The Music of REKKR

[HexenMapper]

The REKKR Soundtrack is now available on Bandcamp!
https://tomjensen.bandcamp.com/album/rekkr-soundtrack-2

 

 

2 Years ago I was browsing a certain forum when I saw a screenshot of what would become REKKR. I immediately volunteered to write some music for the project, posted a MIDI file and emails were swapped. Now that REKKR has been released, I thought I'd write a little bit about my process for the soundtrack.

 

The Premise & Aesthetic

Going on the original screenshot, I figured REKKR was some kind of viking / fantasy style mod. It being a Vanilla TC, anything but MIDI was out of the question. I fired up my DAW and quickly selected some instruments I thought would be appropriate: Percussion, choir, strings, harp/lyre and bagpipes. I went with my gut instinct and wrote this:

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The project lead Revae seemed happy with the direction I was going in so I wrote a few more gut-instinct tracks, trying out some more ideas and sounds. I ended up having free reign to write what I wanted in this score, except for some small timing things like getting the title track to end before demos start, so plenty of room to experiment.

 

Researching Scandinavian Musics

Then I started thinking more critically about what I was doing - This was a Norse inspired setting, so I needed to research Norse instruments and tunings. I started looking for Scandinavian folk music and instruments, and came across some key pieces that would provide important elements of the score.

This video in particular had a striking effect on me:

What was this ethereal, natural sounding instrument? It was a Bukkehorn - a natural horn carved from the horn of a goat.

But there was something else going on in this piece, it wasn't just a beautiful sounding instrument, but the musical Scale was different to our regular western scales. This is due to the horn being made by drilling holes in it, often without too much precision (and certainly the natural shape of each horn would have an effect on the exact pitches it would produce).

And so I went about trying to recreate not only this sound, but the kind of natural scales that we hear in the piece above. I would make these scales using Microtones - a way of retuning notes so they sit in between the usual notes that we might play on a piano. I wouldn't retune all the notes, but just a few of them in a given scale. I would retune them enough to give the melodies a unique and unusual sound.

Listening to some more of these pieces, some were very 'sour' sounding - the pitches well outside our usual piano keyboard. This one for example:

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You can hear some of the notes just sound 'off'. This was the kind of sound I wanted to make use of. It sounded ancient, perfectly natural, yet aeons away from our modern music.

 

Other Scandinavian folk music such as dances and instruments like the Tagelharpa were also noted and their styles put in the 'bank' of things I would make use of in this score. Tagelharpa:

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Incorporating what I had learned

So I set about attempting to recreate these ancient Scandinavian sounds in my DAW. I even began naming the instruments after the ye olde ones.

I used solo violins or violas for Tagelharpa, and a soprano saxophone seemed to work well for a Bukkehorn (I'm still limited to MIDI sounds here - no going out at getting a high quality Bukkehorn library.... assuming one existed?)

I wrote this, my spin on a Bukkehorn melody:

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And this, my take on a tagelharpa piece, with drone and folk percussion and in with a folk dance feel:

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You can hear I'm trying to accentuate the roughness of real played instruments - there are bends in the strings as a player bends up to the note, also featuring are the microtonal scales I devised in order to give the melodies an ancient, natural sound.

The scale I used for the Bukkehorn piece (Hops Harvest) was as follows:

A relatively straight forward E aeolian mode (also known as E natural minor), but with 2 notes altered. One altered downwards (flattening) by an amount of 25 cents. Cents you say? how many cents to a dollar? One of my first teachers asked me this at primary school and I replied: "How many what cents? How many 10 cents? how many 20 cents?" I couldn't understand that she meant "100 cents in total". I was thinking in blocks of 5, 10 or 20, rather than imagining a dollar being made up of 100 individual cents (I was like 6 give me a break).
How does this relate to altering notes and micorotonal tunings? well - in the same way I was thinking about cents in blocks, most people today think about musical notes in blocks too - the keys on a piano. Thats all the notes there are right? wrong. The distance between any 2 notes on a modern piano is measured as "100 cents". I don't know where the name 'cents' comes from, but that's just what they're called so we're going to run with it.

You could have 100 different notes between any 2 notes on a piano. They would be incredibly close together, and most people would not be able to tell them apart unless you played them all in sequence (you would hear a weirdly rising scale than never seems to actually get higher)

You can kind of hear this effect in this video:

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That video is in quartertones - so 50 cents between each note. (lets not get into why they're called quartertones...)

 

Back on Topic

Anyway, back to my scale

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, I altered 2 notes, one downwards by 25 cents, and one upwards by 25 cents. This is enough of a change that the human ear can easily recognize that something aint right, but small enough (only 2 notes out of a 7 note scale), that I could still write regular melodies and have the tunes work and for the regular western person to be able to relate to them. Some areas such as India and the middle east use much smaller intervals (the distance between 2 notes), and so could easily write in much more complicated microtonal scales and even sing them, but for me the 25 cent alterations were enough to give the music an ancient feeling.

 

This effect seemed to work most of the time when I used it in the score, the melodies sound relatively normal, but sometimes the effect is quite pronounced, which could well be a shock to some western listeners (a recent twitch playthrough of REKKR commented that this track was "awful" and laughed at how bad it was.) This was the 'sour' microtones hard at work, sounding like someone was torturing a cat 2000 years ago:

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And looking back I think I did go a bit far on this track. I could have removed the alterations and the track would be much nicer to listen to. But hey - I think one nice thing about REKKR is it's uncompromising - the maps are hard, so imo the music should be hard to listen to at times. Only the first section of this track uses the microtonal scale, the rest is relatively straight forward (so I give the listener a 'rest' from the sour notes...)

 

More Microtonal scales:

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Its not all Vikings and Camp Fires

So that covers the main unusual aspects of the project - researching and utilizing natural scales and instrument types. But REKKR isn't all Norse strongmen living in huts - there is much more to the setting. As I started seeing some of the city maps come around, I figured it was time to introduce a more refined, ""cultured"" element to the music. So I drew on my favorite musical inspiration: Baroque and Renaissance period classical music. I introduced the Organ, more structured polyphony (many melodies interweaving), and more refined harp parts.

 

I spent quite a few tracks trying to really nail the most "crunchy" organ sound possible - I wanted really dense chords and clear but overwhelming harmonies.

I think I finally nailed it in this track, which I believe was unused until I mentioned that it was, and it then became the intermission track (a great choice by Revae):

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Russian Girls on a Train

Inspiration came from sources other than just Scandinavian folk music and baroque fugues and counterpoint, traditional songs - especially vocal-only songs (known as acapella)  were a good source of the kind of music that could be made even without any instruments - perhaps by a bunch of viking woman on a boat, or some Russian girls on a train, as shown in this song:

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The track above and vocal songs like it provided the inspiration for some of my own:

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As an aside, if you want a few really great female vocal pieces, look no further: These 2 tracks also feature quite microtonal vocal parts - making them sound partially middle eastern or indian.

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The human voice is truly something powerful.

 

 

REKKR, But different

As the mod went on, more styles and variety were required, I wrote a more standard metal / rock track for a dungeon map, and even managed to sneak in some Black Metal for the claustrophobia map in the 3rd episode. There were synths used, especially in the first map of E3, coinciding with the change of scene in the 3rd episode (bright purple + smooth futuristic looking walls). Some other styles and genres cropped up, a swamp map, a map for a city (heavily inspired by Edgar & Sabin's Theme from FF VI), boss music, episode end screen music, and a final "credits music" (taking the shape of a bittersweet waltz), and HELL maps. I had a great time writing in this variety of styles, while trying to keep a rough harmonic language consistent throughout. I've loved working with MIDI since I was a teenager, so its always fun to work within those limitations.

More metal dungeon track:

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Regal city music:

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Then a request came through that made me go ooooooooo: (slight spoilers ahead)

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A mash up of all the starting areas of doom, doom2, hexen, heretic, strife and a few others. It was a secret map, and I got straight to work. I took the 1st map music from all these games, and re-envisioned them using my REKKR instruments and sensibilities, harps replaced electric guitar in the Heretic E1M1 music, bagpipe solos ripped over the Strife polyrhythms, and things just kinda came together. Combined with the visuals of that map, and all the familiar areas, I hope it makes for a fun easter egg.

 

 

 

Special Effects

I used a few small things to help make the MIDI a bit more lively, namely layering solo instruments with a very slight staggering in the parts, to make it sound like they were playing in a reverberating hall. So I would have 3 bagpipes all playing the same notes, but one slightly after the other, and the other slightly after that.

There are also plenty of seashore sounds used, lots of pitch bending, and very careful attention to volumes and fading in / out. Sometimes I would put so much automation (programming how the volume / pitch / etc. will change over time) that the file sizes bloated above 100kb (preventing them from playing in chocolate doom), so I had to go back and 'simplify' automation, which had very little effect on the quality of the sound. The difference between a volume curve with 500 points and a volume curve with 10 points is minimal when you have other instruments playing. This was purely something I've been used to from writing non-doom music: being able to draw smooth curves and never have to answer for those extra kb.

 

END GAME - RIP REKKR_3

And so that's the story of the music of REKKR, I haven't uploaded all of the tracks to my youtube yet, I will do a bit of a rearrange now that I know what has been used and what hasn't, and include some of the more recent tracks (such as the metal tracks, the swamp track, end titles and a few others).

 

For now I will leave you with the end game title music (the bittersweet waltz). This track pushed my available voices to the absolute limit:

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I hope this has been of interest, thanks so much to Doomworld and all its users and admins for existing and creating a great place to store / share and work on new stuff.

Edited September 22, 2020 by HexenMapper

[Rook]

While most of the technicalities go over my non-musician head, this is fascinating stuff! Your music for REKKR is somewhat more subdued than we often expect from Doom projects, but the way you've researched Scandinavian folk music and instruments is evident throughout and its a perfect fit for the visuals and gameplay. It's a big part of what makes REKKR so compelling.

Edited July 14, 2018 by Rook

[HexenMapper]

Cheers Rook, glad you enjoyed :)

[elend]

I haven't played through Rekkr yet, but I am planning on do so very soon. Once this is done I will check out your post again. Just take note, that I do acknowledge your work that went into this post (and the music of course).

[Gez]

Do you have actual titles for the songs? Based on your Youtube videos they're just identified as "track XY". Some nice titles would look better in the eventual wiki articles than "ExMy is the yth map of the xth episode of REKKR and it uses the music track "track zz". ;)

[HexenMapper]

Good Idea Gez, I have shortened titles (8 characters), but I'll give them some proper titles when I do my re-arrange.

[KwadDamyj]

Just wanted to say very impressive job making such well-researched music for a humble DooM mod of all things!

[HexenMapper]

Uploaded the remainder of the soundtrack to youtube (8 tracks I hadn't got around to uploading yet)

 

You can hear them as the last 8 tracks of this playlist (from Chained Remains onwards), there's some metal, a FFVI inspired regal track, and a mash-up of every iD/Raven starting track (Begin - (E3M9)). You can click on the top left icon to get a drop down of all the tracks (not sure how to make a playlist start at a specific track here...)
 

 

 

Well done to Revae and team on the cacowards! honored to be mentioned as well :)

Edited December 13, 2018 by HexenMapper