danganronpa investigation themes mashup extended description

Extended description for Danganronpa Investigation Themes Mashup Ultra Super Hyper Turbo Mix

I'm so incredibly glad to finally knock the Danganronpa investigation themes off my list of music to remix/cover. This video is about a year and a half in the making. It all started back during the summer of 2020, when I first heard the soundtrack to Danganronpa. I instantly thought the music banged so fucking hard that I had to learn and arrange some tracks. I was slow to get to it, only starting the recording process in March of 2021. But I got the ball rolling when I recorded the first little scraps of material, the drum and piano parts for Danganronpa Super Mix.

What a joke. Lol. I didn't record a single 'nother part until half a year later, in September 2021. A lot of shit came up that I had to deal with. Anyway, I recorded almost all the other parts between September and now. Now is October. Or November. I don't know when I'm gonna end up uploading this. Hopefully soon.

Did all the mixing and mastering in Ableton Live. Did most of that in October in between classes and on weekends. I truly honestly sincerely wholeheartedly do not have a single clue what the hell I'm doing when I'm mixing and/or mastering. I just throw effects everywhere, flick a switch here, turn a knob there, move a slider around, wee woo, sounds good, ok click save click export. I do like how the end result sounds, though. So I musta done something right.

Like all other people who create things, the stuff I create changes as I grow as a person. It changes because I learn new things, and because my various emotional states and creative influences shift, and because some factor or another may induce me to make different creative decisions on any given day. As time passed while I was working on this video, my musical methods metamorphosed in complex ways. I gradually started getting deeper into jazz harmony and improvisation, playing with more virtual instruments, designing my own sounds with various forms of digital synthesis, altering the tuning of my drums, getting more creative with my arranging in terms of track structure and instrumentation, and getting more creative with other aspects of """"musical performance art"""". The point is—this project took so long to dream up, put together, and finish that you can hear the character of the work transform when you listen to this video from beginning to end, as my musical tendencies and musical style develop right before your ears. I start doing things differently. Harmonizing differently. Arranging differently. Paying attention to tuning my kit. Among other things. At least, I can hear it. I guess it's easy for me to say all that because I'm the one who made it, so I can easily point out the changes when it's all laid out in front of me.

Mentioned this in the video description, but I'll just say it again in case you somehow got here without seeing it. I haven't actually played the Danganronpa series for myself. I got exposed to it by watching Toph (twitch.tv/tophbbq) and EE (twitch.tv/eevisu) play through the games. The stream VODs are still on their channels, I believe. We had a great time.

The aspect of the series that stood out most to me (to nobody's surprise) was the soundtrack. Fucking fire. Love a bunch of tracks from all three of the games. Since all the investigation themes run at 128 BPM, I decided to mash them all up together and have some fun playing them.

In this cover, I did a TON of new stuff I've never done before. Like mixing this many instruments together. And using a wider variety of presets on my keyboard. And altering the parameters on my keyboard's voices to create my own voices. And expanding my array of miking methods. And mapping my GameCube controller to a digital sampler on my DAW. And using it as a MIDI device. Lots of experimentation in this video. Experimentation is the name of the game here.

It's about time I share my thoughts on the games themselves. I don't really have too much to say, besides the usual praise for a great VN series with great music, memorable characters, insane murder mysteries, and a whole lot of funny shit going on all throughout. My favorite character's got to be baby gangster. What a boss. Peko is also super cool. They make a great duo. Danganronpa 2 is my favorite game of the series for the interesting plot and setup for the DR3 anime, which I did end up watching, by the way. The anime felt quite silly at times but was still really enjoyable. "So bad it's good," as people like to say. Except it wasn't even really that bad. A fun watch, but make sure you're familiar with the story up until then. Else nothing will make any sense.