Battle music (2 pieces)

[soundandfury]

So I decided to write something more suited to a battle scene, and produced this:
A Call To Arms; a martial overture which quotes from the main-menu leitmotif and the 'village dance' theme from my Upon Green Hills. There's a slight issue in that a poor snare sample interacts badly with the reverb, but the limitations of the software I'm using make it difficult to deal with that (unless I kill the verb entirely on the percussion track, which sounds unrealistic as hell).

I also thought it odd that there's no piece specifically for fights against undead (of which most campaigns have several), so I wrote one:
Skeleton Dance. It uses a motivic fragment from West's Legends of the North, but it might not be all that recognisable as almost the entire piece is in 13/8 time (usually divided as 3+3+2+2+3). Odd instruments here are soprano sax and xylophone (the latter meant to represent the skeletons); also, there are no strings! Another technical issue; for some reason MuseScore won't apply any dynamics to the percussion track; I might have to re-do the mix in two parts so I can deal with it.

Reactions please.

[Ewing]

Hi,

I think you've got some good musical ideas. I have just a few comments...

So I decided to write something more suited to a battle scene, and produced this:
A Call To Arms; a martial overture which quotes from the main-menu leitmotif and the 'village dance' theme from my Upon Green Hills.

This feels much more like a 6/8 dance to me than battle music, fwiw. I listened before truly reading what you wrote here, so seeing that you've used portions of a dance theme might explain why I felt that.

There's a slight issue in that a poor snare sample interacts badly with the reverb, but the limitations of the software I'm using make it difficult to deal with that

The snare has the infamous machine gun effect, which sucks all realism out of not only the percussion, but large parts of the track as a whole. Have you looked through the free sf2 post in the stickies, yet? I'm pretty sure there are lots of better percussion options that have been put together by West.
Perhaps your software limitation is that you can't use sf2?

I also thought it odd that there's no piece specifically for fights against undead (of which most campaigns have several), so I wrote one:
Skeleton Dance. It uses a motivic fragment from West's Legends of the North, but it might not be all that recognisable as almost the entire piece is in 13/8 time (usually divided as 3+3+2+2+3).

I think this is a very interesting idea. My first impression is that this track has too much reverb overall, and it tends to get too muddled.

Odd instruments here are soprano sax and xylophone (the latter meant to represent the skeletons); also, there are no strings! Another technical issue; for some reason MuseScore won't apply any dynamics to the percussion track; I might have to re-do the mix in two parts so I can deal with it.

The snare is again a sore thumb on this one. If that can't be fixed, I would honestly just leave it out completely.

Keep it up!
-blake

[soundandfury]

The snare has the infamous machine gun effect, which sucks all realism out of not only the percussion, but large parts of the track as a whole. Have you looked through the free sf2 post in the stickies, yet? I'm pretty sure there are lots of better percussion options that have been put together by West.
Perhaps your software limitation is that you can't use sf2?

Pretty much. The software I'm using is MuseScore, which is really meant more for notation than sequencing, and doesn't give a great deal of flexibility. You pick one soundfont (in sf2 format) and it uses that for all the parts. If you want to tweak individual parts, you basically have to separate them out and record them separately, which is quite a lot of work. However, if it's worth the effort (if the music is good enough to justify it), it is possible in theory.

I think this is a very interesting idea. My first impression is that this track has too much reverb overall, and it tends to get too muddled.
The snare is again a sore thumb on this one. If that can't be fixed, I would honestly just leave it out completely.

In this case there are musical reasons why I want the snare in, so I'll see if I can de-machine-gun it, tone down the reverb a little, and repost.

Edit: An improved version of Skeleton Dance, using a G-Town Snare sample from freesf2 (and with the volume and verb nerfed on the snare track): http://jttlov.no-ip.org/music/sd3b.ogg. Getting MuseScore to record it separately from the rest was a *nightmare*. It's still a little bit machine-gunny (particularly near the start where it's at its loudest), but it doesn't stick out nearly so much now, and it acts as a highlight like it's supposed to.

Edit2: A somewhat less improved version of A Call To Arms; I didn't bother to split out the snare part so I could record with a different sample, as there was a lot of it; instead I just chopped down the reverb on that track, making it a bit more reasonable-sounding than the previous version. http://jttlov.no-ip.org/music/acta3.ogg. This also adds the problem that the other perc parts (cymbal and bass drum) have been de-verbed too, which is not ideal. However, it should be listenable now without the jarring machine-gun snare.

Thanks for your comments :)

[doofus-01]

I post here to say that I like your idea with Skeleton Dance. The newer version is indeed an improvement, though it is still a bit ... muddled (? - It could use some more variation in volume?). I hope you stick with it.

[bobbachy]

I like the ideas that you have, although I would have to agree with the comment about the Call to Arms sounding too much like a dance. I like the melody, but it doesn't vary a whole lot. Maybe play with rhythms or dynamics a little so it sound more like I battle and less like a dance? The link to the updated version of the skeleton dance wasn't working for me for some reason, but I think that the improvements that you say you have made would be very good. The drum did stick out a little too much. Again, since I haven't listened to the I can't say a whole lot. I like the 13/8 time idea, it adds some chaos (for lack of a better word) to the music, but the reverb plus the odd counting sort of blend together and it is/was difficult to make sense of the music at some points. I do like what you have though! Good work.

[Tyler Johnson]

Hi soundandfury, if you're thinking of composing for mainline, you'll definitely need better samples. I would hesitate to add anything that was sub EWQL Silver Edition, and trust me, you can squeeze a lot out of that library. I composed Casualties of War and Into the Shadows using the EWQL Library, and for $120 it's not a bad deal at all!

[soundandfury]

Hi soundandfury, if you're thinking of composing for mainline, you'll definitely need better samples. I would hesitate to add anything that was sub EWQL Silver Edition, and trust me, you can squeeze a lot out of that library. I composed Casualties of War and Into the Shadows using the EWQL Library, and for $120 it's not a bad deal at all!

In that case, I have two questions:

1. Are my compositions good enough musically for it to be worth my while investing in good samples? (That is, if I remastered the same compositions with EWQL or a similar-quality sample library, would they be likely to be accepted into mainline?)
2. Do such paid-for sample libraries play with free software? I'm too much of a rabid opensource freetard to use closed-source software. I'd presume the samples come in sf2 format, in which case there should be no problem, but I wouldn't want to spend $120 (which, as I'm in UK, probably actually means more like £120) on some samples only to find that I couldn't use them.

If either of the answers is "no", then I'm perfectly happy to just aim for UMC standard. Alternatively, if the answers were 1.yes 2.no, and someone with good samples were willing to make the effort of mastering, I'd be happy to publish scores in musescore or lilypond format. I realise though that the effort that mastering involves is considerable, and it's not something I'd 'expect' people to be willing to do.

[edit]reading EWQL's site, I see that their EULA is completely fscked-up in that they forbid using the samples "in isolation" and then attempt to define something that they really can't make a bright-line test for. Also, having only just noticed the recent "Info. Regarding Sample Requirements" post, I'm starting to strongly doubt whether there is an opensource toolchain that does what you want.[/edit]

[fabi]

I just listened to "A call to arms".
It is great, just lovely to listen to.
Can't see forward to a version which features better sound samples to hear.

[soundandfury]

Came back to Skeleton Dance 15(!) years later and decided to apply whatever I've learned about music in the meantime to make it sound more "Wesnoth-y". There's a lot more dynamic variation than before, some additional material and texture, and I've mastered it with a lot less reverb than before so you can actually hear what's going on (but still crummy samples — sorry about that). Audio and score attached, and here's the MuseScore 3 source file in case anyone else wants to do anything with it.

[mctom]

Hi!
Well first of all, please use MuseSounds, they've got free sample packs for all of the instruments you've used, and it's integrated with MuseScore (at least >4.0)

As for the composition, it has its ups and downs in my opinion.
The trumpet randomly coming in forte fortissimo to deliver a short.. uh, something, was by far the most annoying to me. It felt completely out of place, can't explain why.
I couldn't ignore that you've used many chords on wind instruments, which sound "unfamiliar", probably because wind instruments generally cannot do polyphony. I would use groups of strings for all that instead.
Timpani at 0:14 goes so high I don't think this instrument can do that either, but I may be mistaken.

However I must compliment the unusual time, I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable writing anything in 13/8 and listening to Tool is as far as I go with weird times.
One more idea, how about making it a bit slower? I think it's too chaotic for something that is supposed to be merely in the background of the players' thoughts, and should not engage the listener with too many surprises.

[soundandfury]

Hi!
Well first of all, please use MuseSounds, they've got free sample packs for all of the instruments you've used, and it's integrated with MuseScore (at least >4.0)

Sadly, MuseSounds' playback engine is not open-source (which is why my distro, Debian, doesn't package MS4), and requires the shady/insecure MuseHub. It's a real shame because I'd love to use it, but I'm not gonna run Muse Group's closed-source bittorrent client with root permissions.

The trumpet randomly coming in forte fortissimo to deliver a short.. uh, something, was by far the most annoying to me. It felt completely out of place, can't explain why.

The intention for the trumpet (and the sop sax) is that they represent bugle/alarum calls (sentries warning "halp, an undead horde just showed up, rouse the legions", or commanders signalling over the din of battle), which is why they're so… abrupt. Ideas and suggestions welcome for what to tweak.

I couldn't ignore that you've used many chords on wind instruments, which sound "unfamiliar", probably because wind instruments generally cannot do polyphony.

That's divisi, not polyphony; those parts (clarinets, horns, trumpets) are scored two players to a stave, which AFAIK is normal practice for orchestral scores. Though I could label it better (e.g. "Horn I/II" and "Horn III/IV" rather than just "Horn" for both), I'll adjust that.

Timpani at 0:14 goes so high I don't think this instrument can do that either, but I may be mistaken.

Yes, the timp part is physically unplayable for at least three reasons (it goes too low elsewhere, and is chromatic enough that you'd need about a dozen timps). I was under the impression that Wesnoth music, being written for computer performance, doesn't need 'orchestral realism' in that sense, but perhaps that passage in particular does strain suspension of disbelief a little too far. I'll have a crack at a rewrite and see if I can keep the feel I was going for.

One more idea, how about making it a bit slower? I think it's too chaotic for something that is supposed to be merely in the background of the players' thoughts, and should not engage the listener with too many surprises.

It's kind of meant to be chaotic and unsettling, to mirror the eerie disorientation you'd feel if you were actually fighting against supernaturally-animated corpses. That's also the reason for the 13/8 TS (and the 11/8 bars to stop the listener 'locking on' to the metre too early), to give that 'constantly off-balance' sensation. (Compare e.g. Rozanc's Frantic, which is actually in something like 16/8 but divided very weirdly, 3+2+2+3+2+2+2. Or Legends of the North, which is in 12/8 but almost impossible to count — I had to slow it down to figure out that it's mostly 3+2+2+3+2 | 3+2+2+2+3 — and probably inspired this track.) I've just tried listening to SD at 150bpm (instead of 168) and… it sounds wrong to me, but that's maybe because I'm so used to hearing it at the usual speed. I'll keep it set to the lower speed for a bit while I work on the various changes (and some better part-writing for the oboe, which currently has a very dull time), and see if it grows on me.

Thanks so much for reviewing!