Topic: NintendoLife Musicians Thread

So we have a NintendoLife Artists thread. We have a NintendoLife Music thread. But what we don’t have is a NintendoLife Musicians thread for music makers to share their creations and discuss the process of producing sweet, sweet noise.

Whether you play a real instrument or are 100% digital; whether you play covers or write original tunes; whether you prefer lo-fi beats or hi-fi soundscapes, this is the place to post your works and thoughts about making/playing music!

A lot of my music tends to be video game influenced (perhaps unsurprisingly). I’ll start with an old Pokémon battle theme I wrote a while back, because everyone likes Pokémon (checks internet) …many people have liked Pokémon at some point in their lives:

Next, something more recent: a Last Boss theme about a flamboyant psychedelic cosmic demigod with a penchant for lasers.

https://m.soundcloud.com/user-327390218/galaxiphrost

I had a lot of fun messing around with weird time signatures making that (I think the weirdest it gets is 29/32 — if I’m counting correctly… which I’m probably not).

Last, a title screen theme from a game about a spacefaring feline that doesn’t actually exist.

https://m.soundcloud.com/user-327390218/kozmikyatt

It started as an experiment with polyrhythms and grew from there. I think there’s at least one segment with 3 against 4 against 5.

And last last, here is a 30 second tune about a jaunty, daring duck.

https://m.soundcloud.com/user-327390218/here-comes-zoomz

Share away!

Ooh, upvote the thread!

I’ve got nothing to share but I do like playing about with my guitar figuring out how to play songs I like.

I’m a so-so guitarist. Occasionally I will see someone like Jack White play who is the equivalent of a roided out power lifter benching 600kg whilst at the same time squatting 400kg only with music and I think what is the point of me even pretending to play guitar. However then there are times I see bands like Blink 182 who can barely play their instruments and I think to myself I should have been a rock star.

@jump It’s not too late to be a rock star. If the Rolling Stones are still pushing out albums, so can you!

At the risk of turning this into a gear-nerd thread, what guitar do you have? I own a… Stratocaster. In three tone sunburnt. Probably the most vanilla electric guitar in existence, but I love it very much. I also recently splashed out on a Tele so I could put in a different tuning and play twiddly-widdly math-rock nonsense, but I’ve been gravitating back towards the Strat recently… probably because I know how to play in standard tuning a lot better than weird math rock tunings, and so am basically being lazy.

Jack White is quite a force of nature. I remember Steve Vai listing White as his favourite guitarist, which is interesting because Vai is an unapologetic shredhead, whereas White is a lot less focused on pure speed/technicality as a goal in its own right.

And while they’re easy to poke fun at, I do have a genuine respect for bands like Blink and Green Day for writing songs that people can pick up and play quite easily. And be fair, the drummers in most Pop-punk bands do seem to know their chops!

I've played in a few noise / industrial / punk bands. I'm definitely at the non-musician end of things, but I can wring a hell of a lot of noise out of some VSTs and some midi data

Love this thread already, I'll be here often! Not just to view others' music but to also to post my own, I make video game music covers on the side. I have absolutely zero instrument talent but I'm very good at transcribing and mixing music tracks.

I've made about 110 covers so far (total of almost 8 hours) but my best ones aren't on YouTube yet... I'll get to them eventually. Here's one of my faves.

@TheJGG Being able to accurately transcribe is a very enviable and hugely practical skill! You’ve done an incredible job with that FF piece.

I imagine if you did decide to pick up an instrument, already having a grasp of intervals and chord voicing would be a massive boon. I bought an electric piano a few years back, and while I wouldn’t call myself a ‘pianist’ (like, at all) it has helped me arrange my thoughts regarding how chords fit together. I still find find plugging notes directly into a DAW the most natural way of constructing melodies though (even if it is a bit time consuming).

@Maxz
What DAW do you use btw?

@TheJGG I’m not a FF fan, I played 8 and that dude bro car trip one and just got bored but that was impressive!

@Maxz I love preforming, I was in a very messy punk band as a kid and then a Muse tribute band (I’m not even a big Muse fan tbh, it was just something to do), the rush of energy is the stuff life is worth living for but I’d hate being in a proper band because the touring would kill me. I’m 6’5 so sleeping in a van for months would physically kill me and the inability to have my own space when I want would mentally kill me. I know a few musicians who tell me their tour stories and it’s not a life for everyone.

I’ve got a Gibson Les Paul, tbh I didn’t put much thought in it as I got it when I was a teenager as they always looked the most rock n roll, I’ve even got a tattoo of the same model. Fender Strats are cool though, a big advantage to them is how versatile they are as well as creating mood.

I’ve recently fancied getting a double bass, however they are just so big I’d worry about the space they take up in my place.

Oh I wasn’t dissing the genre, just Blink. They are incredibly shambolic live (Travis is great though), the way round it is to make sure you’re good and drunk and then sing loudly enough with them so you can’t actually hear them. Green Day are incredibly impressive live though, one of the few stadium bands where they have an infectious fun which spreads to the people at the front to all the way to the people in the nose bleeds seats at the top.

Ooh, gonna post any of them up?

@Rambler Most of the above clips were put together in… ehem, ‘Korg Gadget for Nintendo Switch’. Which is not to say I particularly recommend it. It has some pretty extreme limitations, the most egregious being that you can’t export any music from it unless you also buy the Korg Gadget 2 App for iOS or Android.

I got the Switch App on a deep sale a few years ago and started messing around with it, only to discover the ‘no app = no export’ condition later. It was over a year before I hit the bullet and bought the iOS app and finally got the music off my Switch.

So yeah, I can’t say I endorse it, but at least when I make music on my Switch it feels like ‘play’, whereas when I make music on my computer it feels like ‘work’. So I’ve probably made more music on the Switch than I wouldn’t have done on a more powerful PC-based option. I spend enough time in front of a computer as it is.

@jump My first electric was a Gordon-Smith single cutaway (read: Les Paul knock-off). It was kinda beaten up and the pickups rattled in their cases, but it was my first introduction into the world of ROCK. Eventually it struck me that a lot of the music I was listening to was more funk based, and the ‘bounciness’ that you get from a single coil is very good for that. It blew my mind when I found out ‘Killing In The Name’ was played on a stock 1982 Telecaster, but there’s a certain ‘boing’ to the tone which makes sense upon reflection. Part of me covets a goldtop LP with P-90s, but it’ll be a long while before I can justify that purchase!

Greatly appreciate the praise, thank you very much! I've been told that I have a good ear for transcribing music and honestly, as easy as it may be to play instruments on a keyboard I'm not that talented (I've taken basic violin and piano lessons but that's it). I use Logic Pro and it's fantastic and robust to use, though the electric guitar samples leave a little to be desired. A downside to ear transcription is identifying bass notes though, and I've had to cheat by using arpeggiators... that said my proudest recent creation is a decent cover of Gaur Plain.

I took the time to listen to your Pokémon fan music, it's absolutely brilliant, as if it was straight out the game! Hope you've tried other styles since then! You've already got a knack for imitating a composer's style there.

Glad you liked it, for me no matter how unenjoyable an FF game can ever get the music is always the one constantly good part of the series! I actually liked 15 because of the four main characters, they alone make the game great when it could have been just good. I've actually covered the menu theme (Crystalline Chill, not Somus sadly) and it's one of my favourites to boot...

Hopefully this doesn’t count as a necropost, but I wrote a new song!

https://on.soundcloud.com/dcVYU

It was supposed to be an Irish jig, but turned into a sort of deranged Arabian nightmare. I wrote it for an Irish colleague, and he didn’t seem to mind the change in direction.

I don't write music, but I love playing it! i play piano, and am currently learning Mario Kart Wii's Rainbow Road theme!

I just discovered this forum and it’s awesome!
I play drums so it’s quite hard to play songs on my own but I’m in a jazz band so that’s nice 🙂

I wrote another song! It’s quite a salad!

https://m.soundcloud.com/user-327390218/the-salad-of-alex

@Maxz
That sounds amazing! I wish I could make music like that one day!

(When I clicked on your link it said the song didn’t exist so I looked on your profile and found it, so here’s another link that might work if anyone else wants to hear it) https://on.soundcloud.com/MSfPo

@_Lime Thank you for listening! I made some changes and re-uploaded it which probably broke the link.

I found it one of the hardest songs to write because it doesn’t follow a typical verse-chorus-bridge pattern or have an obvious ‘hook’. With most of my other songs there’s been a ‘kernel’ around which to build the rest of the song, but this one just sort of lollops from one idea to the next and never really looks back.

The lack of central ‘riff’ or ‘hook’ means there’s more riding on the lead instrument to establish the song’s character and direction. Naked chord stabs are nice for a few bars — especially if the drums are interesting — but it took forever to get the bleepidy-bloopidy lead line to a point where it felt purposeful but not predictable.

As listeners we’re naturally drawn to patterns and repetition (the meat and potatoes of music) but we also want to be surprised and delighted! I was really happy with how the first part of the bleepy ‘melody’ came out and I wanted to stay in that general ‘space’ for at least another cycle, but it wasn’t until I realised I could just C&P the first section but write another melody in the upper register (by pulling up lower notes from the initial melody in strategic places) that I cracked it. That struck a nice balance between familiarity and novelty. After that it launches into a sort of blues-rock-solo inspired run with plenty of chromaticism and some widdly-twiddly top-of-the-guitar-neck hammer-on/pull-off-heavy shredding to finish things off. (This bit part feels a little 90s/00s era SEGA-y to me.)

Then we’re plunged into the sewers with a grimy, somewhat dubsteppy synth sound that awkwardly jutters down four semitones over the top of an ugly, stubbornly repetitive saw-tooth pedal point. The drums are similarly unadorned and stick to a basic polyrhythm that sounds more unsettling than groovy.

Then suddenly hope returns and we’re back in the realm of celestial chord stabs which build to a crescendo, leading into a bunch of block chords that I really need to sit down and analyse. There’s something weird that happens where the very minor sound of the piece in general transitions into that last, lush major chord… which I don’t fully understand. Because I’ve been adding the notes one at a time to a piano roll I haven’t really thought about it from a ‘theory’ perspective yet.

Speaking of which, has anyone checked out 8-But Music Theory’s videos?

I was never really a music theory nerd as a kid. I didn’t go to music school. I wasn’t classically trained and I still can’t read sheet music. But perhaps because of that I find 8BMT’s stuff so valuable. I missed out on all that stuff, but here it is, presented beautifully and with infectious enthusiasm. And what’s more it’s about music I actually like and have listened to a million times over (by virtue of game music’s cyclical nature).

I also watch a some of Adam Neely’s stuff, which also touches upon games at times:

Sorry for the giga-post and thanks again for listening!

@Maxz
No problem!
It’s really interesting to see your thought process!

So I realise this thread has just become me occasionally posting whenever I write a new ‘song’, but, err… I wrote a new song.

It’s about someone turning up in a new country full of hope and optimism but then getting bewildered and going off the rails and getting temporarily arrested but then eventually finding their footing and their groove.

It’s perhaps not 100% finished, but I wanted to show it to the… inspiration in question before the end of the month .

https://m.soundcloud.com/user-327390218/mo-flo

@Maxz The bassist on the song that the mario underground theme was taken from is a GOAT (said this many times), very great inspiration for me (his name is abraham laboriel if anyones wondering)
I play the Piano (7 years or so) and Bass (since July 2023) and want to learn MANY more!!
I dont have any music or anything but I do play at my Church (the songs aren't very traditional churchy sounding lol) and I think that im Okay haha