[Shenmue II] Thousand White Convent Scene [Cover/Remaster]
Channel: Nmlgc
Date: 2011-10-03

FLAC / MP3 / OGG / MIDI / sheet music download:
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http://mediafire.com/namelesslegacy
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Thousand White Convent Scene
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Hah, I guess I carried over my love for and increased attention to the more obscure pieces of music of a soundtrack from the Touhou fanbase. This is probably one of the over 100 pieces of BGM that no one particularly remembers.

Yet for me, this song was a pleasant surprise after I heard it on my first playthrough. Compared to Hong Kong, I found the first pieces of Kowloon's BGM to be really boring. It seemed that the composers already played out all their tricks in the first two discs. But then, this scene came up. Not only did it follow the emerging pattern of "Add Xiuying, instant awesome", it also had this very nice piece of music. In fact, it quickly became one of my initial motivations for this project, because it really deserved a better treatment than those terrible piano samples.

I really love how this theme creates a both sacred and benevolent church atmosphere, as if it were a lullaby from the Classical era. I hope that I nailed exactly this feeling with the sound and effect configuration you hear now.

Sadly, churches are too often depicted with a predominant usage of loud and obnoxious church organs, one of those instruments I absolutely detest listening to in real life. Really, I never enjoyed attending church because of those!

Compared to Langhuishan, this one took no time at all. After the transcription of the original notes, done after merely one hour, it was just me, my skills, and the piano. No worries about getting the instrument sounds right, no adhering to the tick of a metronome while recording, no arduous task of mixing and mastering ahead, and no need for inventive arranging of multiple instruments to make it a bit more listenable than mere looping BGM (the whole reason why the track that was initially scheduled after Langhuishan is still stuck in development hell). Instrumental solos may always be acoustically monotone, but they are really relaxing to create (and listen to) every once in a while.

... Well, I still couldn't help it, and used the second loop to mix in some delicious bells and to improvise a bit with those. Sounds cute, doesn't it?

Aside from all that, this video also is some kind of a birthday present for mai waifu. I wonder what has become of her. Probably something utterly horrifying.

About the Shenmue Remastering Project
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(had to cut a bit of the text here due to YouTube's 5000 character description limitation. Please see the Langhuishan video for the full text!)

In this open-ended project, I remake select pieces of BGM from the two Shenmue games using current technology (well... at least using those cheap pieces of technology I can afford for my humble home studio).

I noticed that everyone always focuses only on the two main themes of the series ("Sedge Tree" and "Sedge Flower"). But those have been done to death already and, for me, quickly became very boring after just a few months. Instead, this project will focus on a few of the nearly 600 other pieces of music from the two games.

The selected pieces then are no longer available only in the Dreamcast Sound Format (.dsf) or renderings thereof. Its emulation is still rather immature, with lots of audio glitches in certain songs. Even if you directly record it from a real Dreamcast soundchip, many of the samples used in the original songs are fairly low-quality and unworthy of a sixth generation game. Heck, most PSone games with sequenced music had better sound quality than Shenmue!

But this will not only be a mere sound quality update.
Many instruments will be performed and recorded live, and only receive minor adjustments later on. This will breathe new life into the original soundtracks, and makes the resulting tracks feel way more natural than the fairly mechanical feeling, sequenced original music.

I'm also open to a small number of fan requests! Please use the Moderator module on my channel page to post ayour suggestions and vote for them. I'll then choose some tracks based on the number of thumbs and my personal preference. Please use the (now probably "semi-official") track names from YouTube user Ziming's videos to avoid misunderstandings!
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Hardware
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* Yamaha CVP-301 - stupidly overpriced digital piano, but absolutely worth it for this kind of music.
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Software
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* Samplitude Music Studio 16 - DAW
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And that's it! Nothing more was used in making this one.