Ria's Creation Journal

There may be trouble ahead...

Okay, so a little while ago I published a level, well, more of a showcase really. It showed the synching of sung vocals with the music sequencer. I was pretty chuffed with it, and even though I look at it now and think about going back to improve it, I'm happy with it as it is.

Anwyay, that's besides the point. DajDaj03 suggested the idea of making a Jessica Rabbit video. At first I thought "Wow, what a cool idea! But I've got way too much on..."

Real life aside, I've been volunteering for community projects and working on the Printz Diaries (Slowly chipping away...). I play with and write for the LittleBigPlanet Central Community Showcase, and I'm honoured to have been let loose on the new Observatory Project for LittleBigPlanetarium, helping to write the story.

Add all these things together, and putting a new project on the end of the list didn't seem like the best of ideas.

But that blinking song... It just wouldn't go away!

I went round in my head for weeks. Stupid catchy song. And Daj's comment kept coming back to haunt me. But still I rejected it.

Then a few nights ago I met Daj in the Planetarium chat room, and the monster (the idea, not Daj :P ) reared its ugly head once again. But this time, the more I started thinking about it, the more plausible it seemed.

Maybe I could just work on it bit by bit... while I'm having a break from other things...

Perhaps I could find the score somewhere online...

And so on.

And now, here we are. I've started sequencing lol!

The difficulty I face now is that this rendition of Peggy Lee's awesome song is in a strange time signature. Or at least, it's not strange to me, but when the LBP sequencer looks at it, it just kind of shuns it away lol. Lots of triplets and such, so it's going to be some fiddly work getting it right.

Now it's been impossible to find sheet music of THIS particular version of the song online. All I've found is sheet music for the Peegy Lee version, which, whilst I love it, is much more upbeat and less fancy than Jessica Rabbit.

So I've started by taking individual tracks from this version, and converting them from MP3 to Midi files, so that I can get the on a piano roll in front of me. This isn't the smoothest of processes, as you inevitably end up with a few jumbled notes, and need to go through and clean it up by ear. I've done the bass, which was relatively simple by comparison. The piano is yet to come - that's where the fun comes in lol!

I was going to start sequencing the bass into LBP today, but even though I usually start from the bass, in this case I may have to start from the piano, as the note durations are much shorter, and so I'll need to do some fanyc maths to see how I'll set up my sequencer first. It may make for an incredibly frustrating and confusing create session, but we'll see how it goes.

I wish MM could respond to one of the get satisfaction posts regarding time signature and tempo, but I'm guessing their lack of response means that it's not possible or not feasible for them to carry out. So I'll just have to cross my fingers and muddle on for the time being.

If I can't get a faithful reproduction of Jessica Rabbit, I may have to settle for our own version, in good ole' 4/4. It won't have the same feel, but if I have no other choice, I'd still like to get this out there.

Wish me luck!