amn

hihi you guys, i have another thing from my youtube here!! this time it's a deltarune cover!

okay. so for this cover, i mainly started with the piano-ish instrument you can hear at the beginning of the original track (i initially thought it was a sort of string instrument when playing through ch4 for the first time, but as it turns out it's just a piano with a higher attack!) a good portion of my time on this cover was mainly spent trying to layer a bunch of instruments on this part to try and get the sound as accurate as possible, which i rlly struggled with initially, as even though the initial instrument IS a piano, i felt that the pianos i was using from garageband didn't sound as "synthy" as the original (there's not rlly a good way to describe my issue with it here, so apologies if that doesn't make too much sense! all you have to rlly know is that i didn't think what i was doing initially sounded too accurate bc it sounded too much like a regular piano.) eventually i got a good collection of instruments layering this part to get something like the original's quality, but it definitely was a massive roadblock to getting started with this whole cover (i think i settled on like 2 pianos, 2 guitar-like synths, 1 vocal synth, and 1 bell synth.)

from there, i had to figure out how to apply the higher automation to that bit to actually make it.... you know, resemble the original. i initially tried to go for some volume automation shenanigans (i'd start with a lower track volume at the beginning of each note, then increase to the regular level about 3/4 of the way through the note and keep it there until the note ends, at which point the whole thing repeats.) this, obviously, was *very painful* to do, since i had to repeat this process for each note AND adjust it for the different volume levels of each instrument making up this part (which, again, that's like 6 instruments in total) to keep the mixing for that part consistent. and sure, i could copy paste the automation pattern, but for some reason garageband just..... gives up on the pattern actually copying over properly after a while?? like it just scrambles the whole thing for no reason.

and admittedly, all that would've been fine - i've done worse stuff with volume automation before - but garageband was weirdly consistent with just straight up crashing if i tried doing this for the cover, to the point that it corrupted my project file one time! so obviously that sort of forced my hand to find a more elegant solution, which i eventually did - envelopers! instead of doing volume automation by hand, i can just apply my enveloper (i'm using an ios app called flux mini 2) and just edit the attack directly (sort of? i'm still kinda unclear on the exact way envelopers work if it wasn't obvious lolol), and as long as each note is the same length (which the main piano bit for dark sanctuary very much is), it works perfectly!!

anyways, after this, a lot of the cover was (mostly, big exception coming up) smooth sailing! i added the bass parts for the cover in (it's just strings and an organ, the part itself wasn't actually too complicated either), put in some strings for the chorus section at the beginning and flute section at the very end (mostly just chords, but these were pretty difficult to figure out just by listening, so i used a very helpful deconstruction of dark sanctuary that i've linked in the youtube upload!), set up the lead instruments (just an oboe and bassoon playing the same part, followed by a two-voice string part repeating the melody of those two instruments, then flutes + violin + strings covering the melody/countermelody to the end), and did the little piano (no attack this time) harmonization/texture... thing part (i actually let an organ double this part bc i thought it blended the part rlly well into the whole sound when the choir/string chords are present, so it doubles the piano in the first choir section and at the very end.)

the next hurdle to the whole cover was (probably unsurprisingly, since i imagine most of you have heard dark sanctuary before) the choir. in the original song, this part is performed live by itoki hana - replicating the quality of that sort of performance with garageband instruments and midi was quite a difficult challenge!! i think i eventually got a kind of okay result by layering this string/vocal synth that i've been keeping in my custom instruments bank on garageband for a long time now (it's kind of my go-to whenever i'm doing vocals/any lead strings in my original songs, since it just sounds neat) and the "female choir morph" synth, but unfortunately it rlly doesn't hold a candle to the original performance.

not to mention, on top of finding instruments that can imitate that original's sound, i need to do a whole bunch of pitch bending to properly replicate the actual performance, and that would've been too painful even for me (for reference, that's two instruments that double a four-voice choir where each voice needs to slide to the next note, which all need to be done in an app where the process for performing pitch bends is literally just "go into the keyboard, switch your mode to pitch, hit record, put your finger on the digital keyboard and pray to the deity of your choice that your swipe across the keys resulted in a pitch bend that actually matched the tempo bc garageband cannot be bothered to quantize that bs. we're also gonna randomly increase the gain for the inevitable merge of choir parts that you have to do to fit in the maximum instrument limit for a project, so your final choir track will have weird volume inconsistencies for no reason. and we're cursing you with weird audio bugs and a chance to crash the app every time you reopen this project and hit play, because fuck you"). in short, the choir part in this cover is like, necessarily kind of mid compared to the original, as i unfortunately am only mortal and there's only so much you can do with garageband!! either that or i'm just stupid and missed something that could've made this whole thing way easier.......

and finally, we've got the percussion!! i actually rlly liked doing this part for this cover! it's nothing too fancy, i'll admit - just 3 layers of regular acoustic drumsets and some eq shenanigans to ensure that the tom drums rlly get their moment to shine in the choir sections (they only rlly feature in sections where everything's kind of making a lot of noise, so i figured they need a little boost so that they're not lost in the sound.) besides that, it was a pretty simple part to suss out from the original track! i will say that i did kind of try to give the percussion's rhythm a little more flavor by having a guitar synth blend into the percussion and imitate the tom drum rhythm with some blocky chords (i don't think it's actually that identifiable in the final cover, but trust me, it surprisingly added a lot of very crucial texture to the bass-mid section in the first choir section + the section right before the end where the violin and flute are performing the melody.)

beyond that, all that was left to do was to merge the instruments and percussion into their own separate tracks to make mixing a bit easier (instead of balancing every single track, i can just merge instruments into their individual parts, which i know sounds super basic, but like this is the first time i actually thought to do this so.......) and exporting the final track to audacity so that i can make sure that the track isn't peaking the audio and/or blowing out anyone's eardrums.

hihihi y'all, i have an omori cover from my youtube here!! i figured that it would be neat to sort of use tumblr to rlly expand on what i was going for with my covers w/o being limited by youtube's character limits, so.... yeah! here's that!

(also gods i hope the audio isn't blowing out your ears, i rlly need to learn how to properly mix my audio so that i don't do that.)

alright so. basically where i started with this was with the percussion. that was, like, really simple to get down bc it's literally just kicks and low snares in the original. i did add a few embellishments in the form of crash cymbals and stuff when transitioning to a new section (and jungle drum samples buuuutwe'llgetttothatlaterokkkkk), but it's rlly just like 3 layered drums doing the same kicks and snares when it comes down to it.

then i moved onto the more synthy chord part that makes up like the actual meat and potatoes of the song. this part was what rlly took up a lot of my time. the actual notes weren't too hard to suss out from listening to the original over and over again, but the real issue was the texture of the whole part. the instruments i was using were just sort of.... flat? and honestly i thought that this wouldn't be that hard to fix, since so many of garageband's native instruments just sound like they're fit for the more heavy, electronic sort of tone that i needed here, but it really was difficult!! i eventually settled on layering like 7 different synth pads and leads + 1 pad that would cover the whole bass of the song by doubling this part in a lower octave + a little bit of distortion and a lot of reverb, but wow it took a bit to nail it down!

from there, the only real challenges was to copy over the melody instrument (since the main chord part is so loud, i literally had to double the vocal-like synth i have playing the melody *3 times over* for it to be audible in the final version) and the little synth embellishment you hear throughout most of the song, which is just two doubled classic synths that i thought fit well together (in the original this part had a sort of panning effect, which i could technically replicate with a low-rate tremolo/volume automation shenanigans between two tracks that have a fixed pan to either side of the ear, but i honestly think it sounds better w/o that?), sooo i did that! the vocal part also had a bit of a minor embellishment in the beginning of the track in the original, so i added that, but honestly i couldn't get it to work great so it's just sort of..... not that audible?? it's there i guess and sort of does the job, but it's a little.... meh, idk.

anyways, basically the only thing left to do was the transition effects and my own little minor embellishments. the transition effects were easy enough to do by merging a few riser synths together to get something that feels crunchy and electronic but still has that sort of treble-leaning laser gun effect that you can hear in the original, and then duplicating and reversing that merged audio for the drop part of the transition. the original actually does these transition effects a little different than how i do them for most of the cover, in that excluding the first and last two transitions, they actually rise for half a measure, do a light drop for the rest of the measure, and then a heavy drop. i get why they did this (it gives the moments where you're doing a full measure riser and drop more emphasis), but i honestly think it sounds fine without it here! also, bc of some of my creative alterations, it would mess up at least one transition if i kept the transitions faithful to the original.

speaking of the liberties i took with this cover....

the main thing that i wanted to do was to play around with the intensity of the whole song. you'll notice that, if you pull up the original, the whole song just sort of feels intense. all of the time. i think it sort of gets away with this by emphasizing/adding an instrument to the bass in the section around 0:40-1:05, making the other sections less intense by comparison, but i just thought that properly adding a sort of pull back, interlude-ish section would be interesting, so i did that! i removed a few of the heavy synths in the chord part for the section between 0:40-0:52, and added a sort of choir-like pad (up an octave so it doesn't lean too heavy into the bass) + piano doubling the chord part, and changed the percussion in this section to just be a kick pattern that i thought would fit there (i think i was unconsciously trying to copy the kicks in "you cannot go back." but idk. my main idea with that whole thing was to use the kicks to sort of feel like an irregular heartbeat, since this is something that both this song and "you cannot go back.", the other space boyfriend battle theme, does, so it probably ended up imitating a rhythm in one of those songs.)

as for the other major change.... i added jungle drum samples!!! this is mainly bc the drums add a ton of rlly nice intensity and aren't very bass heavy, so they extend the percussion range nicely. also i rlly wanted to do some drum chops, bc they're fun!! i don't actually think these samples fit the bpm of the song, but it sounds fine anyways bc i chopped them, soo........

i got two drum samples in, and decided i would use them exclusively in the 0:40-1:05 section, with the first sample covering 0:40-0:52 and the second sample covering 0:52-1:05. i chopped them into an interesting rhythm, did some filter + eq stuff (it's just a heavy distortion filter and favoring the treble range of both samples, since the regular percussion has the bass covered), and altering the tail end of the first chop section to have a cut-out transition to the next section (which i think had a nice effect, since i had to also cut out the transition effect and it sort of hits harder in the next section as a result!)

aaaand that's basically it! the song was done, so i just sent it to my laptop and limited the peak amplitude to -6dB so it wasn't peaking or cutting out anymore (and is hopefully not breaking your eardrums lol.)

so i've been rlly burnt out on composing and covers for a bit bc of college applications and other general life stuff, and this is sort of the only thing i've managed to cobble together in like, months. granted, i have been putting a lot of pressure on myself to try composing a musical idea away from my piano (i usually just mess around on my piano until i find a cool idea and go from there, and that works, sure, but it's rlly annoying how dependent on luck the whole thing can feel sometimes + i end up constantly repeating the musical idea i got from my piano and my songs sound sort of boring as a result.) it's definitely not done yet, since i'm still sort of stuck on how i want to order sections (also, i'm still sticking to one musical idea!!! i have to do a bridge section with a rhythm and progression that isn't just a minor adjustment to the main idea or i swear to god i will perish from this earth), so i figured that i may as well post what i have right now for tumblr (unfortunately bluesky is kind of finnicky with just audio files so i would have to do some very basic cover art to post it to there, and i'm saving youtube for the finished song.)

anyways, talking about the song itself now: i've been listening to authentic sky from tekken 4 recently (i've never played tekken 4, i literally only know about this song bc of the deltarune ribbit mod, which is amazing and awesome and which you should play!!! if you want!!), and i found the repetitive piano section very pleasing to listen to. it sort of reminded me that i haven't done a lot of layered piano stuff like that in, ever maybe (the half-baked christmas song i have on my youtube maybe counts? but i've gotten better since then and want to make something complete), so why not do it now?? so i just put together a 3 voice piano thing + some very basic kicks.

the issue at the beginning was that i just didn't like the texture of the whole thing very much. like, the piano harmonies that i settled on were *good*, sure, but the piano instrument that i had was sort of bad (hence why i was looking for a bunch of soundfonts recently, bc garageband instruments can be so constricting like this.) everything was either meh or way too muted to sound good in the sort of song i wanted to make. so, to fix this, i figured that maybe i should use some plugins, and i eventually settled on bitcrushing everything a fair bit!

the piano bit seemed good then, but i felt that a lot of the actual movement of the song wouldn't be carried by the piano since it's supposed to be somewhat repetitive and trance-like, so i mainly built the rest of the sections through percussion (moved kicks to a later section for emphasis and replaced the beginning with hi-hats and shakers, some drum layers with a specific electronic kit bc that one has a cool sfx that, when bitcrushed, makes a sort of crackly sound that feels pleasant and cool to listen to, etc.) then i made a very meh melody line (i wanted to use a zunpet for the melody since it seems fun, but i think that would be better suited to the bridge section since zunpets always map in my brain to tension, so it's not here right now and instead i just have the piano carrying the melody in an octave harmony and a bell instrument for emphasis.)

also i made a bass section that im personally very proud of, since i never get to do cool bass sections in my covers (aside from the bass in from now on, that was a good one). like maybe it's a bit too active for the laid back nature of the whole thing, but man,,,, it sounds cool to me and that's all i need. doing the bass sections also forced my hand for some pitch bends, so i could then take that to the main piano bit and have it pitch bend when transitioning between sections, which was way more convenient than getting a reverse cymbal to do it (i have to set up a new drum track and put the cymbal there and measure how long the sound lasts and then i have to merge that part with itself to even get it as an audio file and then i have to reverse it and cut bits/do some volume automation shenanigans to even get it to actually fit the measures i want it to stick with and,,, yeah you prolly get why i dont wanna do that)

as a result, i have some hopefully decent designs (concept art??) for brain-related deltarune enemies that i made during a bout of insomnia to share!

euphisce - excitatory neuron

somnolier - inhibitory neuron

(also in retrospect, maybe this one should be elec/holy because of the wings)

gliade - oligodendrocyte

glusec - microglia

also being able to see these funky little guys in deltarune rlly helped me solidify an npc design for a personal thing i’ve been working on for a While™️, so i decided to throw them in here as well.

uuh so hey! i’m amn, a generic music nerd who does vgm covers and other music stuff over on youtube, and i figured that i should make use of all these social media accs that i have, so like, here i am!

this website looks a lot better for uploading audio clips than bluesky, so probably expect short music clips from projects that couldn’t be posted to youtube, random drawings, and other stuff like that.

anyways for this debut post have this guei deltarune drawing i posted on youtube a week ago and bluesky a few minutes ago! please be kind i am not great at art nor writing in languages other than english lol.