Composing doom music for OPL synthesis

Some comments I made on the differences in HR2's music in the DWMC thread made me think about how some music in wads sounds good* with OPL synthesis while others sound like garbage. (* By "good" I mean on par the original IWAD music; some people hate FM synthesis, and if you do nothing will make it good in that case.) I assume most tracks that sound good with the default OPL do so by accident, and no one really tests things with OPL much.

Does anyone actually compose music with the OPL synth in mind? Or even specifically for it?

I generally use an SC-55 soundfont with tweaked fluidsynth to sound extremely close to a real SC-55, but honestly I'd probably just use OPL if everything sounded good in it. @Csonicgo's amazing DMXOPL is great and works with a lot of things, but some of the instrument levels are still a bit off (the squarewave lead sounds really loud relative to other things) and occasionally I get nostalgic for the classic OPL sounds.

Not directly related to Doom midis but @yakfak has made a bunch of songs via OPL tracker. Perhaps he'd like to share some of his works here, as most of em are tied to his patreon, i won't do it. A lot of his midi's also sound pretty rad with OPL synthesis.

tourniquet, thanks :3

the only midi I ever designed to be played with adlib sounds was fringl.mid

that's something i made for one of my first levels, observing a really low polyphony limit and trying just to make something sparse and funky-atmospheric

there wasn't any special abstract technique when I was making, just using cubasis with a lot of trial and error!

opl sound seems to gum up very busy midi files and stuff based on hard rock and metal doesn't often seem to survive the transition (to my ears)

one of my fave musical tools is FMC, a really simple opl2 tracker with eight channels and some pretty decent inline effects like you'd find in impulse tracker - vibrato and portamento and arpeggiation, the ability to note off a sound on the same frame as it begins to create a new instrument, etc. etc. but i don't think any of the doom ports support random .sng files from a forgotten bit of dos software!

^ written in FMC!

Great tracks @yakfak! Got a link to FMC? I can't seem to find it on a search at all, I'm guessing it's pretty old.

It would be amazing to have an FM tracker that could do proper MIDI output but that doesn't seem to exist at all.

1 hour ago, plums said:

Great tracks @yakfak! Got a link to FMC? I can't seem to find it on a search at all, I'm guessing it's pretty old.

 

It would be amazing to have an FM tracker that could do proper MIDI output but that doesn't seem to exist at all.

thanks! here's fmc and a tutorial

http://aanaaanaaanaaana.website/page.php?dir=docs&page=fmc

excuse the strangeness of the website :))