spent too much). i will give more if someone wants to invest.

edit: by doing this, i would prefer transcriptions by ear and for source files or MIDI to be provided but not doing either of those things is fine.

edit 2: you don't have to transcribe/cover a full song, i will give 16 boons for something under 30 seconds

157685

Hehehe I've been trying to cover all of MOTHER 3's soundtrack for a while now! I'll post my current progress shortly, and I'll start working on one of the ones I haven't finished

157686

i've been thinking a lot about doing some specific famitracker covers of songs i love; for me it's just a matter of finding the time, haha. i will try to start those later in the season when i'm not enveloped in summer chips

157693

i'm working on covering an early depeche mode song with the ym2612 + sn76489. i think those early ones translate pretty well into chiptune. might do more covers too for fun

157701

i did a cover of triangle in the club.nsf awhile ago on the 2151

157702

to start with, here's a transcription of the thing in the following video in .it form https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSd0fbbMyz4
https://drive.google.com/file/d/19CrWUBh0UJpVobpqjc2pwYrFEBBwx5kr/view?usp=sharing

157707

(half-offtopic: i think i saw somewhere Linus Abrahamson said used tab files for these transcriptions, and then rearranging them into midi files: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=freak+kitchen+8bit - actually, was from there the first time i heard about gxscc )

157708

i confess i have a terrible ear for distinguishing chords (no surprise! xD ) - i was about to try this one (a classic arcade chiptune actually! xD - not available at vgmrips yet, unsupported chip, or "chip"... (discrete logic?) ) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wql1DH8PYYU&t=76s - so, as a start, before trying to transcribe by ear, i tried to use anyconv.com (i think it runs waon from the server), and then opening the midi file on openmpt - https://pastebin.com/raw/ZJmTi2Ha (didn't clean it enough yet..) (the sample i used was a simple sine waveform 32 bytes long, made on milkytracker) (i'm sharing this just in case it might be an useful tool/workflow, who knows..)

157709

_

157716

distinguishing chords by ear is mostly practice both in transcription and just playing random chords on whatever instrument to familiarize yourself with the sound, though for getting unclear bass notes, you can use a steep low pass filter, and add some distortion if you're using laptop/phone speakers.

157724

i'm working on a cover of one of my favorite songs time loop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zCUshj1IfQ

its not from scratch as I have a full midi, but remaking an hour long song while trying to make each part of the song different has taken me more than a month so far.

since i split it up into parts the project files are separate flp's but the two ones that are finished are here

https://soundcloud.com/shitta/1-177-time-loop-remake

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GiHu-lVVq8tD7pcq13ehQ_EUTHalfRb-/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GiHu-lVVq8tD7pcq13ehQ_EUTHalfRb-/view?usp=sharing

(hopefully I did this right, I don't know if I read it correctly enough)

157725

my life is a cover of my childhood

157726

mine is my childhood converted to midi and played on the megadrive GEMS driver

157740

i'm doing a domi transcription but haven't made much progress on it yet https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/945764281453019216/989986519295086742/2022-06-24_16-12-06.mp4

157741

@nitrofurano the beginning of the converted midi sounded ok but after that it was a bit too messy to parse the song, probably melodyne would work well but that's very pricey. to me personally it feels like it'd be faster to transcribe by ear.

@thingerthing i didn't listen to the full original version but it seems like you added a good amount of detail to make it more "polished" feeling, like the sidechain kick in the 2nd half that changes the original character.

@defmech domi has a cool style, i did transcribe the beginning piano riff here a while ago, though it would be cool to transcribe the drums and the solo too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MDS0_TnDiA

157743

@tennisers indeed, agreed totally! i only started to clean the beginning for seeing how it sounds like, the first patterns - what i removed was those notes in octaves 7 and 8, which sounded glitchy - when we unmute the first channels, like the first 5 ones, it sounds like playing the most relevant notes - i was actually about to try both approaches and compare them

157896

idk if yt links are allowed but i just finished my cover of Massive X from Eschatos on the TX81Z (YM2414 or OPZ)
https://youtu.be/nQBub7czFCw
im super proud with the instrumentation lol

157902

more progress https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/721833422699495485/993277674720079932/2022-07-03_18-09-21.mp4

157903

@a64 nice, that reminded me that i hadn't listened to meta reflex by the same guy in a while, that one is a jam
@defmech cool, maybe you could try transcribing the drums too if you want

157910

that's gonna be insane to do lol i might try it though

157972

i might try this one as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVVqzCI5p9A

158042

i did another cover, "yoru no himawari" from the visual novel subahibi, it's live guitar and i used a score that was already online so there's no point in posting a source:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ESScsolK9DIb6hbUZbHTx_3WMyo8jYYj/view?usp=sharing

158453

just a silly, simple and fast exercise for practicing, "converted" this vgm - https://vgmrips.net/packs/pack/majou-densetsu-msx-psg#03-boss-bgm-1 - to this famitracker txt file: https://pastebin.com/raw/zczKmK3X

158482

@nitrofurano
interesting that the arpeggio doesn't start from the lowest note and then go up in order, goes bottom, top, middle. a straightforward idea but something to keep in mind

158520

I have done a few OPLL covers of Mega Man tracks last year.
They effectively were my start in the 2-op FM sound design camp.

https://youtu.be/GMT3XEEDO6k
https://youtu.be/3BNOln7VRAI

158521

@tennisers they are actually volume macros, not arpeggio macros! :)

(edit: tried this one as well, i think it sounds a bit different because triangle channel? https://pastebin.com/raw/MCU7g5xw )

158712

I transcribed this to ABC shortly after you started the thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syv21X7BIvQ

Everything but channel 2 was by ear, but I don't have a trained-enough ear to make out what channel 2 was doing at the start so I had to see what the GBC was doing for that one. I also had to make some minor changes to channel 2 to keep it from crashing abc2midi.

ABC: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AjkP0-5MRkZS5GZ_sWdx8tEqJqT9?e=VdtZSs
MIDI: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AjkP0-5MRkZS6EW88JNAk5JM0BN-?e=8mKk4T
MP3 render (Fatboy soundfont): https://1drv.ms/u/s!AjkP0-5MRkZS6EbyDGkkZhhnZQKV?e=pcpgov

158909

@tathar i dunno what abc is, the different instrumentation recontextualizes it in interesting way, maybe you could try adding some similar percussion

158912

Well, here's a transcription/piano solo arrangement I've been chipping away at ever since I watched Night on the Galactic Railroad and had the weirdest, drugless trip of my life:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzp1H5o1Muo

https://musescore.com/user/38355636/scores/8428103

Not sure how good my ear is for those chords, especially in the middle section, since this is a recording from the 80s for an obscure-ish anime movie that doesn't even have a proper remaster for its footage lmao

For the... chorus? I chose to go with the guitar chords over the walking bass though I'm not sure if I like it that way

158918

gryzor87 covering Tamayo Kawamoto - https://twitter.com/Gryzor87/status/1544655173754159112

158920

@pusakal seems pretty close to the original though i didnt closely examine. i like hosono's version of cosmic surfin on his nostalgia island album

158946

@tennisers: ABC is a music notation format comparable to MML or MusicXML, but without the syntactical overhead of XML. I use EasyABC for my transcriptions, but that's really just a wrapper for a text editor and some open-source libraries.

In fact, here's just the transcription of the last tune in the ABC file exported to MusicXML (much bigger than all 8 versions I included in the ABC file combined): https://1drv.ms/u/s!AjkP0-5MRkZS6Ehvo_4c5OsHaMMH?e=L1dd8P

160090

https://youtu.be/Q0o9bRRIK7c
reviving this place, i made a cover of a snail's house track on the famicom

160123

@a64 sounds great, thanks for reminding me of the thread, i'd like to do at least a few more covers

160975

i did a cover for pc-9801 because i wanted to practice bambootracker before making a glitch.98 entry

https://soundcloud.com/damifortune/nozomi-nobody-tokyo-lullaby-pc-9801-cover

it took me a lot longer than i expected but i am happy with it

160980

Back before I got my new SSD, I made an OPS7 cover of the hangar and briefing themes (they are the same) from Ace Combat 2. I would gladly provide the MIDI if I still had it available, but my old HDD broke before I thought about preserving it (I am still quite pissed off at myself for it)

I'll admit the drums are certainly too loud, but I was still struggling to make good drum patches at that time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnt_afAb2Io

I'm still quite proud of it (especially the patch made for FM6 on the oscilloscope) despite the drums.

161203

@damifortune cool, i wouldn't have thought you could cram that much vocals into 1mb. it's interesting how the low quality makes the words unclear part of the time but the melody still is clear

@enderjed nice, it feels sparser than the original though that's inevitable with the chip restriction

161947

Reviving....
I did a cover of Sara's Theme from Breath of Fire. Just stock plugins in FL. This was good practice for trying to pick out notes by ear with a pretty simple but nice song. I struggle picking individual notes out of chords and have to listen a buncha times lol.

song

source

edit: stock plugins + a snes sample

161959

woa this is awsom, i was not aware of this thread lol

the piece in question:
https://gravitybreak.media/heap/music/synapse's%20leitmotif.mp3

i finished transcribing this a while ago into musescore piano. took me a bit longer because the reverb n the high piano made it hard to hear... i had to stretch th effort over 3 days, with bursts of maybe 20 to 30 minutes each day elapsing.

i hope this link works ahah
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/793200906945560617/1032488883931320350/synapses_leitmotif_cove.mp3

162528

sorry for taking a while to get back to these
@kilowatt64 even though this is in the original arrangement as well, it's interesting how having a contrast between short notes and sustained notes can change the mood.

@mirageofher
sounds like you got all of it, who did the original? the pauses are interesting

162580

Made a cover of the Pokémon Center theme in the style of the Zelda OoT Shop because I wanted to know what it'd sound like.

https://soundcloud.com/textunages/heal-your-bombchu

162630

@tex
nice arrangement , though i note its missing the dissonance in the earlier versions of the theme.

162731

Completed a SNESification of the stage theme from Dragon's Lair gameboy version.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/684089512263155723/1037872152336154704/Dragons_Lair_Gameboy_-_Stage_Theme_ASIKWUSpulse_SNESified_Remix.mp3

162746

@162528 this is one of multis songs c:

162821

Completed a 2A03+VRC6 cover of All The Lights Went Out by Marcy Playground. One of my all time favorites of theirs and a hearken back to high school days of yore. I really loved the ethereal feel in the song and tried to capture that quality in the lead as well as the big distorted tremolo fades for the guitar. This was really fun to work on!

Original

Cover

Source

170011

i don't know if these conversions are offtopic: https://download.file-hunter.com/Music/Furnace%20Tracker/

195969

i did a couple more:
infodrive @ LSA 2016

transcription

transit by bryface

transcript