Sam & Max Hit the Road - Remastered Soundtrack

[Laserschwert]

Some of you might have already seen this on Twitter or some Discord, but I guess this is the right place to post this as well. As a Christmas present to myself I bought a great set of virtual jazz instruments, ProjectSAM's Swing! and Swing More!, which I've eyed for a while for one specific purpose: Using them to finally create a remastered version of the Sam & Max Hit the Road soundtrack by Clint Bajakian, Peter McConnell and Michael Land, so here we go:
 

This is the slowly growing playlist on Soundcloud, and once it's finished, I'll provide download links to the complete soundtrack.

Edited January 8, 2021 by Laserschwert

[s-island]

Some good samples in there. To be pedantic, I see you didn't credit Clint Bajakian who actually composed the majority of the game. Michael Land talked about it briefly on Telarium's now gone Michael Land page: "I didn't really do anything at all on Sam and Max (I think I may have done one piece, if that). Peter McConnell did a lot of initial sketches of themes early on, and Clint Bajakian took it from there and pretty much scored the bulk of the game by himself."

[Laserschwert]

Thanks for the heads up, I've fixed it. I only took a quick glance at the game's credits on Mobygames.com and used the first music-related entry (which was obviously just the programming side of things).

[ThunderPeel2001]

Lovely job. A vast improvement! But it's still my least favourite LucasArts (or TellTale) soundtrack. I could just never get behind this one. 

[Laserschwert]

Several tracks have been added:

Greetings from the USA
The Ball, The Diner, The Bender and the Binoculars
Dino Bungee National Memorial

[Scummbuddy]

While you work on another one or two could you see about documenting your process a bit for a post? I would love to hear about the effort being put in here!

[Laserschwert]

Good idea, sure, I can do that.

[Laserschwert]

Having worked on and off on this, the tracklist has now grown considerably, reaching almost an hour of music. Fun thing I've noticed: The LucasArts logo uses the same theme heard in "Nobody Makes Fun Of My Hair".

 

 

[Scummbuddy]

For me, the embedded SoundCloud links aren't being rendered, either by SoundCloud or MojoForums. So here's a direct link: https://soundcloud.com/laserschwert/sets/sam-max-hit-the-road

 

[Laserschwert]

That's just the usual forums shenanigans, as embedded images don't load either once more.

[TimeGentleman]

I think we've talked elsewhere about how the Lucasarts adventure scores would often riff on existing tunes. I can't find that right now, but as this is HtR-specific, and may even inspire Laserschwert if they's not aware already, I figure this is as good a place as any to post about how I heard this fishing-themed song on a tv show:

 

 

and realised that it sounds very much like the World Of Fish theme from HtR!
 

(51m43s in, and can also be heard in Laserschwert's Soundcloud embed in the OP, of course)

 

Amazing how many of these cheeky references they snuck in to soundtracks I've heard a million times without ever being aware!

Edited August 14, 2023 by TimeGentleman

[Huz]

The version by Taj Mahal is even more recognisably the same:

 

But yep, Fishin' Blues is a hundred year old folk song that's been recorded loads of times over the years! I bet there are some great versions out there.

[Laserschwert]

Nice find! I've added it to the description of the track.

 

By the way, by now I've added even more tracks to the soundtrack, with the most recent ones (still months old, oops) being:

 

Wack-a-Rat
Trixie's Trailer

BumpusVille

The Bodyguard and the Robot

Who's John Muir?
 

Edited August 15, 2023 by Laserschwert

[TimeGentleman]

Many tracks left to add?

 

Also, any plans to do the same for DOTT?

 

Edited August 15, 2023 by TimeGentleman

[Laserschwert]

Yeah, there's another hour of music missing, so not even close to finished

I'd love to do DOTT at some point, but more projects than free time already makes this one take ages.

[Laserschwert]

So, I gave the DOTT main titles track a try:

 

Edit: Mh, compared to the in-game track, the MIDI rips seem to be missing certain parts or instrument lines. Gotta investigate further.

Edited August 18, 2023 by Laserschwert

[TimeGentleman]

Promising start, though!

 

You've obviously heard this live performance already, as you posted it, but I'm wondering if it will provide some inspiration. It makes some strong choices, some missteps:
 

 

Edited August 18, 2023 by TimeGentleman

[Laserschwert]

You might have noticed that that's my YT channel 😉

 

Anyway, that arrangement takes a few liberties too many though. Should I do a remastered soundtrack, I'd like to stick at least a bit closer to the original track.

 

Edit: Cheeky bastard 😀 

Edited August 18, 2023 by Laserschwert

[TimeGentleman]

Heh heh

 

Yeah, definitely not suggesting you recreate that arrangement (although that would be an interesting bonus track!) but I do like some stuff about it, like some of the instrument choices, the way the brass section often hold notes for a while (I do not know music terminology!) etc.

[Laserschwert]

And it's been updated.

[Serge]

A very old different attempt (end titles, though - and without most of the percussion, and some panning issues in places that I never fixed) - towards the end of this video. 🙂 Was actually thinking about getting back to it with newer samples. But I really like your arrangement so far. 🙂

 

 

Edited August 21, 2023 by Serge

[Laserschwert]

Ah what the hell, here's another one:

 

[Laserschwert]

Not yet worthy of its own thread, I toyed with the idea of remastering (some tracks of) the Fate of Atlantis soundtrack (yay, more projects before finishing others!).

 

I know, there are several re-arrangements already out there, and no offense to the people involved, but they are all not really good (not the relatively straightforward MIDI-to-audio conversions, those are perfectly fine for what they are). Sure, some of them use nice (and probably expensive) sample libraries, but to me, it sounds like they don't really care how to use them properly. I am not a professional musician or composer, but even I notice when there's not much care put into stuff like instrument articulations. And with especially the brass being THE crucial instrument in John Williams' compositions for Indy (hell, ESPECIALLY the main theme!!), you would think that they'd put extra care into AT LEAST the lead trumpets playing the Raider's March. That, plus drowning everything in reverb that sounds like the whole thing was recorded in a church, I'd say there are at least some reasons to give it another go.

 

For now, I've only started on the opening theme, to at least get that sound down:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xLcCnrbfF_LYMCZKSEcTcRuyEkLBDzF2/view?usp=sharing

Speaking of which, does anybody here have a REALLY complete rip of the FoA MIDIs? The Highland-ones are pre-arranged, and not ideal in some situations (at least, I think the transitions between the different parts of the opening could be synced up better). VGMRips has a complete rip of the Adlib soundtrack, with all the different iMUSE bits as separate tracks, and that's exactly what I'm looking for, only with the MT-32 tracks. Then again, ripping the MT-32 tracks with ScummRevisited gives me tracks with completely wrong instrument mappings, and no tempo markers at all. Stan's Previously Used Soundtracks seems to use different MIDIs, which would be interesting to look at. @Rum Rogers @s-island

Edited November 16, 2023 by Laserschwert

[Serge]

Here are all the sound files from the CD version of FOA ripped with SCUMM Revisited's potential successor... They all play back fine in iMUSE Sequencer sending to an MT-32, so the instruments are correct, and so are the tempo changes (those that aren't actually implemented in script through iMUSE commands, rather than MIDI). The MT-32 versions are obviously the ones named "ROL.MID". The ones without ".MID" are raw rips of the block, which include iMUSE's headers, and hence won't be read by any standard MIDI reader. The content of those headers can be found in the .txt files.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/jn128u4vvb5v3ug109y4h/foa.zip?rlkey=z16uhvdzbr62ieflw73lqc49l&dl=0 (note: this file will likely be gone in a week)

 

Note that iMUSE simply stores its "bits" as separate tracks in a single file - Standard MIDI format 2 (0 = single track, 1 = the typical multiple simultaneous tracks, 2 = multiple independent tracks). That may be the ones VGMRips has, verbatim. That's also how these MIDs are stored - they're just raw rips from the files. But then, I'm pretty sure the SCUMMRev ones were too - as far as I recall, it simply changed the format 2 bit to format 1, in order to allow it to be read by more applications. The only difference in any MIDI compliant app would be that it would interpret it as multiple tracks to be played at the same time.

 

ETA: As for the HighLand MIDIs, their main problem in terms of orchestrating isn't that we sequenced them based on taste - it's that they're remapped to General MIDI instruments, which does not cover all the instruments available on the MT-32 - and even MT-32 timbres with the same name (say, "Clarinet") may sound very different from the typical GM instrument with the same name - or the soundfont we used as target. Of course, can't go back, since the MT-32 has three acoustic pianos, four electric pianos, three string sections, etc. - which would have been mapped to fewer GM instruments. Also, the MT-32 allowed custom timbres through sysex - which had to be mapped to some mostly fitting GM instrument. Hence, the original MT-32 MIDIs should always be the reference. The HighLand MIDIs were for easy listening on a GM/GS device.

 

ETA2: The files that contain actual music, as opposed to sound effects, should mostly be named "-theme" (the names are from the names they get in decompiled scripts) - but I cannot guarantee that I've been 100% consistent when naming them, so some of them may be "-sound" - or "sound-xxx" (used for sounds I haven't named yet).

Edited November 17, 2023 by Serge

[Laserschwert]

Wow, thanks a lot! I'll check it out in the next few days. As for MT-32 instruments, luckily they are properly documented, so figuring out the right one is just a matter of looking up the patch number. I don't need to exactly match GM instruments anyway, as I am working with my virtual instruments. And I usually pick whatever makes most sense in each case.

 

There are some weird cases, though, where the AdLib tracks actually offer more content. At least with a quick comparison between the Roland and AdLib End Credits (ripped via ScummRev), I noticed that the short string marcatos during the Raider's March are only present in the AdLib version. So, I guess to get the most out of the files, I'll have to compare both versions to see if anything can be added from the AdLib tracks.