Tyrian - Space Journey 1 - Block35 Remix

[block35]

Hi everyone! Here's my remix of Space Journey 1 from Tyrian by Alexander Brandon.

I really love how the original music sounds in Adlib and I wanted to build on that and stay true to the Adlib sound so I found a way to extract the original instruments from Dosbox and put them in my DAW and work with it from there and add processing, effects and all that good stuff.

Let me know what you guys think

Cheers!

https://soundcloud.com/mihai-shprotanu/space-journey-1-block35-remix

Original song here:

[block35]

Any feedback, comments and suggestions would be appreciated as there's always room for improvement

[Gario]

Wow, does this ever have a 90's electronic feel to it - I dig the additions to the sound that you have going, here. You really did rip those sounds straight out of the game, didn't you? It gives it a very cool sound.

Of course, it's about as conservative as it gets, but it does sound a few steps above the original. The production on this is a little sloppy, though - it sounds like there's too much reliance on limiting the master track to get rid of clipping, so it sounds pretty muddy throughout. Be sure to take off the limiting/compressors and get the levels so they don't clip, then raise the volume a little as needed with the limiters.

I also am hearing a lot of excess highs in this. This track would be served well with a low pass that got rid of all that excess high noise that muddies the track further.

Otherwise, I really like how you took the sounds out of the original music - you have any link to the instruments? I'm sure at least a few people could put them to good use on here, if it was offered.

[block35]

Hey Gario! Thanks a lot for the feedback. You're right I did go crazy with those compressors and limiters and now listening to the song again it does sound like it could do with some more mastering to get those sounds right. I'll update this post when the new version is ready!

Here's a little tutorial how on how you can rip instruments from Dos games for those who are interested:

For the original instruments in any dos game, you can rip them by pressing ctrl+alt+f7 in dosbox (0.72 not 0.74). That's gonna create a .dro file in the capture folder of dosbox. Then you get Dro Trimmer and you put the .dro file in its folder and run dro_split.exe your_file.dro. That's going to sepparate the song you capture into individual wav tracks. Also you can get dro2midi-1.6, put the .dro in it's folder and run this command:

dro2midi -s your_file.dro output_midi.mid >output.txt 2>&1

That's going to make a midi file of the song, a txt file and a lot of .sbi instruments.

The sbi instruments are the original dos format instruments of the song and you can drag and drop into JuceOPLVSTI which is a plugin for your DAW of choice that uses the dosbox OPL chip emulator.

in the txt file you can work out which sbi goes into which midi channel.

Then in your DAW you have to paste each corresponding midi channel into each instance of JuceOPLVST with each sbi. and then delete midi notes for each one as necessary as in the original song they don't play all the notes in a midi channel.

[block35]

On second thought, I think maybe what you hear as over-compression might be noise in the 16bit sound of the original OPL instruments. Compression amplifies those noises also and I have more of them stacked together so that makes even more noise. I might replace those but it would be a shame because I really want to have the original OPL sound in there. I'm going to try with a real OPL soundcard to see if I can get a cleaner sound. I totally agree with the highs I have to get those under control too. Again, thanks for the feedback!