Hey folks! Wow it's been so long since I've posted on here or even logged in. I meant to post on this thread sooner, but I've been having major Internet issues this week. Finally was able to get it looked at yesterday and so far everything seems to be good. For those of you wondering about me in general, I'm obviously still alive. Lol. Tbh, I've been struggling to find motivation to just do leisure hobby things like port, so that at least partially explains why my presence here has decreased so much. Anyway, I really did enjoy helping out with the arrangements, especially toward the end when I got some flashes of inspiration. I'm so glad to hear you guys are liking them!
Originally posted by LadiesMan217On this OST, do you guys have any favorites?
Mine has to be athletic. It was stuck in my head for days. Funny enough I think it was the first song on this ost I ever worked on, and most of the work I did was minor edits, I didn't do any arranging on it. And it still ended up being a huge earworm!
Originally posted by FPIOverall I got more Link To The Past-vibes with the soundfont rather than SMAS, but that isn't really a bad thing at all.
Huh Interesting! I haven't listened to Zelda music lately, so that was probably the last thing on my mind when working on arrangements, but I kinda get how someone could get that vibe.
For those who are interested, I'll talk a little bit about our arrangement process, since I always love to read how other people do stuff like this.
More often than not, Ladiesman would send me ideas on how this sml2 song could be arranged to sound like that other song, either from smas, or a Youtube cover or whatever. Sometimes he would be able to see the port through, but other times he would get stuck, and send it over to me so I could pick up where he left off. In these cases I would try my best to honor his ideas and intentions. There were a few times when that didn't work out and we'd have to try 2 or 3 completely different takes until we found one that was going somewhere. That by far was my least favorite part, and I'm sure he wasn't crazy about it either, but it is what it is. You can't make everything work the first time right?
On a handful of songs where Ladiesman ran out of ideas, I was basically let loose to lay down the foundation for an arrangement that we could fine tune. And with those songs, I tended to get more creative. My approach was usually not to imitate a song from smas. Instead, I sort of thought on more general terms. How would I remix this if I was limited to some fairly basic waveforms plus a few drums and string ensemble sounds?
I'd usually start by sketching at my keyboard, beginning with a standard piano sound at first. After a while, I'd switch to a strings sound, or brass sound, or whatever seemed to be most promising. Once I had an idea or two that felt like they had some staying power, I'd work in the context of the soundset we used for the ost.
I thought my instrument choices in particular were kind of interesting, because I basically tried to feature my favorite uses of the smw/smas instruments, while occasionally devising new tricks. One such trick is the whistle in the invincible theme (it's a bell sound with a really fast vibrato). To my knowledge, smas or smw never did anything like that, but the challenge of creating a whistle sound without adding a whistle sample was still fun. And don't ask why I even wanted a whistle there in the first place. I just... Came up with the idea randomly, and then couldn't unhear it.
Also, Ladiesman can tell you that I was very picky on getting notes/harmonies solid. One of my pet peeves is an arrangement that messes up the original notes, or adds harmonies or sounds that clash and just don't vibe with each other, so yeah I spent a lot of time making sure I was satisfied with how things were fitting together before I committed.
In the end, I do sometimes wonder how faithful I was to the smas style. I certainly didn't try to hyperanalyze it or anything. Yet a lot of people seem to think it worked out well, and I'm proud of how everything turned out, so that's all that matters. Who knows... maybe spending time on this stuff will make me actually work on my unfinished ports that have just been sitting around doing nothing. Every time I worked on an sml2 arrangement, I would remember one of those and realize they're not going to finish themselves. Lol
Make more of less, that way you won't make less of more!
