Quest for Calatia Music

Hi,

To keep things organized, I'm creating a separate thread for the Quest for Calatia music.

As mentioned in the "Talking with Mike Pouch" thread, it will take me some time to sort through my files, notebook, and emails from 2007-2008, but here is something to whet your appetite.  



This is the original music I wrote in 2007 for the Calatia Title Theme. It took some effort to get the music to kick in right when the sword drops. This song runs longer and has different parts, but cuts off when the story kicks in. I intended the music to continue into the story, but did not know how to hack this (nor was I responsible for).

Wow, that's a really neat intro. Did you use the music editing option within Hyrule Magic or some other tool?

It's almost surreal to hear this. Can't wait to see what other cool stuff you have!

Yeah, this was made in the Hyrule Magic music editor! I'll have more to post soon - work has been busy!

Alright - I was able to quickly upload another video. Per Zack's request, I transcribed the Zelda 1 boss clear music into Link to the Past.

This is the first draft of the Calatia Harmony Forest music - this was not final and still needed quite a bit of work (the midi file sounded a lot better!). Zack wanted me to remove/change the Lost Woods motif since this is not the Lost Woods.



This is the last video I have from 2007.

That said, I have two (possibly four!) other songs programmed:

1. The shop music - confirmed.

2. The techno church (a joke track I did, not for Calatia) - confirmed.

3. The beach music - I remember the midi for the beach fondly, but I have absolutely no recollection of programming this. Oddly, I found a folder called "Beach Good" which contained a file "Beach Good.SMC". This was along with the other completed songs (a "Title Good" folder containing "Title.SMC", etc.).

4. Castle music - again, I know the midi, found a "Castle Good" folder with a "Castle 1.sfc" file, but have absolutely no memory of programming this.

I can provide the SFC/SMC files for these four songs if someone wants to play through and record the music. It'll be a little while before I'll be able to do so.

I don't mean to spam this board, but I actually have an update!

I just realized I could open up the aforementioned files in Hyrule Magic. It turns out I did program the beach song - it's not perfect, but damn, it's beautiful to "finally" hear it in LTTP format. I can't believe I don't remember programming this and don't know why I didn't record it. Really odd.

I opened up the castle song and I only programmed the first couple notes, so scratch that.

Here it is - the first draft of the Calatia Beach music. The notes are a little too legato and would need to be fixed.

No art for the beach had been created, so I had no visual to base my music off of. I had pictured a quiet, peaceful beach at sunset. I just now made this sample concept art (in the video) to show what I had envisioned.

I don't think Zack wanted to use this music anyway as it didn't match his "beach" vision. I think Zack pictured a wild (more typical) Zelda beach with peahats floating around, so perhaps a more "tropical" theme would be more fitting. So sadly, this music will likely be scrapped!

Very cool to see someone actually make something music wise in the hyrule magic editor.

I myself only messed around with dungeons mostly so you surpassed me skill wise with the music editor portion of HM.

Some of these compositions are pretty good. You can even take some of these as a "base" and improve upon them like the lost forest one. It's a good start, but just needs a little more harmony and polish to make it stand out.

I have a snes .spc player so if you post those I can listen to them no problem.

Also its your own thread so you can spam it all you want LOL.

These sounds fantastic Mike!

It's actually an amazing feat that these were implemented in the rom ages ago via traditional means! You should know there's a work-in-progress tool by Zarby89 that lets us insert MML songs into the game now!

MML to SPC

It supports eight different channels and their instruments and you can set the tempo...but only for the whole song. I think this will be fixed or may have been fixed already.

The tool is still in progress and there's really no guides yet but a noob in music like me was still able to insert a spc couple songs with this tool.

The only problem is space, the sound bank is so crammed up in there and all the songs have size limits that varies in hex lenght so its easy to corrupt other songs if your song is longer then the original song youre trying to replace.

Euclid came up with a solution for my hack where he created 16 new sound banks... so each song can take up to one whole sound bank of those 16 new sound banks.

spoiler: spc songs ive inserted for testing purposes:

^Most of these I found sound horrible because I didn't know I could change each instrument per channel aside the culex one if I recall had its midi channels named with intruments so I used those when I inserted them into the game haha

Different song channels have different instruments, but its a lot of trial and error to get the correct sound you want for a specific channel sometimes.. because theres no song preview button in the mml to spc tool, so you have to guess what the song will sound like.

3ML Editor

^^You'll need the 3ML editor if you want to insert midi files, so they can be saved as mml files and then loaded in the mml to spc tool! There's probably a couple guides on the net how that program works since it exist for a long time already :-P

Keep in mind there's a ton of assembly fixes which needed to be done to make the extra music show up in game along with some laggy side effects.

The music generated in that editor tend to be quite wasteful in space (i.e. no reusing set of notes across different instruments via the call functions) which means you'll struggle to replace a song in HM given the amount of reuse in there.

I had been programming 8bit NES chiptune tracks with FamiTracker prior to using HM, so the learning curve wasn't as steep as it could have been. I unfortunately probably forget how to do a lot of it, but I do have a notebook with lots of notes, so we'll see.

While those tools you mentioned sound useful, reusing phrases of notes and changing tempos is essential. If Calatia does get picked back up, I'll relearn how to use HM and pick up where I left off. I remember thinking, "If Koji Kondo made these amazing memorable songs with crude tools like these, so can I!"

Erockbrox wrote:Very cool to see someone actually make something music wise in the hyrule magic editor.

[...]

I have a snes .spc player so if you post those I can listen to them no problem.

Thanks!

Those files are actually SFC/SMC files - the full LTTP rom containing the edited songs, not a single SPC song file. I was able to open them in HM and confirm or deny their existence, so no worries.