DOOM: Behind the Music
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN raves about it as one of the best conference talks, showing a master's creative process and sound design.
What it is
Mick Gordon's GDC 2017 session on composing the Doom (2016) soundtrack. He details his compositional process, production techniques and the experimental instrument and synth design behind the music.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 5 different months, 2017 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec pault · 2017-11 · on “Audio Design Deep Dive: Scoring Wolfenstein II with the Baschet sonic sculptures”
Here's one of the instruments from the Baschet workshop: [LINK] Mick Gordon–who scored the previous Wolfenstein game–did a great presentation on the instrument design for the Doom 2016 soundtrack, which is in my opinion one of the best (the best?) game soundtracks of all time: [this video]
Strong rec agentwiggles · 2022-11 · on “My full statement regarding DOOM Eternal”
This is really disappointing to read. Mick's soundtrack was a huge part of making DOOM 2016 and Eternal such great experiences. His talk at GDC where he goes into some of the process of creating the soundtrack is fantastic, so much fun to see the creativity he brought to the game's music. [this video] The next DOOM will be a little less DOOMy without him.
Strong rec epiccoleman · 2023-05 · on “Show HN: I've built a spectrogram analyzer web app”
Mick Gordon did some fun hidden spectrogram imagery in the Doom 2016 soundtrack. He talks about that and plenty of other cool stuff in his talk at the 2017 GDC conference. One of my favorite conference talks ever, he did so much cool experimentation to get the sounds he used on the soundtrack, and watching his talk is one of those moments where you really get to see a master of his craft let loose and explain his process. [this video]
Recommends acomjean · 2020-05 · on “Learn sound theory with an acclaimed synth company”
I had a dx7 in college. Its an FM synth, an from the little diagrams on the top, it was fascinating. I could make my own sounds, but I never could get the time to get programming (beyond detuning the sound and doubling it to make a "fatter" sound, the dx7 had a gray matter mod chip). Lamentably in the 90s information about this stuff was harder to come by, plus the 2 line led screen to input things wasn't ideal. You can see the top of the keyboard images here: [LINK] But the internet abounds with sound making tools! ableton has a synth basics online class/demo kind of thing: [LINK] visual programing sound machines in pd [LINK] Also the GDC talk by the sound designer of doom (the new one). He
Recommends acomjean · 2020-11 · on “Dusk is a 90s style shooter from the mind of a teenager (2016)”
Doom came out right when I left univeristy. Loved that game. I like the new Dooms too. I think they're fun. Way more "doom like" than anything else I've played since. The "New Doom" music/sound producer gave a pretty good GDC one hour talk about the music came about. Some fun stories there ( the sound easter egg story was fun). Its more than about just the sound, its about process and change. [this video]