Topic: Castlevania: DraculaXX Intro, Map, and now MORE (music links inside)

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

I have somewhat been working on it... but the tempo and time signature are tripping me up.  That, and the SNES version has this weird thing going on with its strings that when I try to mimic it in MIDI just doesn't sound the same.

I've also been looking into other DraculaXX tunes, but I can't seem to make 'em sound better than Rondo.

[Omegasigma]

Ive noticed alot of Castlevania's go on with the strings in alot of songs, which is why I reverse engineer my music, I can never seem to find the right mix of modern and retro

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

Lately I've been getting into how the original SNES programmers did their sound design.
Often, because the samples would have various attacks and they wanted to achieve a certain sound (a legato, or a slur, etc.) instead of playing a new note, they just pitch-bend the previous note instantaneously.

This creates a seamless note effect (Legato - in music it's when there is no silence between notes, but they're not slurred).  However, reverse-engineering that means that whatever note you had prior might have to have an altered pitch because the pitchbend that brings you to the new note isn't perfect.  With 8-bit samples it doesn't matter much, but with high-quality samples (or mid-quality like the ones I use 'cuz people won't TELL ME WHERE TO DOWNLOAD GOOD STRINGS GEOFF!), it becomes a big problem.

You have to find the happy medium between 'this is how the SNES did it' and 'but that won't sound good these days, so we gotta do this instead).

[Inccubus]

The only other song worth bothering with in DXX is the ending, isn't it? Everything else is the same as Rondo just at a lower quality.

[Chernabogue]

TELL ME WHERE TO DOWNLOAD GOOD STRINGS GEOFF!

He's using LA Scoring Strings, as far as I remember.

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

I'm aware of that, but there's no download link and I can't find a free torrent of the damn things.
Sharing is caring.

Oh, and there's also this:
Cemetery - The Swamp Caves - Stage 4 - Castlevania: DraculaX

[Omegasigma]

I wouldnt say SNES sounds bad today, imo, its still the best chip music out there, in sound sounding terms, eg comparing it to the GBA or DS tho the DS dev's were just lazy, my two favourite chiptunes were for SNES or Genesis, ive been trying to do my music more akin to the genesis Jorge, and the only way ive been able to do that is alter a midi for the song, then pump it through a resnything engine, to get my results the only one ive liked so far the best is "sonic 3d blast boss 2" which ive made, ive also done "reincarnated soul" and now "leon's theme" but its hard to downsample to 16-bit sounding where as you've managed to do 8-bit and almost orchrastrated peicies, If I had the hookups or a 5 1/2 drive, I could redo music on my Commodore 64, thats still fully functional

The other peice of music i'd like to hear you do, is the Final cut scene, where Dracula is defeated

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

I didn't say the SNES sounds bad today.
What I said was, applying the techniques the programmers did to the samples of the SNES chiptune wavetable, on a setup using modern instruments results in some odd sounds and some pitch problems.  These problems are not even noticeable on the original hardware but on newer equipment they rear their ugly head, making a conversion project a touch difficult.

In most cases, it's better to just replay the entire part.

[Inccubus]

Have you done Cemetery based of Rondo? It would be interesting to hear your interpretation of the two for comparison.