Some Doom FM arrangements

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB9jIHWuums

I wanted to give it a shot just because I think the music has never really been done justice through FM synthesis. The original music just used General MIDI which is a far cry from what OPL3 in the old Sound Blasters were really capable of. And the 32X port just sounded like ass with minimal effort put into it (probably just run through a converter).

Originally I wanted to do OPL3-style covers. But there's no good OPL3 emulation out there and I've never worked with the real deal before, so I can't get a good feel for what you can and can't do with it. All I know is that you can choose from more waveforms than just sines. I settled for just doing general 4op FM with only sine waves.

I do all of my stuff in Native Instruments FM8 which is a lot more advanced than old FM chips, but as long as I know the specs of what I want to mimic I can keep myself within those limitations.

I know nothing about this stuff, but you did recreate it. It sounds good, heavy and intense. Is this Sega Genesis or 32X specific music?

Do you do any original music using the same techniques?

love it!

That is wicked! Curious, are you the same Gecko Yamori who did a Sonic OC ReMix or two several years ago? If so, love your work.

I would listen to midis over this. 0_o

Now THIS is awesome!

HELLS YEAH FM

*ahem*

I mean, damn good stuff, I say civilly without any hint of insanity!

Excellent stuff. Have you ever considered using your talents to make a new / better GENMIDI lump? Freedoom could certainly use it.

geo said:

I know nothing about this stuff, but you did recreate it. It sounds good, heavy and intense. Is this Sega Genesis or 32X specific music?

Do you do any original music using the same techniques?

It's not based on any specific chip, but it probably wouldn't sound dramatically different on that. Replace 2 FM channels or so with square waves/white noise, and hard panning instead of true stereo.

That is wicked! Curious, are you the same Gecko Yamori who did a Sonic OC ReMix or two several years ago? If so, love your work.

If by several years you mean close to a decade, then yeah ;)

Have you ever considered using your talents to make a new / better GENMIDI lump? Freedoom could certainly use it.

I've never even heard of that thing before. Glossing over the topic I get the impression you're creating patches for some type of custom sound emulation?

GeckoYamori said:

I've never even heard of that thing before. Glossing over the topic I get the impression you're creating patches for some type of custom sound emulation?

The GENMIDI lump is an integral part of how Doom played music on OPL2/3 cards. As you know, the music is stored in a general midi-ish format; the GENMIDI lump gives OPL2 register parameters for each of the general midi instruments. Read this:

http://zdoom.org/wiki/GENMIDI

These are some pretty badass remixes! Have you done any more besides the ones in the youtube link?

fraggle said:

Excellent stuff. Have you ever considered using your talents to make a new / better GENMIDI lump? Freedoom could certainly use it.

He surely could, but AFAIK the GENMIDI lump is actually almost as good as it gets for the poor old OPL2, considering it only stores 2-op timbres anyway (even for OPL3 cards, they are simply used in 2-op, dual voice mode), so even if he made a 4-op or 6-op or even 8-op GENMIDI lump, it would be worthless but with very specialized hardware (or a special FM emulator plug-in).

What are the names of these tracks (or mission number? obviously the first one is e1m1, I'm just not nearly as familiar with D1's music as I am with D2)

Sounds good man!

The other tracks are E3M2 (Slough of Despair) and E3M3 (Pandemonium).

The very beginning of E3M3 reminded me of the Sega Genesis game Burning Force. :D Played that one a lot back in the day...

Maes said:

He surely could, but AFAIK the GENMIDI lump is actually almost as good as it gets for the poor old OPL2, considering it only stores 2-op timbres anyway (even for OPL3 cards, they are simply used in 2-op, dual voice mode), so even if he made a 4-op or 6-op or even 8-op GENMIDI lump, it would be worthless but with very specialized hardware (or a special FM emulator plug-in).

Some of the sounds could be made in 2op. The drums are 2op, just pitch bended to hell giving them a lot more oomph. Normally you would have to apply that to every individual note in the sequencing, but FM8 is very convenient in that it has a pitch envelope that lets me do this in the patch itself. I doubt you can do the same in GENMIDI though, seems to be a very rare feature.

The guitars also have the operator levels tied to velocity. So a short note with low velocity creates a muted guitar sound, instead of having to change the operators manually.

Just wondering, what software did you make this in?

love that remix sounds so superior too the original 32X version. its too bad that the people who did the port where so damn lazy, too be honest if the entire 32X soundtrack was like this it would make the 32x version a billion times better.

/me picks his jaw off the floor.

I'm visualizing this music with the 32X gameplay and it has moved me to literal tears.

Sodaholic said:

Just wondering, what software did you make this in?

Native Instruments FM8 is the synthesizer I use. It's sequenced in FL Studio.

GeckoYamori said:

FM8 is very convenient in that it has a pitch envelope that lets me do this in the patch itself

...

The guitars also have the operator levels tied to velocity. So a short note with low velocity creates a muted guitar sound, instead of having to change the operators manually.

Interesting. So what you did exceeds what a "static" player can do, with any quality of patches/timbres. Therefore, just a new GENMIDI lump would not cut it, but a very specialized FM player with direct access to the hardware and the ability to change operators depending on what is being played would be required.

Plus, there's the catch that no OPL2/OPL3 emulator will ever sound accurate enough unless you have a sound device that can output at exactly 49176 Hz sampling rate without ANY down/upsampling (the lowest common multiple of e.g. 49176 and 48000 or 44100 Hz is in the region of 60 MHz, so unless you're willing to burn A LOT of CPU horsepower to do a "proper" upsampling, forget it).