Doom: Re‐Engineered Soundtrack

These are all new releases. This time around I tackled PC games with Midi GM soundtracks from the mid 90s. I did these over a couple of months though I already looked before that into the topic since I first needed to figure out a process that makes it possible to render HQ audio because that Roland SCVA 1.16 VST was really picky about the DAW and most didnt work but FL Studio worked fine in combination with loopMIDI.

I usually tracked down the original MIDIs and avoided mus conversions as much as possible for instrument and BPM accuracy. This is why you might notice a few little differences in comparison to other renders since the Doom renders are based on the leaked Doom source code which still had the original Bobby Prince midi compositions rather than mus. They still had their Roland GS extensions intact for example.

After getting all the MIDI files I mostly rendered all channels one by one so that I can do more precise cleaning and mixing. The Bobby Prince and Lee Jackson compositions were most of the time left as is since they were composed on Roland and sounded right to me. Heretic and Hexen were highly reworked though and the mixing might be quite different from what you are used to since I really wasnt happy with the instrument balance and I tried to make clean balanced mixes with every detail audible and a clean soundstage. The James Paddock compositions were only slightly reworked since they were usually fine with the soundfont.

What was made completely different is Descent though. This is because there wasnt really a way to render the midis directly due to them being hmi files and some of the MIDI information and samples coming straight from the games code. Therefore I setup Dosbox and recorded the MIDI output and then did the mastering. In this case I also included the Redbook audio as bonus which I declicked and remastered too.

All renders and masters were saved as 96khz 24bit though it should be said that the majority of the SCVA samples seem to be 16khz.