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40oz

Question for midi composers

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I've always wanted to compose music for Doom, I've got some awesome tunes and guitar riffs by a whole mess of not-very-well-known-at-all grindcore and hardcore bands and I've always wanted to duplicate their songs in midi format because I know it could potentially be awesome.

Whenever I open up midi composing software and place the notes I can never get the song sounding exactly the way I want it. The tune is off or the tempo isn't right or something and I end up spending up to an hour trying to get the riff right, and usually just give in and end up with something completely different from what I wanted.

I noticed that a lot of the people that compose music here generally tend to do really unique and original stuff which is pretty awesome. But I find it odd that there are few midi's based on real songs, which is unlike the music Bobby Prince composed, which was almost entirely inspired by the metal bands John Romero listened to. For the longest time that seemed like a cop-out way to create music for a game.

Was Bobby Prince trying to duplicate those metal songs that John Romero wanted to hear while playing Doom because it was easier than coming up with a bunch of his own metal tracks or because it was what he was qualified for and paid to do? I guess my question is, is it more difficult to create something experimental, new, unique, and original, or to duplicate an existing song in midi format in a fashion that loops? I've been interested in finding someone who likes to compose midi's but would it be a pain in the ass to just throw up some youtube videos of songs I like and say "make this"?

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40oz said:

I noticed that a lot of the people that compose music here generally tend to do really unique and original stuff which is pretty awesome. But I find it odd that there are few midi's based on real songs, which is unlike the music Bobby Prince composed, which was almost entirely inspired by the metal bands John Romero listened to. For the longest time that seemed like a cop-out way to create music for a game.


Because it usually is. Prince's stuff gets a pass because he rewrote substantial sections of the songs in order for the composition to have some semblance of originality. Granted, that is still frowned upon, but it gets a pass because of the quality and the effort he put forth.

40oz said:

I've been interested in finding someone who likes to compose midi's but would it be a pain in the ass to just throw up some youtube videos of songs I like and say "make this"?


*cough*mememememe*cough*

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I`m (slowly but steady) making some midis for a future project these days, and I`m ripping riffs from other bands here and there. I`m not trying to hide it though, and will also mention what I`ve taken from where in the txt, when I eventually use those midis.

I`m doing it with a twist though. One example is a riff I stole from the "Scream Bloody Gore" album by Death, but I`m using strings, piano, choirs etc instead of distortion guitars and such

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40oz said:

Was Bobby Prince trying to duplicate those metal songs that John Romero wanted to hear while playing Doom because it was easier than coming up with a bunch of his own metal tracks or because it was what he was qualified for and paid to do? I guess my question is, is it more difficult to create something experimental, new, unique, and original, or to duplicate an existing song in midi format in a fashion that loops?

Bobby Prince said:
The id Software development team originally wanted me to do nothing but metal songs for DOOM. I did not think that this type of music would be appropriate throughout the game, but I roughed out several original songs and also created MIDI sequences of some cover material. This was before any level design and was before most of the artwork had been created. As the game came together, the guys at id saw that this type of music was not appropriate for many of the levels in DOOM. Thinking that this would be the case, I had also roughed out a lot of ambient moody background music, much of which ended up in the game.

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A program I use to make MIDIs is Guitar Pro, which is actually a tabbing application, so it would be pretty easy to convert the riffs and such you said you have into MIDIs. Only downside is it costs around 50 - 100$. Heh.

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I don't really lean towards either trying to be unique and original or trying to 'recreate' other people's tunes. I just write what comes to me, whether it's original or not so much. However, to answer your question, I think it is actually harder if you try to create something experiment, new, unique, and original rather than sort of recreate riffs. But I don't try to do that, I just let myself write whatever comes to me. Don't think about it, let your heart take over.

And the director I write music for usually gives me a youtube video and tells me to have that style and feel to the next song he needs. Not a pain for me to do and it's probably easier when I have writer's block.

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AveryMaurice said:

A program I use to make MIDIs is Guitar Pro, which is actually a tabbing application, so it would be pretty easy to convert the riffs and such you said you have into MIDIs. Only downside is it costs around 50 - 100$. Heh.


TuxGuitar is an awesome free alternative to guitar pro.

And if you're looking for parts of music to base a midi off of, you can always look up .gp files for that song. There's some pretty crappy tabs, but some good ones too out there. Always a nice place to start.

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Honestly you just need to know a bit about music theory, in particular a rough understanding of chords and scales. The relation that individual notes have with one another is extremely important.

darkreaver said:

One example is a riff I stole from the "Scream Bloody Gore" album by Death, but I`m using strings, piano, choirs etc instead of distortion guitars and such


Man, I have a tshirt of that album and I wear it like 4-5 days a week (I'm also smelly).

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Also don't procrastinate reading up on the music theory stuff; it's actually really interesting. Even though I hate music nerds with a passion.

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I am not particularly adept at playing the keyboard, but I use it when I want to learn how to play riffs, so I can then feed them manually into a MIDI composition tool. After a lot of tedious work, I managed to transcribe this song into MIDI entirely by ear. (My version.)

I will say, though, that guitars just tend to sound radically different from anything else you can sequence reasonably accurately into MIDI, which is often why it's so difficult to get the riffs sounding right in MIDI alone.

I recommend you listen to some stuff by Symphony X - it's not really death/doom metal, but there's ridiculously complicated guitar stuff going on involving weird time signatures and unpredictable key changes, amongst other things. However, virtually everything they have done has been sequenced into MIDI by someone called Simone Mularoni. If you've played Scythe MAP23, MAP26, MAP29 or Scythe 2 MAP30, you'll recognise how complex these songs are - but the MIDIs are still extremely faithful to the originals.

You could do a lot worse than try to grasp what's going on musically in these tracks (and perhaps reproduce some of your favorite riffs of theirs on a keyboard, if you have one handy) - I've learnt a lot from them. :)

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Mr. Freeze said:

If you need a tab resource, go to Ultimate-guitar.com. I get all my material there.

This. Just go to Ultimate-guitar.com, if you can find Guitar Pro files they should be compatible with Guitar Pro, TuxGuitar and PowerTab off the bat. You can just base your MIDIs off of them from there.

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