DESCRIPTION:
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This took a realllly long time to complete. I started it about three weeks ago and have been working on it almost non stop since then. Haha, it ended up being a lot more difficult than I had planned (don't I always say that?). I knew what I was getting into though.

I've wanted to do something from the Kirby series for a long time and finally settled on this one. Jun Ishikawa is one of my favorite game music composers. His work has a very distinctive quality which is something I greatly admire. You can always tell when you're listening to something he wrote. It's a really bizarre combination of beauty and intensity and yet it works so perfectly. It's almost like NOFX meets Radiohead or something, haha.

So I ran into a lot of snags as I was making this cover. I wanted to give up a couple of times, but I persevered! This was the most planning that I have ever done while producing a video and there was a lot of problem solving involved. For the curious, I'm going to detail what I did.

Firstly, the most difficult part were those guitar harmonies. Surprisingly, they weren't that hard to play, but it took a lot of planning to figure out how to make them work. In the original piece, you hear two harmonies, 16th notes, going very fast. I quickly realized that I wasn't going to be able to play them at that speed on guitar so I broke the two part harmonies into six. This required me to transcribe both parts into a notation program by ear then isolate the notes. THEN I made .wav files out of all six parts, dropped them into my DAW and played to them. It took a long time and was a pain in the ass to say the least.

The next challenge was figuring out how to emulate the pan flute effect and the strings. I found a sample in Reason that I used for the flute and just ended up using the built in strings on my keyboard. By this time the overall track was starting to have a very electronic sound so I decided to just rip the percussion track straight out of the game's OST and used that instead of recording drums. I like how it sounds and honestly don't know if my drumming is good enough to keep up with this track, haha.

It took a really long time for me to mix and edit as well. I'm still so green when it comes to mixing and mastering. I have made a lot of progress, but there is such a long way to go. Seriously, if you have any input please speak up in the comments = )

I did have to simplify the bass line a bit because it was really difficult. Also, I this was the first time that I've even attempted to record distorted guitar in probably five years. Believe it or not, I want to get back into playing heavier music because I am a rocker at heart. Acoustic music is just so much easier to record, heh.

Everything you're seeing and hearing is in real time. So that means that I didn't pre-record any audio then film myself playing to the track. I don't think I've ever explicitly stated this, but I'd say at least 90% of everything I do on this channel is in real time. What you're hearing is also what you're seeing. A lot of my favorite musicians on YouTube DO pre-record their tracks and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

It's sort of like the difference between going to see a live show and listening to a polished record. They're essentially two completely different things, but one isn't better than the other. I feel like since YouTube is a visual platform, I want my videos to have a "live" feel to them, as if you were attending concert... performed by clones of myself? When I make mistakes I tend to just let them roll unless they're really awful, then I will sometimes patch in notes to fix them.

A big reason for this is that my equipment is still pretty lame so I sort of feel like the audio quality will hit a plateau in any case.

Okay, sorry for the long description. Thanks for watching! I need to go write some lyrics now. ...before the dawn of the final day...



Composed by Jun Ishikawa and arranged by me

Original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRjEBqGsI2o