Music Covers by Xeotroid (February 2018 - Icarus v2)

[Jimmy]

Ancient Aliens cover is live! There's a link to YouTube and for download in the main post, as always. Enjoy!

That rendition of "Desk Lamp" is the most enjoyable remix of a Doom MIDI I've ever heard. Everything sounds right, and by God, real! Everything. Even the guitar! That is quite a feat.

"Web of Steel" came out really cool and trippy. Super stuff there, too.

"The Greater Good" and "Tales of Old" sound pretty damn cool and authentic. Nice full orchestral sound there.

I must critique though, and you probably won't be as thrilled to hear that I didn't really enjoy too many of the other tracks. Some of them are actually kinda butchered. "Birdsong"'s lead guitar (which seems out of tune by a fraction of a semitone!), and the high-pitched taiko drum in "Trapeze" that somehow sounds like a kazoo, are the gravest offenders here. "Colliding Nebulae" really needed a more subtle organ and some more intense drums. "Gold Rush" became some sort of hard dance remix I could hear in a stifling nightclub. "Tribal Dance" on the other hand is a disparate, confusing mess (the MIDI itself is highly avant garde by its very nature of course, so I can understand difficulty may have been had). The overdriven guitar in "Other Side of the Moon" is a highly grating synth lead which I'd find hard to listen to in any context.

I do very much appreciate that much time and thought was invested in this. For the most part I do enjoy your remixes, and indeed any remix of my or a fellow MIDI artists' work, but more than a few tracks in these packs tend to have a few little (or severe) things that are quite clearly wrong, and as a result I'm not terribly compelled to visit these more than once. The quality standard is still at a reasonable height though! Do keep it up, please.

[Xeotroid]

Thanks a lot! And thanks for the criticism, too.

Until I relistened to the MIDI version of Birdsong right now, I thought the guitars were a little bit untuned even there, to make the hellish theme stronger, but I just screwed up, the guitars are fine in the original. I put two identical guitars next to each other with different amplifiers and maybe that's what caused this. Oh, well... I personally don't mind it that much, even though it's kinda badly tuned, it sounds kinda good, for some reason. (EDIT: But at least I didn't leave an older version there with *slightly* louder guitars...)

I was aiming at some sort of disco / dance (I guess...?) style with Gold Rush and I personally like it, but it might not be for everyone's taste. Space Train and Hypercube are similar in that I tried to make it work with the neon scenery. In Other Side of the Moon, I feel like the guitar instrument in the original MIDI was less pleasant than the synth I used. It's more in the background and while it has this rough, vibrating tone, I find it nicer than high pitched General MIDI guitar instruments.

As with Colliding Nebulae, I totally agree. The organs would still work fine if I would compress the track a little bit more and made the drums louder, so the organs would go more into the background, but, yeah... I was starting getting lazy in the last two tracks. I've never really liked Tribal Dance, I (usually) hate 808 drums, so I've added some tribal drums and at first it sounded fine, but then the other instruments came in... If I've just tried to remix it to Red Dwarf's theme song style, the result might have been nicer.

Anyway, thanks again! I really appreciate it.

[souio]

Just discovered your covers today and wow, I actually ripped some of them off of youtube to put on my MP3 player for my commute to work!

I have a couple of questions. How do you actually rip the midis from the wads? I've heard a lot of tunes from some wads that I wanted to learn on guitar myself, and I'd like to isolate the guitar parts on some of the midis in order to hear them easily.

Also what is your process when it comes to making your covers? I love the diversity of styles and creativity used.

Thanks in advance and keep up the good work! Can't wait for your future projects

[Xeotroid]

Thanks!

I rip the MIDIs using Slade 3, which is a WAD editing utility (and more, it even has a map editor). It can convert Doom's MUS format to MIDI, too. Then I load them to FL Studio (if it's converted from MUS, I need to slow it down from 140 BPM to 120 BPM. I forgot to do that in Memento Mori 2 ), swap out the instruments (either for sample libraries or synths), mix it and do some mastering (Multiband compressor and an equalizer is the best I can do). The notes themselves are often changed because many instruments are sensitive to note velocity and can produce different sounds based on that. After I render it I just load it to Audacity so I can make the track loop for ZDoom or fade out at the end for normal listening. There's some more stuff involved, like effects (especially for distorted guitars) and hearing unfinished five-second segments of a track ten times in a row.

[Frozenwolf150]

I found a glitch that may be a possible mod conflict. I decided to use the Hexen Sounds Remastered, along with the Scourge of Viscerus wad, and the Wrath of Cronos RPG mod. However, when I got to the second map of Viscerus and collected my character's second weapon, I discovered I was unable to switch back to it. This happened with each character I tested, for example, when my Cleric picked up his Serpent Staff, I switched to the mace to conserve mana, but was unable to ready the Serpent Staff. I ended up having to console in the weapon, but then I found later that the same thing happened to weapon 3.

At first I thought it was an incompatibility between Wrath of Cronos and Viscerus. However, when I disabled the sounds mod and started a new game, everything worked like it should once again. It seems that, for some reason, using Hexen Sounds Remastered caused the game to replace the weapons with different versions in order for the sounds to work. I have no idea why it would do this.

On the other hand, the music remastered mods work just fine, and I've been using them for Heretic, Hexen, and Strife. I've tried several music mods and I consider these to be the best versions.

[Xeotroid]

I totally forgot about that one.
My mod edits actors to add new sounds to them and it conflicts with other mods that do the same thing, such as Wrath of Cronos. I planned to make a high-compatibility version of the mod that would either include only SNDINFO or would purely just replace original sounds, similarly to the Doom HQ Sounds pack.
A quick solution is to just remove text files in the "decorate" folder in my mod's archive (it's a PK3, so you can open it like a ZIP file, with WinRAR, 7Zip, etc.). Some sounds won't work (pickup sound will be generic, monsters won't have some extra effects and some actors won't emit any sound, eg. meat chunks), but it should resolve the compatibility issues. It's basically how I would make the compatibility version, except the now useless sounds are left intact.

[Accensus]

I gotta say, I enjoyed Gold Rush from AA a lot, but your cover makes it even better. 10/10. Keep 'em coming. I'll be checking out your other covers after replaying Gold Rush a couple of times, hehe.

[Xeotroid]

It's been a long time and I finally checked out TNT's soundtrack again. And I kinda liked it... I don't know when I'm going to release the whole thing, but it's coming.

[Enjay]

I really like what I'm hearing here. Faithful to the originals but with enough character of their own to make them a little bit different too. Good quality stuff. Looking forward to TNT.

If you ever feel like branching out to the Wolfenstein soundtrack, I've always felt that it could do with some love. There are some great tracks in there that haven't received much attention as far as modern implementations are concerned.

[Xeotroid]

Thanks! I have some old Wolfenstein covers somewhere but I never finished them and I don't like them much. I might take a look at Wolfenstein later, though.

[Xeotroid]

I've got really bored and I was too lazy to finish this whole thing. When I released the preview video, there were two tracks left, which I finished over the course of a month. Then I waited a month before compiling them into a video. Great workflow, eh? Merry Christmas!


As always, download is in the first post, in MP3, FLAC and for (G)ZDoom / Zandronum.

[Nevander]

Amazing work as always!

[Marveller]

Amazing as always, i plan to plug your channel in a future video.

[Doctrine Gamer]

Finally we have all the top games with the Xenotroid's quality covers. Thank you.

[Enjay]

Ooh, I didn't notice this was out. Unfortunately, something weird is going on with the Mega links. The little M cloud logo thingy loads and then it just sits there doing nothing. I've tried in Firefox, Opera, Chrome, MS Edge and MS IE. Same result:



I guess the problem is at the Mega end of things though so I'll try again later.