Enverex wrote:

Does anyone happen to know what Shad0wfax did to make these tracks sound better than they do at stock?

"Mixed, Arranged, and Produced" it, apparently. :p
Yeah, short of composition, I guess it's basically a new performance.

Ha, I misread that before and thought it was referring to the original. Thanks for that.

Well crap, I didn't realise they had been "remade". Back to the drawing board.

What I did for some MIDIs in the past is to import the original MIDI data in a sequencer and change parameters (even instruments) so that it sounds good. There's no need to actually remake it from scratch.

The original MIDIs were usually made for a Roland Sound Canvas. The only way to change them so that they sound good on another synth, is to edit the MIDI data. You can't automate this. A computer can't tell what sounds good or not to a human 😀

Using the original data makes sure that that your conversion is faithful to the original. It's even possible to get from MOD to MIDI to modern synth (my own example).

Once you have a way to import the original data, it's relatively easy to make modifications.

Yeah, that's what I've been playing around with (in Rosegarden). Turns out my confusion stemmed from the fact that I needed to load the Databank information for the Fantom XR, once I'd done that I could then access all the synth's instruments. Before doing that all I could see was the basic instrument list that was already loaded!

Rosegarden seems nice, does anyone have any recommendations of anything better? (that said I'm using Linux on that machine because Windows doesn't recognise half the synths whereas Linux works perfectly with them all out-the-box so I doubt there's anything better available on Linux.

I don't think this turned out badly for my first attempt - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSqEBcbJF3U

Sounds usable already. Personally, once I got the MIDI imported, I then went full DAW, not just sequencer, and looked into using VST instruments and effects to get a more "clean" sound.

One of the things that helps the most is a frequency analyzer, which allows you to see which instruments produce frequencies that clash with other instruments that play at the same time. Instruments producing the same frequencies at the same time can "muffle" the result. You can then reduce that frequency with a filter from some of the instruments to only have a few using that frequency. The result is sound that feels more clean.

The original composers tweaked the parameters so that each instrument doesn't blend too much with others (unless the effect is wanted.) But that only works when playing it on the same hardware the composer used. Usually you have to clean up the sound from scratch when editing for another synth.

And, it can be difficult to keep the original character of the sound. And it can take a long time to get it right. A lot of experimentation is needed.