progress and frustration with recreation of umbral ultimatum - homestuck song

i've been working on a recreation of umbral ultimatum for almost a month and i'm close to the end but it's just. so hard to work on. toby fox put so much crap in this song. i still have bars 59-74 to finish. the rest i think is pretty good. the rest of the song was pretty easy because it's one of the few homestuck songs with almost every instrument and sample documented. this next part will probably be annoying to get done because it has much going on and heavily uses uses an old 32 bit plug-in for orchestral stuff.

because i'm a logic pro user, i have to run a windows vm to use old vsts that silly fox man used 12 years ago. it's not like it's hard, just annoying to constantly transition between software to draw midi and bounce it until it sounds right. at least it's nice enough to run on the windows 11 arm parallels provides. it would be easier if i just used windows, but logic is just so nice to me.

i also accidentally made the whole thing at half tempo so the notes are twice as close together and drawing midi is much harder, especially during the shamisen/koto part in the middle where toby did the ol' Draw a Bunch of Notes Really Close Together trick to make a melody. i wanted to redo the tempo map, but the aligning the beginning and end where the tempo is really unstable already gave me brain damage and i didn't want to do it again.

i understand that this is utterly useless, but it's the only way i will actually do any musicy things because of my lack of talent. afaik i'm the only one that's done an umbral ultimatum recreation, so that's nice i guess.

this post is from my tumblr btw. i don't think i should be mirroring them but i feel like this is a good thing for here.