»Quake

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Quake is a great game. It revolutionised FPS's and popularised online multiplayer blah blah blah. Basically, most of the things Quake did in 1996, FPS's are still doing now because everyone seemingly lacks the imagination to do anything differently. I say that in more words, in the past, here. Anyway, that has nothing to do with why I like Quake. I like it because of the soundtrack and because of the universe it inhabits (Quake doesn't really have a story (it doesn't need one) so I can hardly say that.)

Quake was heavily inspired by H.P. Lovecraft and all manner of pitch-black fantasy horror, but mostly H.P. Lovecraft. The levels start in industrial-military complexes, in a very similar vein to Doom, but then give way to gothic castles, caves, dungeons, evil temples. The majority of the tougher enemies in the game are a grab bag of Lovecraft nightmares with names like the Vore and the lightning-spewing death-yeti, The Shambler. An Id game with truly iconic bad guys, what a surprise.

That band I kind of like, who I mention now and again, NINE INCH NAILS, did the soundtrack. The Quake soundtrack works as a standalone NIN album in my opinion, it is obscure and highly underrated (a surefire way to get in my good books). So you had a grimy, dark Lovecraftian horror shooter with a grimy, dark hyper-industrial soundtrack. Do I need to explain why I like Quake so much? Also, it has the best name and logo of any game ever.

So yeah, this is the theme music for Quake, or at least this is the music that plays on the title screen when you load the game, you see none of the tracks have any official names. Typically this tune is referred to as the Quake theme, which is what it is. There is also a highly dubious and more obscure set of alternate track names floating around that list it as 'Persia Inversion', which is a great name. It would be a great name for a band, it would be a great name for a child. I just called mine 'Quake' to keep things simple.

Mix Crap

I started recording this song as something of a technical exercise. The intention being to try and get as close to the original as possible, particularly the drum parts. NIN tracks of this period often have many-layered goings on in the drum tracks which is why they sound so good, so this was a worthwhile exercise. Too bad it was pretty disastrous. There's a particular piston-like hissing sound in the drum track which I made a total hash of trying to emulate. The result was about three or so drum tracks which still managed to sound weak and made the main guitar riff just sound wrong. The guitars also sounded muffled despite me trying to make them as trebly as they were in the original. If you have a morbid fascination in what a demo of a demo sounds like (since everything on here is strictly speaking a demo) then you can check it out here. But I really can't recomend that you do. You have been warned.

So I once again reminded myself what a great track the original was and that I really should salvage what had been a pretty disastrous first recording session. The only things that were kept over from the demo were the keyboard parts and the drone guitar at the end of the rock bit. The order of the day was changed to just getting the thing finished and not attempt any fruitless technical exercises. The last recording, Night of the Vampire, suffered from dull drums as a result of running them through the Pod which seems to get rid of everything above a certain frequency (which isn't a bad idea when you're just dealing with guitars.) So the drums were simply put through the Boss bass distortion pedal which I haven't used for a while. This pedal is pretty good for drums since it has a pan pot that lets you balance the distorted signal with the original clean signal so everything doesn't come out sounding all harsh.

In the first recording, the guitars were all playing low chords, and as a result things sounded dull and muddy. In the new version there's two guitars, a slightly better played and recorded low part as well as a second guitar playing the same riff an octave up. This brightens things significantly and should have been in there in the first place. I didn't do any dicking around with tuning this time. The original is in drop-D, and so is mine.

The fade in sound at the beginning samples 'Police' by Angelo Badalamenti from the Lost Highway soundtrack (one of my all-time favourite albums, and another mid-nineties NIN side-project). The demo attempted to sample the same song for the ill-fated piston-hiss effect. How interesting?

The spooky Hammer Horror keyboard parts were actually quite easy to achieve. I found a vaguely organ-like sound on the Korg, stuck on a bit of mod-wheel portamento, and a vibrato effect (probably from the Boss ME-50). I can't remember what the Pod was doing in this equation, it was most likely providing additional vibrato effect, and possibly set to the Fender Bassman model which I've been using a lot lately. (True story: it was designed as a bass amp but was made famous by rock & roll guitarists. Well, I just use it as a bass amp.)

There's a kind of scream effect sitting behind the big keyboard riff. I did that by making odd screaming noises through a mic sent into the ME-50, saturated in all manner of effects and making heavy use/abuse of the Wah/Resonance pedal. Yeah, I'm such a dick like that.

I tried to do the same mixing crap I did on Night of the Vampire. Namely, Parametric EQing to accentuate different instruments at their ideal frequencies. I didn't particularly know I was supposed to do this for the synth parts since all the material I've read only dealt with your typical drums/bass/guitar/vocals. How pedestrian.

The screaming sample was achieved firstly by screaming (really?) into a mic with a strong hallsy reverb on courtesy of the mixer. After this I used the slow down effect in Cooledit, and stretched each sample to be twice as long whilst keeping the pitch the same. Doing this produces a rather cool but usually undesirable sort-of flutter effect which served my purposes well. After that I added a 360-degree stereo rotation effect to make it even weirder. I made a conscious effort on this recording to incorporate Cooledit dickery which I've not really indulged in very much since Cumpari Inversion. Oh shit, I just made another link! I was really pleased with how the screaming turned out.

The droney bit was recorded after I'd finished the rock bit and knew that was safely 'in the can'. I cracked open the midi cables and the Korg manual and spent two hours trying to find the right sort of 'brassy' sound. The sound I was after was somewhere between what was in the original as well as the cool brass sound toward the end of At The Heart Of It All (more mid-nineties NIN references, who would have thought it?) Once I had the right sound, the drones were pretty straightforward to lay down. I added a weird 'bell' sound to fill out the drone section. The 'brassy' sound uses an organ sound from the Micro Korg's incredibly useful sound bank (sine/square/triangle waves all sound the same after a while. Totally not useful for 'drone'.) The 'bell' sound used one of the bell samples from the Korg (the weirdest one.) In each case I turned the attack right down (so sounds take a while to fade in) and turned the release way up (so sounds take a while to fade out), the sounds were also played a few octaves from where I think the 'middle C' note is for each sample, so it's all low and unrecognisable. Instant drone! Recording the drone bit was a lot of fun, and I quite like that whole grim soundscape thing, so I might do that again at a later date.

The Micro Korg, as versatile and cool as it might be, really needs to be plugged into a computer via MIDI to make patch editing any sort of an 'easy' or a systematic process. Patch editing is HARD and you really need to be able to see every setting in front of you with a load of sliders if you don't know what you're doing. Maybe if you're Trent Reznor or something, you can get cool sounds just by using the Micro Korg's on-board dials and imagining it all in your head. If you're like me though, you'll need to use Korg's sound editing programme.

At the time his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single mad word of all too obvious source:
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”