In honour of my Sister's birthday, I belatedly created this song:

Ode to Doom, or, Happy Birthdoom.

Like many people my age, Doom was a rather grim childhood game, an FPS that essentially set the stage for all future FPS: Blood n' guts, crazy guns and so forth.

We managed to play via a network in the house using two PC's and floppy disks to install. Great, simple times!

To polish things off, I played through bits of the game myself to find appropriate clips and made this music video too! (Using the level select cheat cuz I haven't got all day)

Take a listen! I'm not one to go viral or anything but the more people who listen, perhaps the more nostalgic joy I can spread (even if you haven't played)

The song is a lot more jovial than you'd expect from such a gory horror game whose original soundtrack is largely based on heavy metal and, perhaps, doom metal (an actual genre), but that's because I'm reflecting the joy that we feel from the memories of those carefree days. We even as little kids didn't exactly feel fear, nor did we have nightmares or any such thing. We just had a literal blast teaming up and killing monsters.

It was pure and wholesome in a weird way, and so that's what I wrote.

How to

For the more astute ears, you'll notice a whole bunch of sound effects from the game imbued into the music. I like the idea of a kind of blend of SFX that are pat of the music, and SFX that just pop up according to the video footage - I even autotuned some of the monster's death screams, for example, under the trumpet towards the end.

This is hardly a tutorial but it might be mildly intriguing to see.

I started off making the tune itself, and after finding a library of original Doom sounds, casually slipped them in wherever I felt appropriate. The whole thing looks like this, with pink being the music, and green being the SFX:

I wanted it to sound a little retro and very cheerful so I used appropriate plugins like this drum machine:

Amusingly, when it came to autotune, the monster screams seemed almost perfectly in key by sheer coincidence so I just had to subtly correct them as you would any normal vocals for them to fit with the epic trumpet part at the end.

Of course, I had to add a guitar solo but I only have my fusion nylon string guitar here, no electrics - too heavy and burdensome - so I wrote it out digitally:

I dunno I could go on all day about the details but as long as it sounds fun, that's the main thing.

Finally...

The last step was to use the video track to make a draft of footage but... the Youtube playthrough I was using kinda sucked for quality and I could never quite find the exact actions I wanted, so I played the emulator online myself, using the level skip cheat code to skip through to some highlighted bits, screen recorded, and then got onto After Effects, a software about which I know nothing, and very clumsily stitched things together in roughly the right places with the music.

My personal favourite touches

The biggest one for me has to be the kick drum, which isn't a kick drum at all but the haunting, anxiety-inducing footsteps of the most notorious boss, the cyberdemon.

Perhaps my second favourite is the 'lyrics', which sound like some kind of peaceful buddhist chant but is actually the monstrous garbled voice on the final level of the game, autotuned melodically.

Originally, it's one of the creators' voices pitched down and slowed down, then reversed. Flip it round and you'll hear:

To win the game, you must kill me, John Romero.

So yeah, would appreciate it being spread around like a virus but it's all just in good fun!