I’m Lake.
dppt-sf_infinitytrain_cracked-reflection.mp3
dppt-sf_infinitytrain_cracked-reflection.flac
dppt-sf_infinitytrain_cracked-reflection.wav
infinitytrain-cracked-reflection.mmpz
You may do anything with these as long as you name the source of the original song and credit me as the creator of the cover version by linking to my website or one of my social media accounts (licence: CC BY 4.0).
Hi, I’m back once again. This time I really actually want to get back to regular uploads. Thank you for continuing to watch even when I don’t upload for months or years!
As you can hear, this is something a little different. I’ve been wanting to expand beyond only 8-bit and only covers for a while. This one actually came to be sort of accidentally. I wanted to just transcribe the song into LMMS to have all the notes and instruments visualised to make it easier to then arrange it into FamiTracker. I love trackers and I find them incredibly comfortable to use, but for planning an arrangement I find it easier to have a fully visual version of all the notes. And I’m not bound by a limited amount of channels. I can transcribe everything I hear (or possibly want to add) to LMMS and then use that as a reference to plan how I want to turn this into a FamiTracker arrangement, and what parts should be in which channel and what parts have to be omitted.
And as I continued transcribing it using the DP “soundfont”, I thought it sounded very interesting and maybe I should not just transcribe the notes but polish it into its own full song. And so I did. I’ve been wanting to make covers with game soundfonts like this for a long time. It was so much fun to do, finding instruments that sounded close enough to be a good representation of the original felt very similar to recreating instruments in FamiTracker. Just like how I use FamiTracker to make faithful 8-bit music, I want to make the game soundfont covers faithful. I don’t know of proper specialised way to do that (althogh I haven’t looked yet), converting the original samples to .sf2 and then just using them in a DAW like LMMS probably doesn’t produce a very faithful result. And this time I’ve taken a creative liberty that I don’t plan on using in other DP covers: I used tons of reverb. Because that’s what the original song is like and that makes it sound much better and more like the original. Playing around with reverb allowed me to make some instruments sound a lot more fitting than they would otherwise be. I’m quite happy with how most things turned out sounding, except for the main chords. I couldn’t find an instrument that sounded satisfactory and I’m not entirely happy with the one I eventually decided was the best. I love how those ascending notes like at 0:20 turned out, though. Although doing the timing of those notes was not easy, I played around with them for a long time and still couldn’t get it to sound exactly like the original. And for that slowly descending sound like at 0:00 I used the sustained crash cymbal (?) sample and made it slowly go down in pitch. The result sounds surprisingly good, I didn’t expect to be able to find something to recreate that sound. What gave me the idea to use the crash cymbal for this was that I found out while analysing the DP Opening Movie that its ending loop also uses that same crash cymbal to make those 3 sounds that to me sound like coal digging in the Oreburgh mines.
I also made more changes to the song than I’ve ever done before. I added a counter melody to the main A D G D F# B and I added 1.5 whole sections. Those sections use a similar saw-like instrument to the aforementioned ascending notes like at 0:20, just a little less sharp (called “off the train” in the project file as can be seen in the video). I think I might have tried both instruments for the ascending notes, decided the sharper one was better and then ended up re-using the other instrument for this additional part. Because I love how these two instruments sound. This additional saw-like melody is meant to represent Lake’s journey through the Train, with its ups and downs, sometimes succeeding in getting closer to defining their own self and destiny but also sometimes feeling hopeless when the world just doesn’t seem to let them.
The secondary instrument playing during the new parts (called “flecs” in the project file as can be seen in the video) is a piano that plays a melody inspired by the motif that plays whenever Mace and Sieve appear and do mirror law enforcement things. It’s meant to represent how the Flecs are a constant threat in Lake’s life, obstacles on their journey through the Train, and the instrument alternating between playing and breaks shows how the Flecs keep coming back, and their echoes stay in Lake’s mind even when they’re temporarily not pursuing Lake.
And then there is the second shorter additional part that ends the main part of the song, with just the “off the train” instrument playing a happy end, and no “flecs” because the Flecs following Lake are gone, Jesse came back for them because he cares about them and sees them as their own unique and equal person, and they got off the train.
For the art I went through my screenshot collection of the second season. I often take screenshots when important, emotional and/or beautiful stuff happens. I thought about what facial expression and pose would best represent Lake, and I thought that this expression of them looking to the side with a mix of mild amused annoyance would be perfect. Maybe even a little bashful and definitely happy. In that original scene the rest of their body is just stiff and straight and boring, so to make them look more dynamic and even more cool I combined that facial expression with a hands-in-pockets pose. Turned away a little, thinking about their new life.
And of course the background is that absolutely beautiful Bob Ross landscape. I again had trouble drawing the clouds and I don’t like how they turned out, but I like the rest. I definitely had a lot of fun drawing this piece and I really like it.
I wasn’t sure how to do the visuals for this DP cover, and soundfont covers or LMMS songs in general. The only “dynamic” thing I could record and show is the LMMS overview, but that’s filling the entire screen with no room for art or animations, unlike the Synthesia-like notes I put over the art in 8-bit videos. I initially decided on just recording LMMS and then putting a sprite of Lake somewhere on it, in a DPPt trainer battle pose and style. I drew that sprite and a round in-battle grass platform for them to stand on, but it looked not that good and the sprite itself and the video idea of just showing LMMS with a random out-of-place sprite somewhere covering things up just didn’t resonate with me at all. I wanted to add a DP-like battle-like background to the sprite, those with just a few blurry coloured stripes like I did in the DP Opening animation. I wanted to use the beautiful Bob Ross landscape from the series as a reference for the colours, but I ended up painting the entire scene instead. And unlike the small sprite I liked this painting. And then I drew the Lake pose on top of it. I planned to make multiple versions of the song, definitely also an 8-Bit cover and possibly something fully hand-played too. So I might need multiple different drawings, and I thought about this Bob Ross landscape + Lake pose, the battle sprite and what other things I could do, and which of them I should use for which version. The DP sprite would obviously fit the DP cover best, but since I don’t like how the sprite turned out but love the painting, and I really want to finally upload this song and upload something again, I decided to use this painting for the DP cover.
But the painting fills the entire screen. I had two screen-filling things, the painting and the LMMS recording. Only having a static image for an entire video might be too boring. But I didn’t know what meaningful and useful things I could put on top of the drawing. So I tried to see if maybe just switching to LMMS for a few short times to give viewers a glimpse of the project file in a very slightly Synthesia-like way would look acceptable and make it more interesting. I did a simple fade over to LMMS twice. It looked alright, I guess. But then I thought about how I could make the transitions more interesting, and I had the idea that it would be interesting and fitting to do a digital glitchy transition that makes it look like the artificial image being projected for the viewer is disappearing because the actual machinery behind it all is malfunctioning and revealing the actual mechanisms behind it, just like how removing the orbs reveals the tech stuff behind the train’s illusions. I probably won’t find a way to integrate temporary transitions to LMMS into other DP covers as nicely, but for this one it ended up fitting really well.
And at the end there’s of course the crucial hand reveal scene. I’ll see you on the train!
Oh yeah, and I’m not sure about how to title this series. Right now it’s called “[Pokémon DP Cover] Cracked Reflection | Infinity Train: Book Two”. The thing in brackets is the problem. I want it to be as short as possible, but also as informative as possible to as many people as possible so they easily understand what this song is. It’s not a song from DP, it’s a song from something else played with DP’s instruments. I guess the word “soundfont” is widely used and easily understandable even by people who don’t know much about music, so I considered stuff like [Pokémon DP Soundfont Cover], but that’s way too long. I could leave out the “Pokémon” and the “Cover” parts I guess, but that might cause more people to not understand what this is. And I want to clearly distinguish covers from potential future originals. Let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions.
PPS: I’ve never interacted with the Infinity Train fandom in any way, but now I’ve seen a little bit for the first time after I posted the video and drawing on Tumblr. As I imagined, there seem to be a lot of people using they/them or he/him for Lake and so on. I initially used she/her for Lake in this post even though I myself have a lot of thoughts about Lake including in the realm of gender, but I didn’t want to assume a part of Lake’s identity and force my own views onto Lake. After all, Lake’s theme is that Lake wants to do Lake’s own thing and not be assigned and told anything by others. Respecting that and only using what Lake lakeself said in the show was important to me. But now that I’ve seen others take the character further than what was depicted in the show I’ve relaxed that mindset a little and thought to myself that while I want to respect Lake which is still very important to me, Lake is a fictional character and I too can continue the version of Lake that’s in my mind into any direction I personally like. So I will personally take Lake into the direction of non-binary and they/them, because I feel like that fits their character’s theme of wanting to be their own person and not being satisfied with predefined binary choices. I feel like this would be something the show and its writers might have done if the show had been done later where this would be more acceptable. So I’ll edit the pronouns I’ve used here to reflect that decision. And of course I’m fine with any other way other people interpret their Lakes.
Lake is just the best, I love them so much. And of course I also love Jesse.
Audio production: LMMS https://lmms.io/
Pixel art: Aseprite https://www.aseprite.org/
Video editing: DaVinvi Resolve https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/
Screen recording, media conversion: FFmpeg https://ffmpeg.org/
Extracting game instrument samples: VGMTrans https://github.com/vgmtrans/vgmtrans/releases
Audio editing: Tenacity https://codeberg.org/tenacityteam/tenacity
Original song: Chrome Canyon – Infinity Train: Book Two – Cracked Reflection