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Recreating Daft Punk's Da Funk with Overtone and Leipzig

overtone-recipes.github.io

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Re: Recreating Daft Punk's Da Funk with Overtone and Leipzig

#31

Post by midgetjones »

6stringmerc wrote: post #28
midgetjones wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those that don't want to learn how to read proper notation, usually.

Perhaps, but Guitar Tab is one of the great equalizers of the internet - proper notation has typically cost money to access a copy, whereas Tab could spread in .txt format, small sizes, etc. Sure, they could be off or need the song to play along with, but that's the trade-off. Lastly, though it's a personal opinion, Guitar and "proper notation" are really only needed in the same sentence when playing Classical/Orches…

I agree, I just feel like it ends up as a crutch for a lot of musicians. For example, it isn't very specific in terms of rhythm so you get a lot of beginners who see that part of music as loose or unimportant.

But of course, up to a point, lowering barriers is always a good thing for beginners.

Re: Recreating Daft Punk's Da Funk with Overtone and Leipzig

#32

Post by austinjp »

6stringmerc wrote: post #28
midgetjones wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those that don't want to learn how to read proper notation, usually.

Perhaps, but Guitar Tab is one of the great equalizers of the internet - proper notation has typically cost money to access a copy, whereas Tab could spread in .txt format, small sizes, etc. Sure, they could be off or need the song to play along with, but that's the trade-off. Lastly, though it's a personal opinion, Guitar and "proper notation" are really only needed in the same sentence when playing Classical/Orches…

Ya, plenty of highly successful musicians and "composers" can't/couldn't read music, Paul McCartney being one of the most famous.

Joni Mitchell apparently didn't even use regular tab notation. She'd detune her guitar and annotate the relative pitch shift per string, e.g. D-2 G+1, etc or similar.

Re: Recreating Daft Punk's Da Funk with Overtone and Leipzig

#33

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

jeremy7600 wrote: post #16
creullin wrote: post #2

Haha. This is awesome. I wonder what the final output would be. A full song?

I was a bit disappointed by the output. Is this the quality of music that is produced regularly by this software? The only thing that sounded good to my ears was the baseline piece, by itself. It sounded true to the original. The rest sounded like a Casio keyboard from the 80s. Not flattering to the depth of Da Funk. I was expecting something closer to the original, not something with the same tones measures and BPM…

It's incredibly hard to make music with commercial production values with nothing but code.

Commercial studios have racks full of boxes that start from $2000 each that fatten up and sweeten the sound, and a commercial track will patch every element through multiple boxes during mixing. The mixing desk itself will add its own sound.

Most of the boxes have analog circuitry inside them. Modelling it is not easy, and good models can use so many cycles it's no longer possible to listen to their output in real time (at least, not without using external hardware acceleration).

None of the mainstream music code environments - Overtone, SuperCollider, Csound, Max/MSP and so on - pay much attention to this. They mostly come with trivially simple DSP models which don't sound all that great.

Surprisingly, they also make it hard to use more complicated models even if you know what you're doing. Mostly you can't just add the model in user land - you have to add it as an external, and rebuild.

Commercial software from Korg, Yamaha, NI, UA, Access, and most pro and semi-pro VST makers puts more effort into sounding good, but the high quality models are somewhat proprietary and the code isn't often open sourced - although sometimes the models appear in papers from (e.g.) the ICMC.

Re: Recreating Daft Punk's Da Funk with Overtone and Leipzig

#34

Post by rdtsc »

dave2000 wrote: post #29
phonyphonecall wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall some composers notes such as 'with great vigor' or 'like raindrops' on sheet music. Midi step sequences would have a hard time representing the "emotion" some composers are looking for.

Satie had some good instructions: "In the morning on an empty stomach" "Hypocritically" "With a lot of difficulty" “With conviction and a rigorous sadness” “With a healthy superiority” “Don’t eat too much” “Shake like a leaf” “Do not cough” “Go away” “Like a nightingale with a toothache”

Should apply that to lines of code in code review .

   x.ugly_hack=blah

Re: Recreating Daft Punk's Da Funk with Overtone and Leipzig

#36

Post by midgetjones »

austinjp wrote: post #32
6stringmerc wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but Guitar Tab is one of the great equalizers of the internet - proper notation has typically cost money to access a copy, whereas Tab could spread in .txt format, small sizes, etc. Sure, they could be off or need the song to play along with, but that's the trade-off. Lastly, though it's a personal opinion, Guitar and "proper notation" are really only needed in the same sentence when playing Classical/Orches…

Ya, plenty of highly successful musicians and "composers" can't/couldn't read music, Paul McCartney being one of the most famous. Joni Mitchell apparently didn't even use regular tab notation. She'd detune her guitar and annotate the relative pitch shift per string, e.g. D-2 G+1, etc or similar.

But luckily Paul McCartney had George Martin, who could do it very well :)

Re: Recreating Daft Punk's Da Funk with Overtone and Leipzig

#38

Post by squeaky-clean »

phonyphonecall wrote: post #17
rorykoehler wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a representation of a midi step sequencer. It's pretty standard in all DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software. Staff notation is way more nuanced than this. In order to represent all the details on the midi ui it requires layers (like photoshop) for all the different parameters. On staff notation it's all there on one page. Staff notation might be a bigger learning curve but it's also a far superior way of com…

I recall some composers notes such as 'with great vigor' or 'like raindrops' on sheet music. Midi step sequences would have a hard time representing the "emotion" some composers are looking for.

> Midi step sequences would have a hard time representing the "emotion" some composers are looking for.

They all allow different amounts of precision and interpretation of the performance. Staff notation is open to interpretation on the performance level. MIDI is an exact recording (or programming) of a performance.

With staff notation you can mark eighth notes and say "staccato, lag behind the beat", and there's an infinite number of subtly different ways to play it, even within the own composers interpretation. With MIDI, it would represented as "Note on A3, 12 pulses after first quarter note, velocity of 87. Note off A3, 54 pulses after first quarter note, velocity of 0. Note on C3 (etc....)". MIDI is great for computers (or routing signals during live performance) because it's exact.

Re: Recreating Daft Punk's Da Funk with Overtone and Leipzig

#39

Post by richardw »

gulpahum wrote: post #15
hanoz wrote: post #3

Well that's opened up a fascinating new world to me. Is there a name for that regular logarithmic by linear music notation in the first image? I suddenly feel like a whole lifetime of musical enjoyment has been denied to me by the utterly utterly ridiculous staff notation system.

I agree. I used to compose small pieces with soundtrackers [1] and it was a lot of fun. However, I've never been able to learn staff notation system. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Soundtracker

I did barely learn some of staff notation at school, but Soundtracker was my tool of choice! Loved it. So many hours.

Re: Recreating Daft Punk's Da Funk with Overtone and Leipzig

#40

Post by Double_Cast »

jeremy7600 wrote: post #16
creullin wrote: post #2

Haha. This is awesome. I wonder what the final output would be. A full song?

I was a bit disappointed by the output. Is this the quality of music that is produced regularly by this software? The only thing that sounded good to my ears was the baseline piece, by itself. It sounded true to the original. The rest sounded like a Casio keyboard from the 80s. Not flattering to the depth of Da Funk. I was expecting something closer to the original, not something with the same tones measures and BPM…

I just looked at the original and the copy through my laptop's shitty default equalizer. The copy has unnecessary bass. Around the 1k hz range. This is probably the largest contributor to what makes it sound hollow.

Also, just comparing them by ear. Over each note, the copy builds up and then builds down in volume in a shape. The original has a sharper attack and then fades gradually, which looks more like a > shape.

I think the copy also has an unnecessary reverb effect, but I'm not sure.

This is all malleable of course. None of this is the fault of the software. It's just a difficulty inherent to reverse engineering.

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