How to write better music for my maps ?

[TheEvilGrin]

Hey everyone. I've been making my own maps for a while now and I decided to write my own music for them.

I've been a musician for a pretty long time too, but the thing is writing music and Dooming is a combination I have never tried before.

Do you have to follow certain rules or guidelines ? How do you make the music fit the map ?

As you can see I'm quite a bit lost so yeah throw your advice in here

 

[Tristan]

Everyone has their different methods but for me it generally goes like this:

 

In many cases I've not had an actual map to play, and so a lot is riding on what the theme of the map actually is - techbase, jungle, desert... steampunk/industrial lava  Hellscape... These will inform your choices of instruments, arrangements, for a jungle map I'm almost certainly going to reach for the marimba or kalimba, and for say a desert map I like to go for scales like harmonic minor..maybe a bit cliche but if it works...

 

When writing for a map I have access to, gameplay can also be considered. In something with very intense combat, a player is going to be putting most of their attention into that rather than the environment, and so you want to match that aspect instead. For me, the last level of the Elementalism water episode is like this. The initial theme I still need to write will be more of an ambient track, probably drawing on middle eastern elements to match the desert oasis environment, but the boss theme is a heavy metal track where those elements are more of a background feature.

 

Usually when I make a track for someone, they have a general idea or maybe even a temp track that's in the rough ball park of where I should go. Dobu gave me a WIP version of The Given that used a MIDI of an old English folk song (Bryd one brere), Obsidian had a short loop of a creepy minimalist choir track in Maskim Xul, and Eviternity MAP30 used Jimmy's "The Thaumaturge" which ultimately starts out more orchestral in nature.

 

Sometimes the authors general preferences are considered. I just did a MIDI for a map by someone who likes dark ambient tracks, so I set out to basically recreate the atmosphere of PSX Doom in MIDI.

 

When you're making the maps yourself, you have complete freedom over it. I'd say start by considering those first factors I mentioned, describe the theme and gameplay of your map to yourself and then think about what you think would work best, maybe look for existing tracks and then when you find something, try and write in a similar style to that.

 

Alternatively you could write the music first and then build maps around the music instead!

 

The beauty of Doom for me is that the modding scene has done such a wide range of work that you can kinda get away with anything. Two very different tracks can easily fit the same map just fine, I've never paid much attention to those who say music track X isn't Doomy enough because I pretty much never agree. Just go with what best fits your vision.

 

Sorry for the rambly nature but this was basically my thoughts straight to text, hope it's useful, best of luck!

[TheEvilGrin]

Thanks a lot. Very helpful advice and in fact that even gave me a few ideas for what I'm writing right now !