Remaking Bobby Prince's unused Doom music?

[Rudolph]

This is a question mainly for the musicians around here.

 

As you might surely be aware, John Romero released a bunch of unused Doom tracks. While some of them are perfectly good and could have definitely made it into the final product, a lot of them are just too short and/or repetitive or they do not sound very good. 

 

Have there been attempts to remake/remix/expand those tracks to make them varied? I have been thinking about this ever since I heard a remix of "Unreleased 17" while playing a custom mapset recently - although I unfortunately cannot remember which one, as I have been going through so many mapsets as of late - and I thought it was really cool!

 

If anything, those "enhanced remakes" would make for great replacements of duplicate tracks in Ultimate Doom!

Edited July 24, 2022 by Rudolph

[head_cannon]

Well, for starters, a mapper named 4mer modified un42 to slightly enhance it & flesh it out a little bit when they used it for their MAP24 of the first Plutonia Revisited Community Project.

 

Many of the community midi packs in recent years have had pieces that remix/reinterpret the original song that occupied the slot, and the idea of taking the unused fragments & ideas and developing them into full midis does sound pretty cool. Those midi packs usually take the original motifs and then build and build on them to make them as epic as possible, but I like the minimalism of your idea of just polishing them until it feels like they belong right alongside I Sawed The Demons & Deep Into The Code - like they're from an alternate version of 1993 that could have been.

[Rudolph]

1 hour ago, head_cannon said:

Well, for starters, a mapper named 4mer modified un42 to slightly enhance it & flesh it out a little bit when they used it for their MAP24 of the first Plutonia Revisited Community Project.

Ah, that is cool! This reminds me that I have yet to beat that mapset.

 

However, I must say, I am not sure I can hear the difference between the original un42 and the modified version.

[QuaketallicA]

Cool! Never knew about this.

Sounds like a lot of these were just taking the original metal/rock songs and turning them into midi as a starting point, before Bobby finally modified them enough to be his own work. A lot of these are just songs from the Alice in Chains album Dirt and the Slayer album South of Heaven.

 

Un 52 is basically just South of Heaven slightly modified. Un51 is Walk. Un45 is God Smack (the AiC song). Un44 is Big Gun. Un43 is Dirt. Un42 is Junkhead. Un41 is Rooster. Of course Angry Chair and Them Bones are there too, but they made it in the final game. Un23 is Sex Type Thing from Stone Temple Pilots., which I didn't know until recently was the inspiration for Into Sandy's City. Looks the final version Bobby released is far removed from the source, and arguably one of the best Doom tracks for it. Un20 is of course Man in the Box.

 

I rather like Un36. Sounds like a Pantera/groove metal kind of song. Curious that Romero didn't. Maybe it got annoying to listen to after a while. Un32 also sounds like a Pantera song. Un31 has a really nice feel to it, but I get what he was saying it's just the same riff over and over. Needed more work on it. Un30 like he said has a very Wolfenstein feel, it is funky. I really like Un19, that one ought to make it into a wad somewhere.

 

Un18 is Silent Scream. I had to look up the name on that one, but I definitely remembered the riff as one of the songs on South of Heaven album. Un17 also sounds like the song South of Heaven, maybe an early work of him toying with different variations of the song before. Personally I prefer Un52. Un16 I am unfamiliar with if it is based off of something, but it sounds like a trademark thrash/death riff. Un15 sounds like another one that could fit in Wolfenstein. A bit too simplistic I think for Doom. Although the end of the song also kind of sounds like an early version of what you hear in DIS the final boss fight against the Spider mastermind.

 

Un12 sounds like another Slayer song. Cleanse the Soul, I think? (had to look that one up too). Un09 sounds like another prototype for the Mastermind Boss fight music. Maybe it got merged with Un15? And Un08 is also the Mastermind music. Looks like he merged several different ideas for that one. Finally it seems the original intro to the game became the Icon of Sin music.

 

 

Edited July 25, 2022 by QuaketallicA

[Faceman2000]

I know @Mr. Freeze did that with a couple of them for the Doom the Way of Did/Base Ganymede soundtrack: https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/dtwid/dtwidmus.zip

[Rudolph]

Sweet! I did not know about Base Ganymede or that Doom The Way Id Did had a soundtrack. I shall check it out as soon as possible. Thanks a lot!

[Dweller Dark]

15 hours ago, QuaketallicA said:

Un31 has a really nice feel to it, but I get what he was saying it's just the same riff over and over. Needed more work on it. 

 

Un31 is Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage", if a bit barebones compared to the song itself. I don't mind it myself, but I think it definitely needed more work if it was meant to become something a player would hear for an entire level.

[Quill]

Gifty was working on a project implementing the unused songs into Ultimate Doom. Sadly Episode 4 was abandoned and it only officially goes up to Episode 3. Sigh... -M-

 

[QuaketallicA]

On 7/25/2022 at 5:42 PM, Eddie 2077 said:

 

Un31 is Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage", if a bit barebones compared to the song itself. I don't mind it myself, but I think it definitely needed more work if it was meant to become something a player would hear for an entire level.

Ah that's why. I haven't really listened to Soundgarden yet, other than Spoonman coming on the radio once or twice.

[QuaketallicA]

Am I the only one that doesn't mind some tracks repeating? As fantastic as TNT's soundtrack was, I always liked the way Plutonia used vanilla songs for its levels.

[Sonikkumania]

Just now, QuaketallicA said:

Am I the only one that doesn't mind some tracks repeating? As fantastic as TNT's soundtrack was, I always liked the way Plutonia used vanilla songs for its levels.

Depends on the track.. D_RUNNIN is too bland for my taste.

[QuaketallicA]

13 minutes ago, Sonikkumania said:

Depends on the track.. D_RUNNIN is too bland for my taste.

Interesting. I love that song. 

[Sonikkumania]

10 minutes ago, QuaketallicA said:

Interesting. I love that song. 

It's not a bad song by any means, but when you've heard it a million times it loses it's charm for me.