Chaotic Descent

(This was probably my favorite song from the game, (I would listen to it over and over all the time despite how short it was) and I'm SO glad someone remixed it!) Lyrics are usually not my thing either. They sounded nice, and you did a good job which is damned rare (I've heard too many lyrics that hit a few off notes that just ruin it), but I'm not a fan of the choice of lyrics either. TL;DR: Have you considered releasing a version without vocals? I know they did that for a few tracks in the Bound Together album remixes from Earthbound*. *: actually, I think one was a version they ADDED lyrics to, while another was without. Flying Man by Mustin. Now THAT's how you pick cheesy lyrics properly. The one they added lyrics to was ROM Schtick. Two of my favorite tracks from that album. (either version of both songs, although the Applesauce Baptism is a little over-the-top)

I don't know what the roman nuemerals mean. It's hard to tell if it's used for more than one thing in music, since I can't understand any of what it's talking about. edit: Ok, I managed to piece it together after ending up at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_progression (which didn't make any sense by itself) but that lead to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_degree when compared to what you said, seems to be the number of notes the chord is compared with the key. although I don't really know what purpose it serves to identify this. I also don't know why you marked some but not others. (if it was just obvious, or if these notes were different, maybe single notes instead of chords) I also still can't figure out the chart in chord progression, why there are upper and lowercase versions, etc... it's really strange that the information isn't include on the same page. I read about how chords are made out of major and minor intervals. (although it still takes me a long time to identify them) but how are you determining these keys? I see only 2 places where an instrument hits the C key, and it doesn't look like the start or end of a melody, so how did you determine a C major key?

which is just in a different order... except it has an Ab in there. it jumps those chords around pretty fast though. there's more I'll write down later. Well, I'm just trying to prepare for a song with greater difficulty. If I can learn to recognize chords and stuff, I figure that's a good thing. I took my suggestion from the guy who was replying to my earlier: and picked up a copy of the songs here: http://www.ffshrine.org/ff7/ff7/ff7-3-11-racing_chocobos_place_your_bets.mid http://www.ffshrine.org/ff7/ff7/ff7-3-12-fiddle_de_chocobo.mid I gotta say, fiddle de chocobo is a lot more complicated. It has a lot more instruments. hrm... on second glance, it looks like a lot more of them follow the same notes. I wish I know how to get FL Studio to display more than one track in the piano roll view, but leave other tracks out. I can have ALL of them greyed out in the background, but can't pick and choose which ones. only the notes D,G,B for ALL instruments. hrm, pretty simple. it quickly changes, just like he said. C,F,A, back and forth each half a... number. whatever measure of time that is. and in the middle it has a short section where it uses D,F,A#

And this is the most unproductive post ever. Yes, I am ignorant. I don't know yet. If I knew, I wouldn't be trying to learn. with Racing Chocobos, the 6th instrument plays a repeating part like this: D A A C E D (the 1st A is up an octave, the 2nd one is back down, and uh... the last D is also the first D as it repeats) and then changes at one point much later to: F C C E G F so I'm guessing that this instrument is like a broken chord. the 1st instrument goes: A D F# E E D D C C B B A A G A B G A A D F# E G F# F# E E C C B C D E F# D I'm guessing this instrument is like the melody that goes all over the place. but the melody turns into chords when the broken chord instrument changes notes. I don't know how to figure out chords though. I have a book that lists them all, but it's hard to go through them all. looks like chords with 3 notes are often majors, so I just have to look up the majors for all 3 notes. CFA... is F major DFB... I can't find. B diminished has 4 notes, but at least all the keys are normal instead of sharps or flats... how can you play different chords if another instrument is playing just one broken chord?

Oh ok. If you can use any note, how are you supposed to determine what key it's in? I'm guessing something distinguishes the instrument that sets the key as opposed to the instrument that can go all over the place. It's easy when you see one instrument doing chords and another one all over the place. (well, I'm guessing. I don't actually know if chords set the key) but not all pieces of music do that. Well, this isn't written. I found a MIDI, and the program I used to load it just happens to display all the black keys as sharps instead of flats. Nah, that's not so much a problem. Like I said, I have some experience with music. like I said, different instruments start and end on different notes. what do you mean by third note above the root? third as in letters? C-E-D? is that in the instrument that goes all over the place, or the one that's more similar to chords or broken chords? (I think that's the term) hrm. well the melody (is that what they call the instrument that goes all over the place?) in racing chocobos starts and ends on A. all C's are normal. wait, can't it be in regular keys instead of just major or minor? (looks at his chart) no, apparantly not. Ok. so Racing Chocobo starts in the scale of A MA/maj, right? I know. Those two songs I mentioned are basically my end-goal. I want to mix them together. I don't know how well I know myself, but I know some things... I have a hard time seeing mid-term goals and motivation. I'm easily swept up in overly ambitious goals. I wouldn't say it makes the more short-term and immediate goals less interesting, but... most of the time I'm left to learn on my own, and there ARE no short-term goals that are similar to my long-term goals. If I were trying to learn music keys from an easier piece, that would probably work. It's definately a problem if I need to design my own goals though, and it's not easy to find educational material that even has an assignment for you to do to follow along and learn. Well, thank you so much for your attention. and thanks for scaling down my problem to an easier song you recomended. It's good to have examples. I'll keep reading, seeing if I can easily identify the keys in the easy songs, and see if I can compare it to the hard songs. Once, long ago, I managed to match up the tempo on both songs and play them simultaneously. they had really odd tempos that were really hard to match. One part of my ultimate goal of remixing that I dread is picking out instruments or playing with waveforms and... filters or whatever it is. Have you guys ever thought about making a wiki on learning music composition? It would be really nice if there were something with visual diagrams and examples and stuff... I always hate the way forums are laid out for this kind of thing. It's always "READ THE STICKY!" and the sticky doesn't tell you what you were looking for. or previously it contained a thread 90 pages long and who knows where the answer to your question might be, or if it's actually phrased in such a way that a newbie can understand it. :S sorry if I'm rambling.

5th what? first of all, is there a symbol for flat? sharp is easy. it's on the keyboard. strange. I don't actually see information on wikipedia on how to identify keys if you don't have the sheet music. I have book that tells you which key you're in depending on which notes are sharps or flats. I'm trying to decode Final Fantasy 4's Moon (surface) music, and Final Fantasy 7's Makou Reactor. Maybe FF4 Moon is too challenging. I bet Makou Reactor would be much more standard music. I thought I heard chords and such. In one of the instruments, the first notes are a G#, F, and G. Does that mean that it's actually an A-flat, since you can't have both G# and G in the same scale? In which case it's a key that has an A flat. The only ones that have A flats but no G flat (as it would mean no regular G) are ... oh, finally found it. A flat major or F minor. oh crap. in another instrument, the 2nd set of notes very soon after has a B, and both Aflat major and F minor keys have B flats... oh, then again, back at the first instrument, it also seems to have changed key. it has an F#, D#, F. that F# must be a G flat. one instrument hits nothing but C and B through both key changes... uh... that's not compatible. There's no key with A flat or G# and regular B. *sigh*

I'm still trying to understand music theory. I used to play piano when I was a kid, and took lessons for quite a few years, but I don't remember much of it. I'm looking on wikipedia, but I still can't understand half of what's being said. I think it's the lingo. While I don't EXPECT to make a masterpeice without learning a little about music and having a little skill, I do need to apply the knowledge I'm taking in. I have a goal in mind for a remix, but I don't know at what point to reach for it. While I am an artist, I'm probably going to tackle this subject on a more technical level, since I lack the skills intuitively do it, and I'm not interested in waiting 5 years before starting. right now I figured I'd try and see if the wikipedia page on music theory wouldn't be better than jumping to a specific section like music scales or music keys or music chords. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_theory one thing I'd like to know how to do is make sure I use compatible notes. I notice in some songs when they layer two ... melodies, I suppose, there's a note or two that sounds "off" because of it's contrast to a note on the other layer. There's some sort of incompatibility, but I don't know the term for it, if the layers are in different keys, or different scales. I would like to learn to mix two different melodies compatibly. I wonder if there's a way to adapt one so that it fits when normally it doesn't. Actually, one of my FAVORITE OCremix tracks has a lot of these off notes. actually, most of them I'm not really certain on, but it does sound a little strange in too many places. Chrono Trigger 'Millenial Mountain (Delightful Disco Mix) http://www.ocremix.org/remix/OCR00652/

that flute at the end was way off-tune. in some parts it doesn't sound too bad being off-key with the rest of the song, but I wonder if it changes keys and becomes more off-tune at some parts, because it seems worse. I liked the sound of it before that though. At least it was good enough that I didn't care about repetition.

uhg. there's one part that's always off-tune. I don't know if the original is like that, since I'm unfamiliar with it, but owch.

I've picked up FL Studio two or three times, among other music-making programs... I don't learn easily, especially from non-interactive material. (IE: internet, books. I don't consider search engines to be the same level of interaction as communicating with a human. it's grossly inadequate, especially if questions pop up a lot) I'm also easily discouraged. is there a way to plug a MIDI into a SoundFont? I know last time I tried FL I got a WAVE file to play at 78.4 BPM at the same time as another WAVE file at 86.6 BPM. now I can't find any such simple settings directly connected to the WAVE files. "57 Channels and nothing's on". tons of information, and no way to make sense of what's actually important. I have a headache. too much stumulus and/or stress gives me a headache. I think that's the problem with these new programs... they have to include all the features you would need, but not everyone will use all of them, so there's superfluous stuff there that just distracts you from the job. you're not SUPPOSED to learn it all inside-out, but they still treat the information on it that way. I wonder how much I could actually get out of trying to transpose a song into a ... whatever. you know, figure out the notes. I don't know what's the best way to be familiar with notes and such. oh god! why can't I find any documentation on this?! I can't open multiple channels in the piano roll, and I can't open multiple piano roll windows. how am I supposed to compare two channels?? god! nothing works! I turn the volume of a channel down and it still plays! nothing I do works!

the reason people keep posting NEW topics for newbie questions is because the sticky topics like this one are 8 pages long (which means a lot of reading through posts that wander from one subject to another) and start out 3 years ago with outdated and still incomplete information. I noticed in this thread: http://www.ocremix.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=74907 that someone asked about trackers VS sequencers. I don't even know what the difference is. I think 3 years is a good amount of time for you guys to restart your sticky threads. forget about what programs to use at the start. I want to know the terminology. if I'm seeing suggestions for trackers but it turns out I should be using sequencers, I could potentially be wasting days trying to figure out something that's a dead-end.