Leaderboard

Moving over from off-topicking my own Sam & Max soundtrack thread, here's the dedicated thread to my remastering project of the Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis soundtrack. To be fair, with several unfinished projects in the works, I can't guarantee anything, though. As stated in that other thread, in my opinion, all remasters or re-arrangements of this soundtrack (even the most recent ones, sorry!) fell flat in a big way. Using fancy virtual instruments isn't all there is to it, if you can't even get the performance of the most essential part of any Indy soundtrack right: the brass. Especially the trumpets playing the A and B themes of the Raiders's March (which, as you die-hard fans might know, is the actual name of the Indiana Jones theme). Originally composed by John Williams as two options for the main theme, the B theme turned into the bridge of the track, since Spielberg liked both enough to be used. So, to make sure that I could actually do better, I tried my hands on the playable introduction of the game, which opens to the Indiana Jones logo with the A theme, followed by some sneaky underscore while you rummage the Barnett College's attic in search of some unknown artifact. As Indy gets knocked down and comes crashing through the ceiling of another floor, our unconscious hero gets a rest while the B theme accompanies a few more on-screen credits. This back and forth between suspenseful underscore and jump-scare transitions to different versions of the B theme culminates in Indy finding the horned Atlantean statue to a rousing crescendo that fades out while Indy leaves the college's main building to deliver the artifact to his mysterious accent-wielding client in his on-campus office. Was I actually successful in turning the MT-32 beeps and boops into something properly orchestral? You decide: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (fan soundtrack) by Clint Bajakian, Peter McConnell, Michael Z. Land A bit of tech-talk: For this I didn't use any of the pre-arranged MIDIs that were released over the years, instead I started with clean rips of all the iMUSE snippets of this game (courtesy of @Serge), which I've combined and arranged from scratch. The introduction already consisted of 11 different cues I needed to combine, and VGMRip's AdLib rip of the music (and some Let's Plays on YouTube) provided a great template. As far as software and virtual instruments go, I'm using Reaper as my DAW and mainly East West's Hollywood Orchestra series, Project Sam's LA Scoring Strings and VSL's Fanfare Trumpets, with a few additional instruments here and there. Anyway, with the main theme out of the way, my plan is to tackle the end credits suite next, as it lets me get my hands on several different themes from the game in one go (plus another go at the Raider's March, yay!).

You could interpret it as being Indy's march (rather than that of the movie "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" or of the multiple raiders of the lost ark in the movie) and therefore referring to him as the singular habitual raider...

The thing is, I wanted to get the intro and end credits out of the way first, as those contain basically the original arrangement of the Raider's March. And since it's so well known, those take the most work, just to make them sound like we are used to. The rest of the soundtrack allows for much more freedom in interpreting them, so it's a lot easier to not make them sound "wrong". I think besides the Atlantis Presentation track I am really looking forward to doing The Coldest Year of My Life, which is basically the Marion/Leia/Han Solo & The Princess theme of this game.

Very nice, looking forward to the credits suite!

It’ll be good.