Just another rendition of the Lemmings soundtrack

[The Tomato Watcher]

This is something I've been wanting to do for a while now, and this summer I decided to do it! I've recreated every original Lemmings tune in Renoise, a very nice tracker program, converted them to OGGs, and set them to loop when appropriate. Some of them may sound a little strange when listening to them standalone, as some of them fade out after the loop point, while others I couldn't be bothered, but they should all sound fine in-game. The tracks are in the default order, so Amiga order for the original game, and DOS order for Oh No!

I didn't use the MIDIs directly, but I did use them as reference, along with the Amiga MODs and occasionally the DOS VGMs. I tried to include the best parts of every version of each song, as well as slightly extend each track if possible. For example, the first half of "Can-Can" is based on the MIDI and the Amiga version, while the second half is based off the Archimedes version, with my own embellishment at the end. For several tunes, I didn't have much to work with and/or anything I tried to add to it or change just didn't sound good, so I was mostly faithful to the Amiga version, DOS version, or MIDI in those cases. My top priority was to make sure the tunes sounded pleasant enough, and I think I accomplished that decently well.

Huge thanks to freewavesamples.com, which provided the vast majority of the instruments I used to make this. I sampled a few instruments that I really like from a few versions of the original game, such as the brass section from the Amiga version and the synth bass from the DOS version. The rest just came with Renoise, with the exception of the stock dog bark sound effect I used in "Doggie."

And of course, this wouldn't be possible without all of these wonderful composers: Brian Johnston, Tim Wright, Justin Scharvona, Tony Williams, Matt Furniss, Tomomi Hatekeyama, Jeroen Tel, Colin Andersen, and Phil Stringer.

This rendition isn't anything too special, but I don't think it sounds too bad. If you simply want to hear another version of the soundtrack, you might enjoy this. Feel free to use these tracks for whatever you want if you wish, be it level packs, a video, or anything else. Just be sure to credit me in some way.

Download link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zflk80qbgfuud14/Tomato%27s_Lemmings.zip?dl=1

[mobius]

I really liked the personal spin you put on some of them, well done!

maybe I should say I don't despise any of them like I do some of the originals cause of the instrumentation used that is hard on the ears

Tim3; the piano intro was well done. You said you did this on a MIDI track I think? Still; I was impressed cause it takes a musical ear to put together a rhythm like that cause the reverb/echo makes it sound like a different rhythm when the band kicks in. That might be my favorite one out of this bunch. Despite "Tim 1" usually being my favorite.

Tim2: just a minor criticism; during the second verse the "Orchestra Hit" sound (which is what I believe that is? unless I'm wrong but thought I recognize) sounds bit off to me and it's a bit hard to hear some of the other instruments during that part.
Otherwise though I liked this one as well and I like how you combined the original (DOS Amiga etc) versions with the Commodore 64 version.

"Smiling Blues" -- this is my favorite of the ONML tracks, I see you went with the slower or less 'full' version, which isn't my favorite but I still liked it
Maybe what I'm saying doesn't make sense; but on some versions (Amiga) this song has quite a different feel to it imo, like there's a lot more faster paced movement in the verse.
In any case don't  I liked your version; wouldn't have thought of it without the title but it does have a blues sounds .

Btw; are those your own titles for the ONML songs?

[The Tomato Watcher]

Thank you so much! I will say "personal spin" may be a bit of a stretch since I didn't really add too many of my own ideas except for some embellishments that anyone could come up with; I mainly just combined ideas from existing versions of the song, including the classical composition (or demo tune) they originated from in a couple cases.

For Tim 3, I didn't use MIDI at all, just 7 echo tracks for that intro. I primarily based this one off the Puggs in Space demo tune, just with more Lemmings-y instrumentation, for the most part.

For Tim 2, that is indeed an orchestra hit, and that is a fair criticism. I knew if I was going to do anything badly on this endeavor, it would be the mixing. It's definitely a little too loud. I'm glad you liked how I combined the versions though, I thought that would be cool.

I totally get what you mean about the Smiling Blues, honestly I'm not sure why I went with the non-Amiga arrangement of this tune since I think the Amiga version sounds a bit better, but I think it turned out really well nonetheless. And no, these are definitely not my own titles for the ONML tunes. They come from the developer sound test from the DOS version. They're not supposed to be the actual titles, but since we don't have actual titles for them at all, and the track order differs between versions of the game, they're the best identifiers we have.

[NieSch]

Very well done!

[WillLem]

I sampled a few instruments that I really like from a few versions of the original game, such as the brass section from the Amiga version and the synth bass from the DOS version

How did you record the samples for these instruments? I'd particularly like to get the Amiga brass, and I have an idea of how I'd go about it but it would be good to know the process you used since the samples sound pretty spot on in your tracks.

[The Tomato Watcher]

Ah, well for the Amiga instruments, I just opened the MODs that came with NeoLemmix in OpenMPT, which let me access each of the samples and save them to my computer. For the DOS instruments, I downloaded the VGMs off vgmrips.net, opened them in foobar2000 with the Game Emu Player component, and isolated the channel they were playing in. I then recorded and trimmed them with Audacity. I did a similar procedure with the one C64 instrument I used, just using a dedicated SID player instead of foobar2000.

[WillLem]

Ah, well for the Amiga instruments, I just opened the MODs that came with NeoLemmix in OpenMPT, which let me access each of the samples and save them to my computer

Access in what way? Do the MODs themselves contain the actual sound files as sampled instruments? I've never used MOD format before so I'm unfamiliar with how it works.

I can manually sample an instrument, but it doesn't sound like that's what you've done for the Amiga sounds (i.e. they don't sound like they've been pitch-shifted - I could be wrong, though), so I'm interested to know the exact process you used. If you'd be happy to share it in a bit more detail (or even share the samples themselves) that would be great!

[The Tomato Watcher]

Yes, the MODs contain the actual sampled instruments. Here, I can just share all the Amiga samples then.

I put them in four groups. One for Brian Johnston's samples, one for Tim Wright's samples, one for special level samples, and one for ONML samples, since they're quite distinct from each other with very little overlap. You might wanna finetune some of these, since they're not all tuned to the same standard, especially most of Tim Wright's samples.

[WillLem]

Thanks, Tomato!

[RubiX]

Well done!