About a month ago, I used the pic18F and the SF Music Instrument Shield to play some songs from Ocarina of Time. A friend requested Saria’s song quickly after I had posted. I accepted the challenge.


Nearly 1200 lines of code later, I bring you the Lost Woods song:



A little bit about the process:

I typically transcribe the songs from Zelda Reorchestrated aka “ZREO.” Check them out! They do a fantastic job. They’re also about to release their re-orchestration of music from “Twilight Princess.”

I write the transcriptions onto some pieces of manuscript paper and make judgements on coding as I review the sheets. I cut out instruments and/or phrases that might make coding extremely complex but I try to keep the cutting to a minimum and I think I did pretty well. The timbres of instruments that the VS1053b offers is not great, but it’s still pretty good. Sometimes however, a certain instrument might not sound good at all so I try different instruments to see if the song sounds better (I fought pretty hard with “Minuet of Forest” on this).

After all that, I sit down and spend a few hours coding and debugging. I play back the songs in progress constantly but I never get sick of it.

All in all, doing this little project was really fun…and so was this:



This is “Midna’s Lament” from “Twilight Princess.” I didn’t transcribe the entire song because I didn’t feel like attaching multiple strips together nor was my music box capable of accidentals. I also screwed up some of the phrasings too but oh well…

The Sparkfun packaging box does a really good job amplifying the music box. I’m impressed!