Writings/ Music: Uses for video game midis

Music:
Uses For Video Game Midis
by Ben Scheele

        When something great and useful is discovered, it is only right to share it with others, after you have figured out a way to make sure the credit goes solely to you of course. Alas, what I have to share is not something as momentous as the creation of the method of calculus, which Newton actually hid for quite some time, selfishly polishing his manuscript and biding his time. I would like to share with all who are interested a way to practice music, work on their sight-reading skills, and have a lot of fun with familiar melodies. I suppose whether the melodies are familiar or not depends greatly on the amount of video games you played, and when. First, I will provide you with a little background.
        I grew up in the years when Nintendo dominated the home console video gaming scene with its Nintendo Entertainment System. I fondly remember dodging plasma beams on Quickman's stage in Megaman II, and dueling with Link's shadow in Zelda II. Now that I have rediscovered the music from those games on the internet, I realize that a major factor in my enjoyment of the games was the music. I remember grooving to the ridiculously odd music from Klax and Marble Madness, and humming along to the repetitive yet all too catchy tune from Bubble Bobble. The atmospheric music from Godzilla and Final Fantasy would give me goose bumps. Even with such rudimentary graphics, a few good songs could have a huge effect, and endear a game to me forever. With the arrival of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and 16 bit graphics and sounds, there was the potential for truly moving music, as was the case for Nobuo Uematsu's score for Final Fantasy III.
        I have collected all of my favorite music that I could find on the internet from the Nintendo and Super Nintendo games I played and loved. The reason I chose to focus only on those two systems should be evident from my history, as explained in the last paragraph. I have certainly liked some of the music of games created for more recent gaming systems, especially from the people who had made the music for earlier games, but I simply haven't developed or haven't wanted to develop the same connection with them. A lot of it has to do with nostalgia, and the NES and SNES music was oftentimes just so much fun. My collection of favorite midis also leans slightly more towards music with a certain kind of melody and structure, for a reason you will soon understand. I played tuba in a band all throughout school, and now that I no longer have a tuba to play, I have taken up playing the clarinet. I don't have a band to play with right now, and practicing from lesson books alone can be expensive and tedious. That is why I started searching for alternatives. I found a demo version of a music composition program called Finale created by MakeMusic! Inc. of Coda Music Technologies. When I realized that you could import midi music into the program, display the notes, and have it play it back at any tempo that you want, I quickly saw how this could be a great and fun way to read music and practice on my instrument.
        I have since played along with dozens of pieces from all kinds of video games. I was surprised and excited at first by how many songs lent themselves extremely well to being played by the clarinet. I think it is due to the necessarily melodic nature of the early video games. Many of the songs have a kind of synthesizer sound to them, but quite a few have recognizable instruments in them, such as piano, flute or strings. My collection of favorite NES and SNES midi music should be valuable to anyone who grew up playing those games, or who wants to improve their instrumental skills. You could also try downloading classical midis and playing those, although I find listening to classical music midis somewhat dissatisfying unless you have a very good soundcard and soundfonts. Piano midis are generally okay, though.
        The basic procedure that I use for setting up a piece for playing in Finale is as follows.

Open Finale and either open the midi file from the file menu, or simply drag and drop it onto the Finale workspace window. It is easier to drag and drop, because it will otherwise make you switch which file type to look for to .MID.
It will give you a lot of midi file import options, which you can leave be, but might be fun to play around with later.
The music will then be displayed in a readable format. I like to switch to "scroll view" by pressing Ctrl+E. You can also do this by going to the view menu and selecting that.
I will often press Ctrl+7 to scale the sheet to 75%, so I can see more of the music at one time. You can scale it to any size you want by pressing Ctrl+0 (zero) and entering the percentage that you want.
In order to make it easier to read with clarinet, I need to transpose the staff that I am going to play. There will often be multiple tracks for different instruments in a given piece.
1. Select the staff tool, which is indicated by a treble clef icon on the toolbar.
2. Then double click on the staff that you want to transpose, anywhere where there is some open space.
3. The staff attributes dialog will pop up. Here you can change from bass clef to treble, and also transpose the music.
4. On the right side, by where it says transpose, click on select to open the staff transpositions menu.
5. You can change the key signature by toggling the drop down menu for it, or by entering the interval and key alteration. For clarinet, I need to add two sharps, since it is a B flat instrument. This is an interval of one and key alteration of two.
6. Since an octave is seven intervals, you can drop it an octave simply by subtracting seven from the interval value. A negative value will most likely result.
7. Then just click OK for both pop-up windows, or toggle through to other staffs and change them as well.
The melody might be carried on several different tracks, and you should look ahead to see which ones should be transposed before you start playing.
If you want to change the tempo, and make it slower for practicing, you might need to delete the first bar of the music, because I think that is where the tag for the tempo is encoded. It will most likely not let you change the tempo unless you do this.
After all of these changes to the file, you might want to save the file in .MUS format for playing again later, but this is unfortunately not available on the demo version. It is a crippled version of the program, but at least it does not expire. If you want to save, you will need to purchase the program for the several hundred dollar fee that they charge. If you are a student, you can get a discount, and there are also less expensive versions of that company's software, such as Printmusic!. Printmusic! will allow you to import and modify the midis, and save them as .mus files, although not quite as easily as with the top end software. Try downloading the demo version of Finale or Finale Allegro and have fun!