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Mario Paint Composer (redirected from Mario Paint ComposerReview)

Page history last edited by Aaron Manns 10 years, 6 months ago

Mario Paint Composer Review

by Aaron Manns

Description

Mario Paint Composer is a sound tool designed for children and adults to create their own music with classic SNES sound sets. Originally a part of "Mario Paint" for the SNES in 1992, the composer was remade as a stand alone program for Windows in 2005. While it was marketed as a game more than a tool, the production capabilities of the time were quite powerful, and it still may be able to provide a retro sound to a modern project.

Access

Mario paint is free and can be downloaded: here.

Sample Usage

Thriller

Back to the Future

Tips, tricks, and tutorials

Holding the Shift key before you place a note will make it sharp. Holding Control will make it flat.
You can use the Arranger tool to string multiple songs of different tempos together.
Left click adds a note, right click removes one

What the Tool Does Well

Completely free
Very simple and intuitive
Drag and drop style music making
Video game like sound
Light program, doesn't require much computer power to run

What it Does Poorly

Very limited instrument set
Slow, somewhat tedious composition tools
No internal way to record audio to an .mp3 or .wav format.
Very little formal documentation
Tempo is not self-explanatory, if you can't read music you might have a bad time
No way to zoom out to check on your work, you are limited to a small frame of notes.

What happens when you...

All Mario paint composer saves are saved as text documents, and instruments are recorded as letters and breaks as + signs. So, you could really muck with a song's code by throwing in junk data just to see what would happen. Be careful though, you can easily destroy your song by doing this!

http://mariopaintcomposer.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=mods&action=display&thread=5331

The above link is a forum post of people who make glitch music by editing the text document in a text editor.