#melodyswaps

[sylvyspritii]

Oh I didn't realise it had to be a question question, sorry!

I do have a question then: you're a music creator right? And you did some work for SiIvaGunner? There's some ideas I have often for doing some instrumentation swapping in music I hear, making one song have the instruments/sound font from another. However, I'm really not experienced at all in music production and it can feel a bit daunting trying to understand it, I'm not sure where to start.

What are some resources you'd recommend to someone trying to start music work like that? Both the editing software itself (is GarageBand still a thing? Does it cost money?) and also how to go through songs and figure out stuff like what instruments they're using to repurpose them?

No worries! I just prefer actual questions over random meme pictures, i have no idea what i can add to those or how i could respond besides "ok" Yes, i'm part of SiIva, but i was more active in the earlier years I'm mostly busy with original compositions for games nowadays If you want to make melody/soundfont/MIDIswaps, the first thing you will need is a DAW, Garageband will work fine (i think?), but i can't say for sure, i use FL Studio myself, so i'll answer with my knowledge based on using FL Studio primarily For the sake of this tutorial, we will focus on games that used sequenced music, which usually means MIDI files and soundbanks/soundfonts (for more advanced non-sequenced/MIDI recreations, you will usually have to recreate songs from scratch, or invest in expensive hardware in the case of Touhou music for example) There is an FL Studio demo available, it's pretty good, but personally i just reccomend obtaining it legally since it's pretty cheap (and if that is not an option, then, well, yarr harr, you know (note to cover my ass from a legal perspective: i am a professional and i do not use pirated software)) Download VGMTrans (and the ROM of the game you wanna fuck around with, legally of course (wink wink)), it's software that can extract MIDI (the notes) and .dls (the instruments) files (you can also extract .sf2 files, which are the more traditional "soundfont" format, but .dls is easier for editing existing songs from games since the MIDI data and the .dls can get imported together to be more accurate, more on that later (basically, export .dls for accuracy, export .sf2 for fucking around if you just want 1 instrument from a game)) Okay, so now you have a DAW (we use FL Studio in this example), the MIDI file, and the .dls file So, now, open FL Studio, drag the MIDI file in a new project, and then it will ask you what you want to import it as (do not use FLEX, use MIDI OUT with LSD) (fuck FLEX all my buddies hate FLEX) Then you will see this thing

Okay so click the little folder icon on the top left, and then select the correct .dls file you exported for that MIDI file with VGMTrans Then, if you did everything correctly, you will hear the MIDI file WITH the correct instruments from the game, and it will sound (mostly) like how the original game sounds From there, you can start, then, you can edit the little bits, change the instruments easily, change the notes, and add funny fleentstones if you want So, tl;dr quick version: 1. Download FL Studio 2. Download VGMTrans 3. Throw ROM file in VGMtrans 4. Export the MIDI and .dls data from a song from the ROM 5. Throw MIDI in FL Studio, choose "MIDI OUT with DLS" 6. Choose .dls soundbank file with the little folder icon 7. The song will now sound like how it is in the game (or at least, close enough), so now you can go crazy and replace instruments and/or melodies and have fun

[yourbirthcertificate]

joining in on this funny fad

[diamondbrickz]

this was gonna be a whole video, then i kinda got busy, then my interest in TOH dropped, so....... idk (originally made 7/20/2021)

[ibbandflow]

I’m sure there are like 6 people who will like this completely random combination of things, but here is The Band Camino x Ace Attorney! Made for my partner’s birthday. 😊

[7grandmel]

Rip of the week: 30/09/2024

Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix)

Season 4 Episode 1 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume AI

Ripped by beardfear

Last week, for my "Character Archives" series, I finally pulled the trigger with the aptly-named [FILE-07] and wrote about the SiIvaGunner channel's mascot: Grand Dad. The funny Flintstones have been there since the literal first day of the channel's life, in a way representing everything that the team has aimed to achieve for the channel during its run. Yet one part I only briefly covered in the aforementioned post was the very fascinating evolution that Grand Dad as a channel meme has undergone over these past eight years. To outsiders to the channel, it may appear as if we've been laughing at the same tired joke for close to a decade - yet as things so often are on SiIvaGunner, the truth is far more densely layered, and arguably even more stupid. And in my eyes, no rip on the channel better encapsulates that ongoing growth than Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix), a time capsule of almost five years by now.

Back in the beginning of Season 1, the appeal of Grand Dad as a meme was incredibly simple to understand: You expect one song from clicking on the video, and are instead met with one of the most globally recognizable melodies in the world. It's not that the Flintstones melody has some sort of inherent comedic value to it, like with The Nutshack and rips like Too big, huh, my nuts are too big how about that, nor is Meet The Flintstones the kind of piece to really evoke fierce emotions the way Snow Halation does in rips like Violet Snow Memories. As the very first joke made for the SiIvaGunner channel, the appeal in Grand Dad lay almost entirely in the novelty of the melodyswap alone. You as a viewer will be aware of The Flintstones theme, and you may even be aware of the Vinesauce bit that inspired the channel - and from that, the surprise of hearing the tune from a video game song you weren't expecting to, most often done with surprising authenticity to the game being ripped, was the extent of the bit.

The problem here, as you might already be able to tell, is that this joke is very reliant on the first impression, the initial surprise of not expecting the funny Flintstones to show up. That kind of surprise is something the team would continue finding new ways to evoke even in these first few months of the channel's life, resulting in a huge amount of all-time classic, inventive Season 1 rips like the great seaweed, Be Cool, Be Wild, and Be My Girl, and of course: Athletic Doctor. Yet as these kinds of new and fun ways to surprise people kept being explored, Grand Dad rips still kept coming - it had become a fun exercise for new rippers to learn, a simple melody to play around with. And even just a few short months in, I distinctly remember the reactions toward these rips beginning to feel more...tepid. Within the team, legendary rippers like Triple-Q had gone vocally against leveraging the joke further: all of which slowly escalated into the meme becoming derided as played out and tired. We'd get phrases like "Funny 7" and "Epic Flintstones" tossed around in an ironic tounge-and-cheek fashion, forever immortalized into the rip of Season 1's finale, Epic Flintstones. It felt as if, across the channel's nine months, Grand Dad had now lived a sufficient life, going from hero to the channel, to a bit of a punching bag, but one we were still left sad to see go.

And then the channel...y'know, continued.

With Season 2, as I've covered on posts like ULTRA S+G, the channel was now taking itself and its lore just a little bit more seriously. Grand Dad was still a little bit of a dated thing, yet with the notion of the channel's fate hanging into balance, he came to be as a sort of symbol for the channel's spirit, an icon to rally behind. By the time Season 3 rolled around, all of these views on the meme had wholly coalesced into outright ironic reverence. Videos like Unusual Circumstances and tons of rips made during the Nostalgia Takeover (see Fragile Snowman (Remastered)) in particular emphasized just how bizarre the fanbase's supposed adoration of Grand Dad and the funny number 7 was - and we the fans nodded, laughed and agreed! We all knew Grand Dad wasn't *genuinely* all too funny anymore, but somewhere in that storm of irony-fueled laughs it felt, at least to me, as if we sort of forgot the importance that Grand Dad was meant to hold on the channel, the ways in which it so beautifully encapsulated everything the channel stands for. And that's when this story takes an interesting turn.

In April of 2019, Season 4 of SiIvaGunner was officially well under way - and all eyes were, of course, on the newly-announced King for Another Day Tournament, covered on posts like Theme of HOBaRT. This month in particular gave us the first-ever real "SiIva Direct", a spoof on Nintendo's series of video announcement reels, only now of course focused on activity on the SiIvaGunner channel. It was as mentioned mainly focused on reveals for the still largely under wraps tournament set to come later in the year, yet amidst all those reveals and the announcements of some albums, one of the headlines stood out amidst the rest: The announcement - a week ahead of its release - of a lone high quality rip. That, of course, being Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix). Now remember, this is still the same channel that releases on average six of these videos a DAY - and all that this announced rip was explained to be was a basic, ancient, old-ass, everyday Grand Dad rip. Surely, we all thought, there was a twist ahead: this rip was going to have a character reveal for KFAD, or this rip was going to be the start of some larger ARG, or contain some sort of crucial lore!! Even as the Direct ended, it stayed in the back of my mind...

And then the day came, April 7th. Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix), as scheduled, lands right into our laps. And, shock and awe: It is quite literally exactly what it was advertised as. Waluigi Pinball, from Mario Kart DS, with the melody swapped to the Flintstones theme. Just the same as it had been as far back as Season 1. The drop of this video wasn't really hyped up more than its announcement, it wasn't as if this was the only video to drop this day, but it still felt like a lot of eyes were on it, yet the reaction wasn't really angry, or even tepid, so much as it was just a fair bit baffled. "I like how we all expected something huge but it's just a normal decent rip", writes one commenter: "I knew that there wasnt gonna be any special joke", writes another: Largely, though, people were of course dropping in a lot of ironic excitement for the rip, feeding off of the reputation Grand Dad had gotten. It was like Season 1 had never left! Or, well...

...the thing is, when you listen to Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix), when you give it a genuine listen, you realize just how far the channel has come since Season 1. Sure, its grown in more extravagant, ambitious ways as well, but in Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix), all SiIvaGunner viewers got to oh-so-subtly notice just how much better the team had gotten at ripping even the simplest of concepts in the few years since the channel's inception. A good number of early Season 1 like the original release of Violet Snow Memories were once taken down from the channel due to their off-key sound, and even the ones that stayed are often noticeably rough in sound, sufficient in getting the joke across yet failing to really stand up to any scrutiny. We'd seen rips get bigger and bolder, projects growing to the scope of projects such as The 2:28 Collab and SNES Mini Circulation - yet in a way, it was as if we were missing the trees that built this forest. In Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix), the melody swap plays along to a melody so erratic in tempo, with such strange instrumentation, to where you just KNOW right off the bat that a less experienced and less knowledgeable ripper would have made this sound completely off-kilter back in the days of Season 1. Yet the ripper behind Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix), beardfear, only got his start on the channel just a few months prior toward the end of Season 3, doing simple melody swaps much in the same vein as the ones Grand Dad had inspired hundreds others to do back in the channel's humble beginnings. The spirit of Grand Dad, even though all the mockery and irony surrounding it, was still continuing to inspire new rippers on the channel. It still so concisely and effectively represents everything that SiIvaGunner as a channel and as a team aims to achieve - and I feel like with Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix), tongue-in-cheek as it were, we got a gentle reminder of just how much this ancient meme really means to all of us. From my perspective, seeing this unfold, this was the first point at which we began to start actually...like Grand Dad again?

It wasn't as if we automatically began finding the meme as funny as it had been in Season 1 or anything, nor did all of that lighthearted irony-posting really ever cease. Yet in the years since, in Season 5 and 6, it felt as if we'd all come to understand just how important Grand Dad as a figure is to the channel. By the time Season 7 was declared to be an entire YEAR dedicated to the guy, all hints of the irony that used to dominate discussion in the comments on Grand Dad rips felt as if it had completely disappeared. So many years had passed, not just since Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix), but since the days when the meme had even started becoming derided to begin with, to where it just felt normal to present and view Grand Dad as a figure worth celebrating on the channel. He's the one who started it all! He's the most clear-cut embodiment of what the channel represents! But more than that, I feel as if by Season 7, we had all begun to realize just how far the channel had come, just how many years it had now been trucking along for - and just how impressive it was that it could all still be traced back to that one little melody.

The very next year after Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix) released, at the SiIvaGunner team's 2020 MAGFest appearance, they held a special panel detailing how to get started in high quality ripping. Named High Quality Ripping LIVE!, it was a setup that let fans in the audience request simple rips for members of the team - live on stage - try to create as fast as possible. It was through first seeing this event that everything just sort of clicked together for me, in realizing how important Grand Dad as a figure still is for rippers in particular. I imagine it can be easy to feel lost in the excitement of rippers contributing these out of this world projects to the channel, yet as we learned back on Welcome to 2021! They finally invented summers that hurt motherfuckers😂 only at sonicforces​.​com - the main point of ripping, in truth, is to just let the imagination run wild and to have fun with what you're doing. That fun, be it ambitious or silly, all has to begin somewhere: and for rippers all across the team, rippers from Season 1 all the way to Season 8, those first steps taken into the hobby begins with FL Studio, a video game track of their own choosing, and the vision to recreate that iconic sequence of 15 notes.

[melblur]

Todays rip: 06/06/2023

Catching Wild Animals, Trapping them with Strawberries

Featured on: Haltmann's Highest Quality Video Game Rips Ripped by Sonicheroesfan1

I've touched on before just how interesting the individualism of SiIvaGunner contributing is to the identity of the channel as a whole, and I don't think there's a better example of that than Maroon 5's neverending presence on the channel since its start. When channel creator Chaze the Chat opened the channel, its concept was always pretty clear: Video game music, remixed in unexpected ways, uploaded as innocuous music rips. But see, Chaze wasn't just a fan of video game music - he also had a very distinct love for Maroon 5, and their previous work as Kara's Flowers. Through that love, many of Chaze's own rips would begin featuring Maroon 5 / Kara's Flowers songs more and more, often sampling Adam Levine's vocals or using their tracks as a basis for melodyswaps. The apex of this expression of individualism can be seen with Adam Levine's appearance in Season 4's King for Another Day tournament: When the tournaments other contestants were chosen due to popular fan vote or for their potential as a funny character, Adam Levine was specifically added in as an executive decision by Chaze.

Simply put: During his years in charge of the channel, Chaze had a special interest and was extremely open about it, and it eventually became part of the channel's legacy.

The result of that is Maroon GO: A series of recurring rips from a made-up game, effectively serving as an excuse to make Maroon 5 jokes without needing to tie them to any specific game. Todays rip is by the ever-talented Sonicheroesfan1 and is a perfect example of the extent these rips go to, mashing up Animals by Maroon 5 with J-rock music from Love Live, another core part of the channel's legacy. An inevitable mix of sources blending in a way that feels extremely true to the channel's own brand - not catered to any popular trends, but specifically to what the channel itself wants and likes.

Though these rips never get many views, I'm always there to watch them day-of specifically due to that limited appeal.

[knightofgames]

i made the melodyswap section of down to the configuratione (remastered) in FL studio, using Genny. in the original it was just done directly in vegas, but i actually did it properly & accurately for the remaster. it's drumless because i knew the drums would be sampled from to the bone directly in vegas

[thatweirdlynxdude]

J-Pop from Tomodachi Collection but it's actually J-Pop this time - Tomodachi Collection by Skiff An arrangement of If You Wanna Dance Tonight by Toshiki Kadomatsu using Tomodachi Collection instruments. No MIDI was used for reference.

[asmajaeger97]

https://soundcloud.com/cosmic199x/a-shitty-off-key-sparta-melodyswap

[internetsampler]

https://soundcloud.com/akfamilyhome2/puzzle-melodyswap

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 19/04/2024

i love(d) you

Season 6 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume FF Also on: Now That's What I Call Quality! 3

Ripped by vvsvlogs

Requested by oetaboy and an anonymous reader! @oetaboy (Ask Box)

I'm sure this rip's been a long time coming for many - I know it has for me. I've had i love(d) you sitting in my drafts as far back as in March, but truthfully it's...daunting, to write about. Requested by two readers. Close to 200 thousand views on YouTube, and recently featured prominently in popular Clone Hero YouTuber Acai's "The Quality of SiIvaGunner" series. And the rip itself being an emotional gutpunch in a season filled with them, from a ripper who's already gutpunched me plenty with Wham! Into Dreams and The Paragoomba and the Wiggler. vvsvlogs, Vivi, I ask this with the most sincere gratitude possible - why must you do this to me?

Minecraft as a game has its emotional hooks in at least two generations of people - that much I think we're all aware of. A sandbox filled with endless possibilities, community, friends, individual stories of survival or of great creative endeavors, all wrapped in C418's hauntingly beautiful score, one I've discussed many times before with Fell From a High Place (Reprise), M-O-O-G City and Every Mob Wants To Rule My World. All of these rips are beautiful, yet they're all aiming to play with Minecraft's sound in some way - the former two rips are arrangement of its music with other games' instrumentation, and the latter rip is a melodyswap playing Everybody Wants To Rule The World. They all play on my senses in their own ways, they're all rightfully impressive - but nothing hits quite the same as Minecraft's own music, on its own terms. i love(d) you isn't aiming to impress or amaze - but it lands a full-on critical hit on one's heart through leveraging everything that's kept Subwoofer Lullaby alive for so many years.

I've talked plenty about my musical illiteracy, and so I hope it doesn't come as a surprise that I've never really listened to world-renowed singer Billie Eilish. She's been on the radio, I've heard Bad Guy, but it was never a name I gave much more thought beyond seeing her discussed online from time to time. You can imagine the absolute awe I was in when I clicked on i love(d) you when it first went up, already expecting an emotional hit due to the Minecraft song used, only to get goosebumps from Eilish's vocals alone. i love you is the penultimate song from Eilish's debut studio album, the very same that Bad Guy was featured on - yet compared to that track's bass-heavy, almost seductive energy, i love you feels remarkably personal, with little more than an acoustic guitar and piano accompanying the openly emotional vocal performance. It's sincere in a way I don't hear enough music be, as if a diary translated into song, much the same emotion that Because I Love You conveyed yet with even greater magnitude due to the vocals in play.

i love(d) you, uploaded for 2022's valentines day, wields both of these forms of love - the connections many of us have to one of the most impactful games ever made, and the unfiltered emotion of i love you - to create something unabashedly beautiful. Mashups aren't a novel concept, mashups are nothing new - yet one glance at the comments tells me that I'm not alone in finding this rip in particular to have struck an incredibly sensitive nerve. Because there's a beauty to Minecraft that I think many of us oft forget about. It's a game that we all cherish, yet also one that's very easy to have left behind: we have adult responsibilities, we have school, we have other, shorter, more concise games, we have social media, we have friends, we have blogs...the solemn beauty of playing the game itself is, for many viewers like myself, not much more than a memory, something that can feel ever so difficult to recreate without feeling as if something's wrong.

We...I'm...not a kid anymore.

There was nothing about i love(d) you's concept that necessitated it to be more than just the mashup. There rip had no need for visuals that'd help convey the edit like with Plantasia 2 or Luna, mi Amor, no need to tickle the funnybone like with SUNGORE or the hundreds of other YTPMV rips on the channel. Yet, halfway through the rip, to the tune of Eilish's soothingly reverberating vocals, the background begins to change, not to a bit, not to a reference nor easter egg...but to Minecraft. To where all of this attachment began - to a far-off view of the game's beautiful landscapes as the sun begins to rises. That digital world that looks different for every player, yet the same in everyone's hearts - that place that, no matter how many years pass, how long its been since we last played, we all love. Its impact different to everyone, yet the feeling unanimous. It drives home how well the mashup works not just as a mixture of two deeply emotional songs, but as music tied to a shared experience: all of our Minecraft worlds looked different, all of our personal lives look different, but we've all played the game, and we've all had affection for it.

Every moment I spend thinking about this rip aches in some way. It's been well past two years since it was first uploaded, yet it continues to follow me as the years go on, my mouse drawn to it any time it reappears in my recommendations. In being featured on 2024's Now That's What I Call Quality! 3, I think the team holds much the same sentiment - even as the months pass, i love(d) you is the kind of rip that'll never fall out of favor, never stop meaning things to people. And realizing that it was made by vvsvlogs, the very same vvsvlogs who's already made me far too emotionally vulnerable on here twice before, has only made it mean that extra bit more to me.

I'm not a kid anymore. I know that. But I'll always be grateful to SiIvaGunner, the people behind it, and those who follow it along with me, for being able to bring me back to that state of mind when I least expect it.

Thank you.

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 11/04/2024

I will Never be a Redneck

Season 7 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume Sapphire

Ripped by Madinstance

Requested by Corb and uwustepanne! (Discord, Request Form) (@uwustepanne)

"I'm just kidding, this isn't a blue balls rip. However, you're going to wish it was. I warned you."

Can you IMAGINE being 601billionlazer and getting this rip for Secret SiIva 5?? You hear the silly blue balls and go oh, haha what fun, what a great little bit Madinstance, you always outdo yourself so its fun to see you've taken a funny step back here - only for the truth to be revealed and all hell to break loose? You hear the backing change and think, I swear I recognize that, there's no way he actually did it - the banjo comes in with a gleefully sinister pluck and reaffirms your suspicions. Madinstance fucking did it. The first proper rip uploaded as part of Season 7 introduced the year with a fucking bomb. I will Never be a Redneck.

And look, I've covered some One-Winged Angel rips on here already, One Winged PSYcho - V​.​S. Sepsyrop and Hen'yoku no Piraman - the latter even being made by Madinstance as well - but I feel like it needs to be stressed how thoroughly deranged this rip in particular is. We ALL know Cotton-Eye Joe, if not the original American country song then ABSOLUTELY the world-famous 1994 Eurodance version - one that, funny enough, was recorded by a Swedish band. Indeeds, its oddly befitting: A culture clash between my homeland, and the nation where a majority of SiIvaGunner's own audience and contributors live - the result is that ALL of us knew well what Cotton-Eye Joe was, a piece of our childhoods for some, or at least for me. Yet its prevalence on SiIvaGunner had been comparatively tame in comparison to that popularity, only appearing in some modest mashups and melodyswaps in Season 1 - seven whole years before Madinstance deployed the nuclear option. Realizing that this overplayed icon of a song even had the ability to be remixed in such a fashion positively blew my mind - I won't sugarcoat it, I will Never be a Redneck completely floored me.

And like, in some ways its to be expected, right? Madinstance is incredible, he continues to show up on here with rips like Initial Deluxe (I've Just Raced on this Course Before) and Fell From a High Place (Reprise) for a reason - his prowess for these large-scale projects feels like it shouldn't even be humanly possible. I remarked back in Hen'yoku no Piraman just how much the recent trend of One Winged Angel rips impresses me, how each one feels as if the ripper is truly showcasing their worth whilst dedicating it all to the glory of a single meme. That still stands, yes, but to apply it to a song that otherwise had near-no prevalence on SiIvaGunner, no standard set for how remixing it ought to go: To have my FIRST ever time hearing Cotton-Eye Joe pitch shifted be in this absolute behemoth feels downright criminal. And its even crazier how it WORKS the whole way through.

The amount of touches present to make this feel as cohesive as it does is staggering. The chorus' titular line of "Cotton-Eye Joe" replaces the use of "Sephiroth!" in the base track perfectly, the original song's violin instrumental breaks between the chorus and verses are pitch shifted into the ominous tone of One Winged Angel's equivalent instrumental breaks, the banjo going off the shits in the longer break from the main melody midway through the track...really, its incredible how much of the original track's excitement and danceable fun suddenly sound so ominous, with changes so deliberate, substantial yet conservative enough to not lose the Cotton-Eye Joe feel - this ALWAYS sounds like the right amount of both tracks in balance. I love how the song's chanting "Hey-hey-hey-heyys" suddenly sound akin to One Winged Angel's latin choir song, how the vocals of the chorus repeat in a somewhat staggered, haunting way near the rip's end - like Beautiful Dreamer or My Dr. Eggman Can't Be This Evil!, its remarkable just how drastic the change of tone becomes through rips like this.

Most of all though, it is that gradual realization of what you're listening to that has made I will Never be a Redneck such a classic for me - NOBODY could've anticipated it based on the channel's past history, and nobody would've expected THIS would be the way that Season 7 would officially "start". Yet its the kind of rip you can send to anyone - both songs are immediately recognizable, and the effort put in to making the two work in tandem is unmistakably impressive. uwustepanne, who wrote in to request this be covered, included a short anecdote with her write-in, about how this rip showing up in her YouTube feed was what made her realize the channel hadn't ended with Season 6's finale, that I will Never be a Redneck in a way represents everything she loves about the channel, the impact its had on her. And yeah - isn't it crazy how a rip as cracked as this one, still wound up facing incredibly stiff competition for rip of the Season?? 2023 was one of SiIvaGunner's greatest-ever years, and seeing a rip like I will Never be a Redneck uploaded at its very start felt almost like they'd set the bar far too high for the rest of the team. Yet somehow, someway, everyone else was up to the challenge and continued making absolutely incredible rips throughout the entire year. Madinstance continues to raise the bar of quality on the channel at almost every turn, and having him do it at the Season's very start - with a rip as out-of-this-world as I will Never be a Redneck to boot - remains as an absolute power move.

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 13/04/2024

Locked In The Underground

Season 4 Episode 2 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume C

Ripped by Jamangar

Whaaat? More Undertale?? Say it ain't so!!

Look, I lamented it a bit over on Logan Paul's Shop, and its something you can even see for yourself by viewing the Undertale tag on the blog archive. In terms of games to have been featured on the blog one way or another, Undertale/Deltarune are leagues ahead of the competition. And I am torn on this, still. Like on the one hand, I want the blog to cast a wide net of rips, to not just cover my personal favorites, but to cover as much of SiIvaGunner's history and growth. But on the other hand...Undertale IS a huge part of that history and growth, it has been since the very beginning, and as I discussed in Your Best Nightmario and Shiny Smily TALE the game's very DNA and themes is just a perfect fit for everything that SiIvaGunner stands for. Well, there's that - and there's how rippers like Jamangar just keep absolutely outdoing themselves with how much leverage they can get from this 9-year old game's soundscape. Its rips like Locked In The Underground that remind me of WHY Undertale rips are so prevalent on here.

If you've been reading for a while or just kept up with SiIvaGunner in general to the degree I have (or are from the team!! hi team!!), you may well recognize Jamangar's name. Much like ShonicTH with Trial of the Heart and many others on the channel, Jamangar has carved out her own very specific niche in terms of what she contributes with. That niche is the same one you'll hear in World Out There and Story of Undertale: There are few SiIvaGunner contributors who have as much expertise in ripping Undertale as Jamangar. Yet all of these three rips feel quite different from one another - Story of Undertale is a magnificent journey throughout just about the entire Undertale campaign with instruments changing along the way, wheras World Out There was an incredibly resonant mashup/melodyswap, a full-on shot of nostalgia on all the senses. Indeed, Locked In The Underground follows their footsteps in quality, yet is excellent in a subtly different way - its just a flat-out banger.

I don't know what it is about Bruno Mars' music that makes it work so incredibly well in mashups. Perhaps I have BotanicSage to thank, with Pokemon GSC Is What I Like and 16BIT Magic both permanently etched into my soul ever since I first heard them - but Locked In The Underground takes on the very same challenge, and in my eyes passes with absolutely flying colors. I mean, it only takes a few seconds for the rip to sell you - as soon as you hear Mars' "oh-yeah-yeahs" followed by Undertale SFX playing to the beat, you KNOW Jamangar's made far more than a mere mashup here. It helps, of course, that CORE is already one of the most stand-out songs in the game, much like Colress' battle theme was to Pokémon Black & White's soundtrack in Light! (Potentialseeker Colress) - its hard NOT to get excited seeing a CORE rip knowing just how distinct of a sound any take on the track will have, due to the pure quality of the track underneath.

So much is done to have Locked In The Underground truly fit together. The melodyswap is fantastic on its own, having CORE's lead instrument play in tune with Mars' vocals yet rising high in volume to the song's chorus, and CORE's synthetic backing paired with the drums of Locked Out Of Heaven create such a unique soundscape to boot. But beyond that, there are tons of little flourishes - small segments where CORE's original melody peeks through in the backing, Undertale sound effects sprinkled in to censor expletives or punctuate key moments of the song...like Semi-Charmed All Star, you get the impression that Jamangar GETS both of the songs used, that she's "studied" how Locked Out Of Heaven works in order to have the mashup work so perfectly.

Really - Locked In The Underground is the kind of rip that just feels like a shoe-in for the blog, as one of the most popular rips made during 2020. Funny enough, beyond the obvious combination of Locked Out Of Heaven and Undertale, you could even read the rip's title itself to be referencing the feeling all of us had during the pandemic - sort of reframing its pleas and shouts, in a way. But then Locked In The Underground also isn't the kind of rip where I'm desperate to know more about its possible lore and inner workings: I know Bruno Mars, I know Undertale, I know Jamangar, and she made one of the season's cleanest bangers by doing what she does best. That's awesome.

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 29/03/2024

Luna, mi Amor

Season 8 No Album Release (Read More) K.K. Moody (Cherry Mix) - Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Ripped by Astor, BrahaMan Visuals by Café con leche, Elsix64

You've probably noticed if you've been reading day-by-day just how comparatively high the frequency of Season 8 rips has been already, at slightly more than one covered per week on average. That's of course because Season 8 has far more catching up to do in terms of coverage here on the blog - perhaps to be expected, given that it has only been running for about a month wheras the blog itself is now pushing past 10 months of activity. But to be clear - I'm not going to have my intentions of covering Season 8 rips at a higher rate cloud my judgement on what rips end up on here. I'll write when there's something to write about, as there was with Satin PantE's, Willievan Afton Polkka, and indeed today's rip - Luna, mi Amor.

Readers who keep up what I do on this blog besides these posts may have already been made aware of this rip's existence by this reblog of its key artwork, with Animal Crossing villager Cherry holding a bouquet of maroon pansies. It's entirely reasonable that the reference is lost on you, as it was for me - yet the presence of such visuals in the rip, paired with the beauty of the rip's audio, invigorated me to dig deeper. What I found was yet one more reminder of one of the things I've hammered home on this blog as one of SiIvaGunner's most defining aspects, not only recently with Poké Village but at pretty regular intervals in posts like As Miku Collides. What I found was one of the most beautiful displays of the SiIvaGunner channel's ability to be a melting pot of all different walks of life, and in this case, even extending to different parts of the world.

Much like the joke of the rip itself, initially the people who created it stood as a big question-mark for me. Its not that any of them are inexperienced rippers and/or artists - far from it - but their activity has largely been on SiIvaGunner fan channels as covered in V​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​a​-​V​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​v​-​r. This includes Vvvvvavvvvvvr itself and TimmyTurnersGrandDad, but more notably - channels you may not have heard of, like SiIvaLatin and GiIvaLatinSunner. As you can perhaps tell by their names, these are channels defined not solely by their independent nature, but specifically by the culture and memes prevalent in Latin America. And sure, we've had some funny Brazil-related postings on SiIva, but its predominantly stuff like Os Barões da Pisadinha - a meme that despite its origins has received somewhat mainstream attention outside of the Latin American regions, making rips like Rainbow Baroad understandable and funny even to outsiders like myself. Barões are great, don't get me wrong, but Luna, mi Amor feels like a far more personal, genuine, and heartfelt act of culture exchange. A way to give us SiIvaGunner viewers, who are out of the loop with the beauty of regions like South America, a peek into just what we're missing.

The joke of the rip, and by proxy the reference the artwork is hinting at, is to Mexico/Chilean musician and overall acclaimed artist Mon Laferte, and the single Amor Completo from her 2015 album Mon Laferte, Vol. 1. Luna, mi Amor is a melodyswap to this song - specifically having it be sung with the in-game vocalizations of the character featured in the artwork herself, Cherry - and the rip was so well done, that I felt a need to go listen to the original song. It's enchantingly beautiful and uplifting, yet at once a little bittersweet - the feelings of love, passion and true romance are completely understandable even past the language barrier. In that sense, I suppose Luna, mi Amor takes things yet one step further, beyond even what a rip like Moves Like K.K. did with Animal Crossing music as a source, in replacing those vocals to the explicitly unintelligible vocalizations of the Animal Crossing cast. The emotions in the rip can no longer be conveyed through vocalized words with meaning - no matter where in the world you live, Luna, mi Amor's beauty has to shine through in its music alone.

And, if it wasn't immensely evident by this point, I do believe it succeeds at that effort in spades. The gentle, nostalgic strumming of K.K. Slider's guitar works to excellent effect, but there's something just so endearing about hearing the sounds Animal Crossing vocals - which many of us likely associate with peppier songs like Bubblegum K.K. - attached to a piece with such passionate meaning ascribed to it. It's a fantastic rip on every front, but most importantly, it stands out in such a meaningful way. Amidst all the great stuff we've gotten in Season 8 thus far, be it bangers, reoccurring jokes, fun events or nostalgic reminiscing, I wouldn't necessarily say that Luna, mi Amor is my favorite - but it is perhaps the rip I've spent the longest thinking about, and by proxy the one that'll likely stay with me until the end of the year and beyond. The invitation to listen in to this small little nugget of culture from the other side of the world was one I was not expecting, but one I'm now very grateful to have received.

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 14/03/2024

My Dr. Eggman Can't Be This Evil!

Season 1 Featured on: 7 Somari Dad Also on: Your Onii​-​Chan's Favorite Rips!

Ripped by Smoky

Look: It's a point I've made before and a point I won't needlessly harp on about, so let's get it out of the way: Season 1 of SiIvaGunner was, as most firsts tend to be, far simpler than what we'd get just a year or two later and beyond. But it was before SiIvaGunner came to be known for its lovingly crafted and detailed mashups like Hella Pummel, before the ludicrously in-depth projects like my rip :), before we'd start getting delicately authentic melodyswaps like Outertale of much of any original covers or compositions like Trial of the Heart. Back when the very idea of disguising video game music edits as normal, unedited music rips, was still something really novel. The novelty of the channel paired, with a lack of basically any set-in-stone recurring jokes other than Grand Dad, resulted in some true classics like Pikmin Park, Live and Ooooooooooooooh, Dr. Soulja - and, of course, My Dr. Eggman Can't Be This Evil!.

Now, let's start with a bit of a disclaimer - there's obviously a whole bunch of baggage to unpack with the humor surrounding the Your Onii​-​Chan's Favorite Rips! album in general. 2016 was the absolute plateau of edgy YouTube humor being in the mainstream, right before LeafyIsHere, iDubbbz, Keemstar, Filthy Frank and all the others sort of petered out from YouTube's stricter moderation. It was, in no uncertain terms, the time where making fun of how weird anime could be was at its most trendy. The joke in My Dr. Eggman Can't Be This Evil!, and the joke of almost all the rips featured in Your Onii​-​Chan's Favorite Rips!, is to reference the anime franchise Oreimo, one that's effectively built entirely around the theme of being attracted to your younger sister. Despite its incestuous contents, the series sports a poppy, happy-go-lucky, bubbly aesthetic - hence, prime material to make jokes about how bizarre it is for Japan to effectively glorify such taboo relationships. Now, this is far from the only risque topic that early SiIvaGunner chose to tackle, and even back then there were topics such as described in Stickerbrush State of Mind that were still seen as going "too far" - but many of those have faded away as distant memories overtime, rips which failed to gain much of any traction, only really remembered as an edgier footnote in the channel's legacy.

So then...what makes My Dr. Eggman Can't Be This Evil! any different, worth highlighting here today?

Put simply, I don't believe its million-plus views come purely from Oreimo fans, or from people deep in the trenches who find references to weird anime to be inherently funny. I believe the views are there because of a far simpler, far more effective joke in play: the contrast between a song as bubbly as Oreimo's opening theme irony, and the vocals of E.G.G.M.A.N. and the character its attached to, is simply very funny. The original E.G.G.M.A.N. is sort of an industrial rock "anthem", where the titular doctor celebrates and glorifies his own destructive goals in a theatrical, self-aggrandizing, yet still aggressive way - an aggression that feels as if it disappears entirely without the track's original instrumentation. An aggression that, with the instrumentation replaced with the sugary sweetness of irony, turns into something purely theatrical, like a performance from a School Idol, a performance from the heart - which, given who Dr. Eggman is as a character, is obviously a very funny mental image. Pikmin Park was listed as one of the classic Season 1 rips above for good reason - it, too, plays on this same sort of contrast in songs used for a mental image that's simply too good not to get a chuckle out of.

Thing is, while Stickerbrush State of Mind was fondly remembered for just how much of a genuine banger it was, while Pikmin Park is considered a classic due purely to how well its joke works, I believe My Dr. Eggman Can't Be This Evil! succeeds above both of them due to mastering both sides of the coin. It's already very funny as a concept due to the contrast in songs used, yet a similar BPM and excellent mashup work by Smoky makes the rip an incredibly fun rip to just listen to as a good piece of music, vocals and instrumentation working in harmony far better than they probably should. It is, in that sense, a shining example of SiIvaGunner's biggest strength, the ability to make its viewers smile both from its jokes and from the surprise of hearing good music. It's the perfect harmonization of two jokes, preserving the strengths of E.G.G.M.A.N's vocals whilst using every piece of irony possible to highlight this new cutesy feel - a deceptively simple joke executed perfectly, transcending the dicey origins of its conception and becoming far funnier in a completely different way.

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 29/04/2024

slider dank version

Season 8 Featured on: The Joke-Explainer 7000™'s Highest Quality Rips: Sunrise

Ripped by Mitchell

So, it's been more than a week since it happened: the glorious 4/20 event of SiIvaGunner Season 8. Are we all in agreement that it was fucking amazing?

Look, I love the olden internet days and all what Unregistered Hypercam 2 brought as much as anyone else, those anthems of YouTube's earliest beginnings as heard in rips like Unregistered CyberSpace 4-5: Arrow of 2009 are well worth remembering - but the truth is, that I was just a bit too young to get to experience it all in a way that I can tangibly recall. My age was still in the single digits during the Dreamscape's reign - but in contrast, I remember every little bit of how MLG and Montage Parodies rose in popularity, and how they eventually fell out of style. And like I said back in we are number one but with outdated memes over it, it was as if they died out right as SiIvaGunner itself was taking off, like the torch was being passed from one to the other. All these years later, I presume even the SiIvaGunner team themselves were getting nostalgic for the sheer chaos of it all - and so, the age of MLG was celebrated for a day straight on the 20th of April, 2024.

It was a fantastic day across the board, and it was really hard to pick just one rip from it to feature on here. It featured everything from the typical Snoop Dogg rips a la Ganja Man 9: Hash Blunt Hash (Shorty's Stage), to genuinely excellent melodyswaps using songs featured in MLG parodies, to rips not even prominently featuring music, spoofing MLG edits more directly in a genuinely super nostalgic way. In the end, I had to go with slider dank version, just for it being the most whollistic rip choice possible - a cacophany of noise using all corners of MLG, and in said noisiness perfectly encapsulating the ""appeal"" montage parodies had back during their prime. That, and just like with slideless, I feel like there's just something special about Slider rips in particular - they've been around for so long, posted with both such frequency and such enduring quality, that a meme getting Slider'd feels as if its being inaugurated into the SiIvaGunner Hall of Fame. Seeing my beloved MLG get that very same treatment felt like a prophecy come true, a story in the making since the very beginning of SiIvaGunner, realized at last.

But, okay - what exactly IS slider dank version? It was maybe a bit wrong of me to describe it as just noise, because it does have a throughline carrying its melody from start to finish - Smoke Weed Everyday, that is. This isn't a meme medley that changes sources with every half measure of the song a la Memey Hell - rather, other MLG-related sources instead play like accents onto the base melody, little flourishes that make the rip feel more complete. The rip would've been a great listen with JUST the main melody edits, the pitchshifting on Snoop's vocals are fantastic as-is, but each little flourish just adds more than the last. I think a big reason why it works so well is because of how Slider as a track is composed of a lot of call-and-response segments: The melody plays one segment of four or five notes in a steady rhythm followed by a pause, and within said pause the music leaves just enough room for a different melody cue to "respond" to the lead melody. My favorite example of how that's used in slider dank version in particular has to be the airhorns at 0:25 - Snoop's pitch-shifted vocals are met with the infamous airhorn sample which is ALSO pitch-shifted into the aforementioned response melody, and the two sources keep playing off one another for the rest of the segment.

All your other, uh, "MLG Favorites" are here and accounted for as well, I love the hitmarker sounds as the melody starts up at the very beginning, and how the responses before the airhorn segment are just small audio clips like "NICE MEME", "Mom get the camera" and more - it lets the rip add in just about every part of MLG possible incredibly seamlessly. Perhaps most seamlessly is when Slider's melody changes midway through to a slightly less upbeat segment, as it does in the original track, only here being paired with Enya's Only Time - a song you may not recognize by name, but one that was used CONSTANTLY for shitposts about characters dying in MLG compilations, the theme song of all "RIP in Pepperonis" and "liek if u cri evrytim :(" comments all over the internet. And hey, Semi-Charmed All Star - All Star itself even makes it into the rip, taking over Snoop's lead melody duty toward the end of the rip before it loops, along with everyone's favorite Darude Sandstorm. The list goes on - you're surely getting how much fun of a listen this rip is by this point, right?

And like, I know MLG stuff isn't for everyone - there's a reason it all died out, and I'm sure many viewed this event as to be taken purely ironically. But shit, I dunno, sometimes loud DOES equal funny - and though my perspective may be tinted by nostalgia, Montage Parodies are undeniably a part of internet history, a brief but nonetheless HUGE part of online culture, and one that we need to acknowledge happened no matter its obnoxiousness. They weren't all funny, sure - but rips like slider dank version don't feel like they're made to remind us of how terrible things were, but rather how much fun they all COULD be when done right. Not that SiIvaGunner is spearheading an MLG revival per se - but the entire event gave me a ton of nostalgia for something I only recently realized that I was missing. Nice meme indeed, Mitchell - and I suppose that with THIS. IS. SOLEANNA., we've now come full circle on your rips, in paying tribute to all corners of the internet's shitposting history.