kyari.net - Final Fantasy Remastered
 
Welcome Friday, January 25, 2008  Well, after owning this site space for about four years, I have finally managed to come up with an idea for using the site space - it is about time, I figure. To start, a little bit about me. My name is Daniel. I kind of like the name Kyari, though - I did not even know that it had any connection to the Dutch till months after I decided on that as an online persona. In any case, I am a musician. Currently, I am studying in my first year of University, in a Bachelor of Music program with a major in Clarinet. I have always been interested in the music of video games, particularly that of Nobuo Uematsu. I realize that people are saying advances have been made in the styles and abilities of video game composers since his prime; however, my affinity for his music is not one I retain in ignorance but rather as a matter of personal preference. I could explain what it is I enjoy about his music, and I promise there is much that as a studying musician I could go on about, but I think the testimony of his fans is enough; I am not the only one who senses a certain uniqueness to his music, and certainly will not be the last, as it is rife with that sort of eternal quality that has been attributed to similar groundbreaking musicians in other genres and generations. When I was about 10 years old, at around the time the North American release of Final Fantasy VI had been out for a bit, my growing infatuation for the works of Uematsu reached the point where I actually started to record his music on a clunky old tape recorder we had kicking around the house. This was a new thing at the time - the idea that video game music could be listened to out of context and still be enjoyed. And, enjoy it I did. I would play his songs over and over again, sometimes pretending I was conducting the music (I was a bit of an oddball). This escalated until I decided to use the internet (new to us backwoods dial-up users) to find better quality recordings. Being young and not knowing the difference between an MP3 and a MIDI file, I went on my hunt, downloaded zip files crammed full of .mid files, and was disappointed at the results - essentially, the stuff I found sounded like crap. It was not always the fault of the scribe, since the MIDI instruments that came with Windows 95 were terrible to begin with. But often, there would be careless mistakes in the MIDIs, or just examples of poor musicianship, and after finding a copy of Finale 97 online, I for the first time began to repair, re-score, and even arrange from scratch, tunes from the Final Fantasy games, for my own personal enjoyment. As the years went by, the internet became faster, MP3s became mainstream, and people even invented .psf and .spc readers so that we could hear these songs as they originally sounded - in far better quality than my old tape recorder, I might add. But though music recorded in such a way holds a heavy nostalgic quality to it, and I enjoy listening to it very much, I have always wanted to hear those original songs using the far superior synthesizers of today - the pieces being presented as they originally were scored, but with better sounding instruments and a better quality of mixing. Well, 12 years later, here I am studying music as a result of those years of music-making. I still own a copy of Finale (2007), and now with Garriton Personal Orchestra and the Kontakt 2 synthesizers at my command, I plan to release my remastered versions of some of these old songs as a podcast, hopefully at a rate of once a week (I shall try my best to commit to this schedule). The songs will be unfinished, as I am not yet sure how to fade out with Finale :) . The reader will note that I am not a graphic artist, or a designer, by any stretch of the imagination. This will perhaps be more apparent to iWeb users than anyone else. I do not expect to come up with a clever layout for this site on my own, and as of now it is in its infant stages. Any skill I have is with music and writing, so if anyone has any suggestions for a layout plan, I am most welcome to them. Another note - I realize I am not yet proficient at using Finale and the GPO to their fullest extent. I hope to improve over time; I am somewhat of a perfectionist when it comes to music, and realize that my earlier stuff will not be as good as it could be. For this reason, among others, I will be releasing my finished .mus files for download, if anyone would like to take a look. - Daniel &
 
?