Analyzing "PUPA" by Morimori Atsushi (BMS/maimai/etc.) | Basterd's LFA (Layman-Friendly Analysis)

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Next up we have Pupa official MV by Mori Mori Atsushi featured in BMS and my my is my understanding. Once again everybody this is a bastard Zelfe a layman friendly analysis about professionally trained musician a composer and my objective here is to explain things in a way so that you don't have to be one to understand what is happening here musically. So, if you like the sound of that, make sure you're following the channel, subscribe to the channel, whatever you use, like the video, share the video, comment, turn on notifications, become a member. Once again, everybody, don't forget to join the Discord server, join the Patreon, subscribe to the gaming channel, subscribe to the reacts channel, how to request songs if you're none of the live stream members getting early access to the content. I have a spiel for this and a bunch of other things later down this video, so stick around for that.

[00:00:44]Disclaimers showing on your screen right now, so go ahead and pause the video to read them in full. Otherwise, please be patient with me. I am acoustic and guitared and I pressed the wrong button. So, please keep that in mind with that. Let's go ahead and do this. Poopa. Let's go.

[00:01:04]Okay. So, we start with silence. Then we have the sound of a record scratch.

[00:01:09]Basically, a vinyl record that is then interrupted as it's playing. We have piano drums giving us that initial melody initial uh containing our initial motif. Motif being the smallest version of your musical idea, the seed, the essence which everything else comes from. I think uh then we immediately have that again and we're doing some sequencing. We have a little bit of silence and now we're doing some sequencing. Sequencing being another way that you can develop your material in which you play a musical idea, usually a melody from a new starting point. You repeat the same shape from a new starting point. So for example, if I have this over here and I then want to sequence it, I am going to just repeat that same idea for a new starting point.

[00:01:53]Very very simple. So I think we're doing something like that. Let's see where this goes.

[00:02:00][music] And yeah, really really fast drums in between. And yeah, just to explain the record scratch, right? So when it comes to a vinyl uh is it vinyl as with I uh vinyl player uh if you look at a vinyl player this is like one of the early ways of playing music. You will see that this device consists of a few parts.

[00:02:21]Number one you have the vinyl record itself which has the music or the audio physically engraved into the disc. Then um when it comes to the rest you will have the spinning cycle over here which is going to rotate the record itself.

[00:02:39]And then we have the um the needle over here. We have the arm here with the needle. We have a very very delicate glass needle over here. Uh very very fragile which will then read the engraved sound and then transfer that audio over to the speaker that we're going to have over here. and classically, thank you for stopping by.

[00:03:00]Good to see you. So, yeah, we're having that happen. And uh basically the record scratching noise is when you disrupt the sound get you get over here by interfering with the spinning that you're getting. You're either uh stopping the sound or you're going backwards, that kind of stuff. So, uh the game itself, you actually record Scratcher as part of the uh of his controller. Oh, that's really cool.

[00:03:27]That's really cool. So yeah, the record scratching is going to be even built in.

[00:03:31]And of course nowadays because of how expensive this is, DJs back in the day would do this at parties and it result in very very high bills replacing the needles because you if you're not careful with this, it breaks either the record or the needle. So nowadays DJs have um DJ disc sets which just contain an um controllers over here that just emulate the sound because we can just do everything digitally. For example, this is how it used to look. This is how DJs used to be. A DJ used to be a disc jockey and the DJ would bring in his records and he would have music on these records and he would just be playing the records and he was what does a DJ even do? This was a the job of the DJ. You would be hired for a party. You would have music on the records and your job was to make sure that the music stayed playing.

[00:04:27]That was it. And then as time went on, the DJs themselves started making their own music with that that kind of stuff, which now leads us to the current age of this. But yeah, no, like if you go um if you're outside of the first world, uh whenever you go to a party, chances are you're going to have a DJ there. And the job of the DJ is not to play his own music. It is to play somebody else's music on this. And then eventually DJs started making their own thing, leading to the to what we have nowadays. So yeah, let's see where this goes.

[00:05:02]Okay. So now we bring in uh an elongation of what the piano was doing.

[00:05:07]We bring a uhum which is an elongation of the motif.

[00:05:13]Elongation being another way that you can develop your material in which you play a slower version of something you've done before. We introduce another synth higher up giving us variations basically of the motif. basically playing kind of like a solo, more adorned version of this whole thing. And yeah, let's see where it goes.

[00:05:35]Oh, run over there. Nice.

[00:05:42]Okay, so we then switch over. We have a run there. Uh runs and music. Uh by the way, uh run is basically doing something really really fast as we just heard that scale up and down going as a form of transitioning. Now we have the melody here.

[00:06:00]I'm just trying to figure out what it's doing. I'm just trying to figure out it is doing a variation of the motif.

[00:06:11]It is doing a variation of a retrograde of the motif. So it one, it has an uneven rhythm, but two, it it is a retrograde. It's an altered retrograde of the motif. Retrograde being another way that you can develop your material in which you play the backwards version of something you've done before. So in this case, let's say we have this over here.

[00:06:32]And if we do the retrograde, we're going to do that backwards.

[00:06:35]And what we're doing over here is we are adding a temporary alternating pedal note to this over here. So pedal note, pedal tone is a note that you hold for an extended period of time. And an alternating pedal note is something that you just bounce back and forth. So it doesn't even have to be an alternating pedal. It's just an alternating note.

[00:06:54]We're adding one extra note over here.

[00:06:57]So instead of having we're having this extra note added before we do anything else.

[00:07:06]So we're having that and of course we are not completing the motif. We're only doing part of it. So we're chopping it off. We're adding an extra note in between giving us this new version of the motif. Let's see how it goes.

[00:07:22]Now we're having the [music] actual motive there.

[00:07:25]Yeah, this part confused me. Drums very fast.

[00:07:29]And okay, another thing to note is that once once we get that retrograde done, we go to we go to another retrograde of the motif. We add one extra note to it. Um, which is then carried over to the piano.

[00:07:44]So we have the retrograde of the motif from the synth. Then we have the extra the first note of the motif played by the first synth completed by the piano.

[00:07:55]So basically we are having um the first synth giving us this over here and then we take the rest with the piano.

[00:08:06]That's what we're doing. We're engaging in some instrumentation over here. uh instrumentation or orchestration.

[00:08:15]The study the art of which instruments get what of uh picking the right excuse me picking the right instruments for the right sound for the right texture sometimes even for the right psychological response. And in this case, we're having the buildup from the retrograde from the alternated from the alternate uh altered retrograde and then we're having the retrograde and then we are having the motif being done very quickly as a reduction of itself. So, as I said, reduction um elongation, you do something slower, reduction, you do something faster. So, yeah, let's see where this goes.

[00:08:51]Little break there. running the piano.

[00:08:56]Okay, so now we are bringing the synth, the piano, and the bass. All of them giving us variations of the motif. The main one being the one on the bass. The main one being the one on the bass. And we now do a call and response. Call and response being a musical conversation.

[00:09:12]We have in this case the bass, piano, and synth giving us the call. And then we have silence as a response because we're getting here on the screen some text which I can't read. So let's see where this goes.

[00:09:26]Oh, now we're introducing the piano [music] there. Nice.

[00:09:31]Building up from the synth. Nice.

[00:09:36]And we introduce immediately some direct modulation. So modulation is when you go from one set of chords or a key signature to a different set of chords or another key signature or scale. Um usually this is based on the circle of fifths. Do I have the circle of uh fifths image over here? Yes, we do. So the circle of fifths, this one being over here is all the natural major all the natural minor scales that exist in western music. And each one of these of course how different they are from one another. So the difference between C major and G major is one note. You take F to F sharp. The difference between D G major and D major is you take one note up. So yeah, circle of fifths takes you.

[00:10:18]And the further you are, the more difficult it is to modulate between one key signature and another. So usually to modulate you're going to use some sort of transitionary material, right? You can use common chord modulations, common tone modulations, pickery third modulations. There's a bunch of them out there that the whole point of it is to smoothen the transition between the two.

[00:10:39]Unless you are doing a direct modulation, direct modulation, as we just heard over here, you're basically you were in key signature number one.

[00:10:49]Let's say we're in C major, right?

[00:10:53]Yay. C major. Very nice. Now we're in D major.

[00:10:59]Like you just go straight for it. No questions asked. That simple, right? So, we are doing um we're doing that over here to build up the next melody and just to step things up immediately and to just bring out of nowhere this new key signature and get away with it. And you know what else we brought OUT OF NOWHERE? THE PATREON. [laughter] PATREON.COM/JAMESARBASTASTER.

[00:11:24]If you want to support this channel more than you already, consider joining the Patreon today. Even if you're not pledging any money, do do uh do join the free tier because this is where the non-gaming LFAS are going. What are those? Anime, film, TV, label, music, the kind of stuff that we usually don't do on the main YouTube channel. Why?

[00:11:41]What we do on YouTube is inherently fair use. That does not stop bad actors such as record labels, film studios, and smaller independent rat uh scammers out there from abusing the copyright system on YouTube uh for nonvideo game music.

[00:11:54]So, in order to just not deal with that kind of headache, we're putting them here on Patreon free for everyone to watch with paid members getting early access to the content. So, if you want to support this channel more than you already are by watching and subscribing and all that good stuff, consider joining the Patreon today linked in the description. Thank you to those who are already members, especially those who are paid members, particularly um real nemesis, French guy, Amaya, and another random human. Your support means the world to me. Thank you once again all of you for your support. Everybody else, join the Patreon today.

[00:12:23]patreon.com/jamesrarbastard linked in the description down below.

[00:12:26]patreon.com/jamesrarbastard.

[00:12:27]Become a member today. Anyway, back we go. Modulation, direct modulation. Let's see where this goes.

[00:12:35]Little break there.

[00:12:39]And off the ramp we go. Off the ramp being a colloquial term that I use.

[00:12:44]Colloquial by that I mean there is no official academic definition for this or at least I'm choosing not to use it for the sake of simplicity. And off the ramp is what I like to call a particular type of transition that makes your listener feel suspended up in the air at the mercy of inertia waiting to see where you land. Kind of like going off a ramp.

[00:12:59]How do you do this? Remove the drums, maybe the bass as well. As we are hearing over here, we go back to a distorted version of the piano. We have the piano doing two parts now. One of them doing um holding down the chords and the other one playing now a new variation of the motif. Let's see where this goes.

[00:13:17]still with that rhythmic.

[00:13:20]And we have one um one other instrument like one percussion out there uh giving us a beat kind of sounding like a clicking uh like a ticking clock. Yeah, there we go. [music] Switching over to the sins. Bass and drums are entering as well.

[00:13:38]Nice. [music] Very nice. Very nice. We do a uh another retrograde of the motif this time around and we are now building up. Oh my god, we just take off with this with a little bit of rhythmic displacement. Rhythmic displacement, as the name suggests, is when you displace something in your rhythm so that you're pushing something down so that you're do uh you're doing something uh you're pushing something down so it's on later, rushing something up so it sounds earlier, or you're using silence or some sort of interruption to achieve either of the two effects. So, in the case of rhythmic displacement, right now we're using it to drop the beat. Basically, um when you're making music, you're doing one of two things.

[00:14:19]You are building tension or you're resolving that tension. That point in between, we call the cadence. Now, usually this is something that you do with your chords, but dropping building and dropping a beat has the same dynamic. And rhythmic displacement is basically as we did over here. We take the moment of resolution or the drop and we push it back just a little bit, which creates additional extra phantom tension that makes the drop that or the cadence or the resolution that much more pronounced. So, yeah, we're having this.

[00:14:48]We're running over. Let's see where it goes.

[00:14:53]Yeah, we're taking the full version of the melody over here. Really good. Nice little bit of silence there.

[00:15:01]Okay, we bring back this version of the melody and in the background we're having a um like we're having a bunch of arpeggios, really, really fast runs in the background. Um it's featured Oh my god, it's featured in a lot of them.

[00:15:13]Yeah. So yeah, the main ones that I was told is um what's it called? Uh BS uh BS BS uh BS BS BS BS. God, why has my my and um and BS [ __ ] where which one was it? BMS. Yeah. Uh BMS. So yeah, we're using we're mentioning those and I'm probably going to use attacks for the other ones. Anyway, let's see where this goes.

[00:15:37]Ah, triplets there. Nice. Thank you. We modulate back down.

[00:15:45]Nice. So yeah, so we bringing Okay. So, so much going on. So, we're having the the drums and the bass giving us this new version of theup.

[00:15:57]Then we are having the piano giving us a melody. We're having the sins doing their own thing. We're basically having multiple versions of the motif playing right now. Engaging in some counterpoint counterpoint, the art of melodies. The study the art of melodies. How they are, how they develop, how they interact with one another. Usually in the context of having two or more melodies playing at the same time. In this case, the different versions of this that we have.

[00:16:20]Let's see where it goes. Z. [music] We're not taking any more requests today.

[00:16:25]And requests are not open. All right.

[00:16:28]Master triplets there. Very nice.

[00:16:31]Oh my god. We speed it up and one.

[00:16:36][music] We bring it back to the start.

[00:16:39]Intro as outro.

[00:16:41]Not only did we use the intro as the outro, we used the retrograde.

[00:16:48]We used a retrograde of the intro as the outro.

[00:16:54]And there it goes. It's okay. It's all good. And there you have it. We use not only do we use the intro as the outro, but we actually did a retrograde with it. We gave it some actual symmetry here.

[00:17:07]And there you have it. Poopa by Mori Mori Atsushi featured in BMS my my and a bunch of other games. What a journey that was.

[00:17:22]What a journey that was incredible dude.

[00:17:24]That was incredible. Once again everybody, this has been a bastard a layman friendly analysis. I'm a professionally trained musician and composer and my objective here has been to explain things in a way so that you don't have to be want to understand what's happened here musically. So, if you're watching this on the YouTube video archive thing, thank you for watching. Make sure you're following the channel, subscribe to the channel, whatever you use, like the video, share, comment, turn on notifications, become a member. Once again, everybody, don't forget to join the Discord server.

[00:17:48]That's where everything is announced first. Whether it's the streams going live, the videos going up, the channels, updates, projects, giveaways, everything is announced there first. Of course, we have the community there. We hang out, we chat, we steal memes from other from other people's servers, claim them as our own. and where I host the Vintage Story. Vintage Story Community server used to be a Minecraft mod, not to some standalone game. I love it. I prefer it.

[00:18:08]I'm not sponsored by them or anything. I just really love the game to the point that I built a PC just to host a server for this game, which is available to join via our Discord community server.

[00:18:16]So, join the Discord today, linked in the description, and become a member of our community today. Also, share these videos with everybody that you know. Use the hype function on YouTube. We have a group on the Discord coordinates for that. So, links in the description. Help the channel grow. Members get early access to the content. I schedule the videos for a week on Saturdays. And if you're a paid member on YouTube, regardless of your tier, you get access to the videos when I schedule them, at least for the LFAS. So, become a member today. If you want to listen to this without me interrupting you at 3 and a half seconds, I'll be linking in the description down below. If you want to request a song and you're not on the live stream, you can comment on this video. It has the instructions on what to do. If you want to catch the streams when they happen live, we aim from Monday to Friday, 400 p.m. Central European time during the fulltime experiment. If you don't know what that is, go to the main page of my YouTube channel. The pinned video there has an explanation of what it is during the duration of the experiment. We stream live on Twitch, YouTube, and Cake so that you can tune in from whichever platform you prefer. Again, 400 p.m.

[00:19:02]Central Europe. If you are not in Europe, do not worry. We have the full upto-ate streaming schedule showing in your local time zone in both Discord and Twitch, both linked in the description.

[00:19:10]So, if you live in Los, the Bulls, Chile, and you're like, "Yeah, but what time is 400 p.m. in Hungary? I don't live there." Do not worry. Just go to Discord or Twitch, both linked in the description, and they're going to show the streaming schedule up to date in your local time zone, accounting for daylight savings if necessary. And subscribe to the gaming channel. Follow the gaming channel, cuz of course I have a gaming channel. I'm on YouTube. What else could I possibly have? Games are bastard. Uh, thank you again for 800 subscribers here already. I really do appreciate it. This is where I put the gaming after recordings when they happen. We play video games on the later part of the stream. And then the VODs of every game we play on stream eventually end up over here. So, subscribe to the channel linked in the description or search on YouTube same username as James Rastard. Just the J for a G and YOU GOT IT. AND subscribe to the reacts channel.

[00:19:50]We have a react channel. Yes, the LFAS are react format, but the reacts channel is where we're putting the reacts for basically everything else. James Reacts bastard, thank you for over 350 subscribers here already. I really do appreciate it. Linked in the description. Subscribe to the channel or search on YouTube. Same username as James R. Bastard. Just extend the R to react and you got it. And uh yeah, there you have it. Poopa Mimi Atsushi BMS. My my that was awesome, dude. Really good stuff, man. Really good stuff. But uh yeah, let's move on.