Discs and Colored Circles

  • Posted by mariteaux on January 4th, 2021 filed in Modding
  • Comments Off on Discs and Colored Circles

Happy late New Year, lads. If you missed it, I had a big data crunchy post up on the group blog about our 2020 search performance and traffic metrics for New Year’s proper, but now, it’s 2021! Feeling good about it, I am.

To start off, since I totally didn’t feel like posting about it until now, I finished up that quick charting project I started in the last few days of the year. It’s for “Trippolette”, which was a cut song in GH1 that was left on the disc totally intact and playable, but without the song definition needed to make it show up.

So where do I come into that if it was playable? Well, I wanted to play it on GH2, which has a nicer engine for faster stuff using HOPOs like “Trippolette”. Problem with most GH1 ports is that they don’t have separated bass in the game audio, as GH1 had no playable bass and thus also no bass chart. There’s a version of the song that got released for the Rock Band Network that did have separated bass, but it was a re-recorded part that in my opinion doesn’t suit the song as well. Thus, I’d need to find some way to get the original bass part isolated from the band (non-playable) stem and chart it.

Given that the recording is very clearly an old GarageBand MIDI arrangement (read: clean and well-separated sonically), I thought I’d try extracting the bass stem using splitter.ai. splitter.ai is a neat little experimental tool that can take a mixed song to pieces using a neural network. It’s still not the cleanest thing, but it managed to isolate the bass reasonably well, certainly good enough for its use in-game (as a way to mute the instrument when the player misses).

The isolated bass part for “Trippolette”. Funky.

Beyond the bass, here’s a small handful of other improvements I made:

  • Major fixes on the guitar part: “Trippolette” is definitely a GH1 chart and thus not exactly the cleanest and most professional thing. The main riff was charted two different ways, and the timing of the notes in places was suspect. Tightened the first solo, tightened the outro.
  • Recharted lower difficulties: The lower difficulties on the original “Trippolette” chart were…very not accurate. Unsurprisingly, as no one plays anything but Expert, this went unnoticed until I checked. If anyone still plays GH on lower difficulties, there you go.
  • Sections: The chart had no sections, as GH1 had no practice mode.
  • Drum charting: Necessary to get the drummer’s kit to animate to the limited extent that it does, plus the practice mode drum machine for when you slow the song down.
  • Band events: Gotta get everyone moving! Fretmapping was taken from the original chart, as was the drummer animations, but I added the keyboardist back in in lieu of the singer (for those lovely organs) and discovered that [half_tempo] works on the backing band as well as the guitarist. Useful, given this song’s absurd 206BPM and everyone having a stroke during it.
  • My usual lighting work with events and MIDI keyframes: Pretty venue.
The Trippolette chart in-game
Warped Tour is the most suitable venue for this track, naturally, though the lighting wasn’t as dramatic as with the Rat Cellar or some of the other early venues. Still looks nice though.

Anyway, you can grab it on the GH2 page on my site if you’d like. I guarantee you it’s the best “Trippolette” port you’ll get, certainly better than the job GHEx does. This one comes with practice mode audio too, so I guess I’ll be packing that into my other posted charts at some point too.

In other news, I found out that Dawn (you know, dish soap?) works absurdly well for cleaning DVDs. Been trying to image a few DVD-Rs I’ve had lying around, and I had one with some awful, weird, dried on gunk from who knows how long ago on it. There were vintage cartoons from Limewire on it, so I definitely wanted to preserve the disc, but I was getting read errors from all the crap stuck to it.

Dawn cleaned it up fine. Get some on a Q-tip, gently break up the spot, swab the spot with another one wet with water, then swap it dry with a third. Read and imaged fine. Did not know any of this.

The old Hanna-Barbera Pac-Man cartoon
This is what was on the disc, if you’re curious. The quality is really really good for an off-air fan transfer from the mid-2000s. Wonder if it was straight to digital files or through a DVD recorder. Certainly no VCR involved. (The disc menus were authored lovingly too!)

Back to real projects tomorrow, lads. 2021 will kick ass.

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