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You can download it for free from my Bandcamp. daforlynx.bandcamp.com/album/pok-mon-reborn-ost

Thanks Hannibal XD

Zero-G Chemical Beats and Jungle Warfare, EastWest Prosamples Guitar & Bass, Best Service Advanced Orchestra, and Roland XV-5080 are the main sources. Dunno how many more NDS-emulated tracks I'll be making, but I will always be messing around with samples. It's too fun.

Thanks! I worked quite hard on it, but just six months later I feel like there's areas I could've definitely tried a little harder. To be fair, my PC itself was getting a little complainy at that point, and for some reason I hate freezing tracks to lighten compute. If there's one thing free instruments tend to do better than expensive ones, it's being relatively light on resources - and in this project I wanted to use my most expensive tools. I don't think I'll attempt something like this again for quite some time.

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. Using libraries is something I'm always working on improving. You're right that when used in the right context with the right techniques, these free options are capable of more than the sum of their parts; I will always champion the notion that you can achieve much without spending a dime. When I made this video I was looking at these libraries purely from a value perspective - what you're getting when you download it alone. I did a direct comparison because at the time I was impressed with the quality I got by spending a little money, in comparison to what I was working with before. I really, really didn't - and still don't - like the baked-in room sound you tend to get with a lot of free offerings. It's not something you can just fix with more reverb. Berlin Inspire had marginally less reverb, and I was mostly happy about that. Even without velocity crossfade and legato patches and room mics, I think old game soundtracks (from the GameCube/PS2 era mainly) prove that if you have good samples you can make MIDI sound surprisingly realistic, as long as you're willing to put in a little extra work. So with that in mind, today I'd recommend searching the internet archive for sample CDs, as well as trying out VSCO CE. My preference is that drier is better; you can always add reverb, but never cleanly remove it. But then again, context is everything. With a calmer piece, longer expressive notes, I know BBCSOD can sound good, even ideal; it's also a situation where more reverb would fit. With something like a battle theme, reverb can muddy things, and long notes may need to have strong attacks. (Though even back then I knew that layering the spiccato patch with the long patch in BBCSO would basically do that, though it wouldn't necessarily sound convincing.) Uh, I'm rambling. Yeah, combine your options for best effect. Still something I'm learning today. Ha, listening to this again, I'm really not impressed with my arranging skills in either of the examples. This was a quick and dirty comparison. Not even remotely meant to be played by any orchestra (as is the case with most of my music XD). Also would you believe I had no idea SINEfactory existed when I made this video

@@DaforLynx Ah I might have sounded a bit harsh there. What i meant is it's really easy to reveal the weaknesses of these libraries when you focus on single instrument lines like this, where every instrument is doing a different thing like in traditional composition. You kind of have to fake it and play them in sections to make these cheaper libraries sound decent, even then the strings are definitely a weak point, and the brass dynamics are limited especially toward the top of the range. I ended up mapping the mod wheel to both expression and dynamics on the stronger string instruments (violins 1, cello, bass), and only dynamics on the lighter sounding instruments (violins 2, violas). I put the lighter instruments down a few db in the mix so when it's played as a section with a mod/expression pedal you can get a bass line and upper melody going to sketch with and a nice dynamic crossfade. I also layered them in octaves, particularly the bass and cello, and I had a sub layer using the downtune, turned down ~10db to really give it some cinematic power. Even then all those tricks work better with the brass in BBCSO, Sine Helix just sounds better all around for strings. With the brass I also mixed in Majestic Horn for that FFF layer, and used Realoud mapped to the modwheel/expression pedal to really add some dynamics (works for strings too). That's the thing though I never have too much focus on individual instruments in these cheaper libraries other than the lowest dynamic/power instruments (violas, violins 2) as the violins 1 and cello just don't hold up to a listening test without layering. I'd really like to get into uploading some vids and showing people what these instruments can do, but my health has really gone downhill lately. Once I get feeling better I'm really inspired to jump back in and see what these can do.

@@DaforLynx I've used VSCO and the Alpine Project as well. I find them most useful for the solo instruments and woodwinds. The string instruments and brass just don't seem to suit the more trailer music/cinema style I like to compose in. I'm more into the Two Steps from H3ll and Daniel James sort of sound. It all started with guys like Zimmer and Junkie XL of course.

You sound like you know what you're doing! If you do upload, consider letting me know, because I'm always very interested in seeing people stretch limited tools to their maximum potential.

I made this 3 years ago with Ableton Live 10 Intro using mostly Helm and soundfonts Damn Thanks for the positive comment. This remix ranks well below Ichinose's original, but at least it's unique...I recommend my newer stuff for production quality, though (I'm thinking 2022 and after).

No...not on purpose, at least. I'm not hearing it.

None of the samples come from existing DS games (at least not directly). There's a bit of a process - after selecting the samples, I export them as 16 bit mono WAVs and throw them into Awave Studio to downsample and loop. Start at 32khz, but often you can go lower for bass sounds and such. Try to keep the length of each sample under 40,000 samples (less if you want to evoke games older than BW). Make sure there are NO samples after the loop endpoint. After that I package it into an SF2 soundfont using Polyphone. Then I import the SF2 into Nitro Studio 2 (an incredible shortcut), after which is the long and frustrating process of recreating the ADSR envelopes since they usually don't import correctly. There's certain things you have to do to make it 1. not crash and 2. save at all. Sometimes it just won't work with certain samples for no discernible reason. I then open the resulting SDAT file using VG Music Studio, which is what provides the NDS emulation and the channel visualization in the video. This is all entirely unnecessary, though. You can stop after making the SF2 and use Sobanth (soundfont player VST) or Fluidsynth to play the MIDI with nearest-neighbor interpolation; it sounds just like the VGMS output. I really wanted to make it "NDS accurate" just cause I could. Next step is putting it into a game and playing it from an actual DS...

​@@DaforLynxLegend. Thank you for responding. I also tried doing some DS music, but I couldn't get my own samples to sound just right, and I never knew how to compress them for that iconic DS sound. Thank you again for your response.

This whole song reminded me of it too, after I put it all together...