Not too much of an interesting story behind this one. I'd recently discovered the absolute godsend that is Reason (a not free, very expensive piece of music creation software; worth every damn penny!), and after a lot of screwing around making all sorts of random pseudo-ambient shit, I figured I should attempt something constructive. Such as remixing well-known, old (classic) video game music. There's always someone who wants to use that in something.
I was at first tempted to remix something from the early SNES/MegaDrive era (Something from Revenge of Shinobi or Streets of Rage, or Super Mario World), but then randomly decided on 'At Doom's Gate', the signature song to Classic Doom. I suddenly stopped short, halfway through, after realising that:
A) Everyone else and his bloody dog had re-done that song to fucking death already.
B) I actually wanted to remix 'Sign Of Evil' more, as in my opinion it's a work of underappreciated genius.
My first few attempts were worthless, and I was eventually driven to opening the original MIDI in Anvil Studio to have a base to look at and work from (I cannot stress this fact enough: I did NOT import the MIDI itself into Reason; that would be terribly lousy of me, and horribly, HORRIBLY cheap too!). After a fair amount (better known as many, MANY hours) of chopping, changing, track doubling and almost everything else you can think of (most importantly learning how to use the fucking program efficiently)...
Here's the result. I stayed almost perfectly faithful to the original, because I couldn't bring myself to risk ruining everything by tacking on some half-assed crap at the end.
If I'd attempted to get a sound anything like this using a standard MIDI editor, I'd still be sitting at my desk now, blindly scratching my nuts with hunting knives, repeatedly slamming my head against the wall and contantly drinking ridiculous amounts of beer to cope with failure after failure.
Anyhow... At the end of the day, I got there. And I'm fucking proud of it.
Enjoy listening to this. I know I enjoyed creating it.
If this gets a good reaction, I'll be motivated to try my hand at some of the other songs in Doom. Hell, send me requests for any retro game (Retro being anything from before the first PlayStation), and I'll see what I can do!
Software used:
Anvil Studio (MIDI reference)
Reason (Sequenced)
Cool Edit Pro 2.0 (Converted the WAV to MP3)
(If you want to use this in your animation, that's awesome; just give me a minor credit somewhere. That's all I ask.)
*NOTE: For some odd reason there's a load of extra time at the end of the song. I have no idea where this came from, as it wasn't there when I uploaded it.*
