C64 SID remix – R-Type theme song (beta!)
(Don’t care about my rant below but want to listen to the song? Click here to jump to the audio player 
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Here’s something a little different – nearly half-way through last year, I thought I’d finally do something I’d been wanting to do for years and years, ever since I stumbled across the C64 Back in Time remixes when they first hit the internet.
One of the tunes on the C64 I absolutely loved was the theme song Chris Hülsbeck did for the R-Type port on the C64 – it started off as this cool bass-line and drum combo and then adds a touch of synth and melody to spice things up before breaking momentarily… and then BAM — he goes into this awesome synth chorus, then rolls it back into the previous melody, rinses and repeats with alternative basslines, breaks again, goes into different variations… just amazing, amazing stuff – complex, stunning, beautiful arrangements on such a humble home computer. For those unawares or maybe just want to take a trip back in time, here’s a clip from YouTube of the C64 title screen running a complete loop of the song:
Anywho, going back to the original story before I got distracted – I wanted to do a cool remix of the opening song. Unfortunately, for some reason I really, really struggle with working on audio sequencing and loop-creation programs. I got my head around a reasonable amount of bog-standard MIDI-sequencing when I was in high school and played around with a basic loops and sequencers (like the early eJay series of stuff, specifically Rave eJay), but as soon as I wanted to get into anything more complex, I always struggled to achieve anything! The best I got was mixing stuff on ReBirth on the fly, because I struggled making anything remotely awesome when I tried to build up patterns myself, I used to always get confused Then I tried messing around on a demo of Fruity Loops, and I had no idea where to even start I kinda gave up after that.
So, I finally decided that I’d have a crack anyway – the end result takes a lot of the original SID elements because I absolutely loved them and wanted to preserve them, but I wrapped them around some more contemporary progressive trance bass lines. I made a few drum loops as well, but I still think they could sound a bit more interesting The end result is still in beta, as there are things I’d like to tighten up – the original export file I created was actually lacking volume and bass, and since I couldn’t be bothered opening up the program, I took the file into Goldwave and worked on the volume and selectively equalised the sound to make it sound a lot beefier than the standard export file I created. There’s a little clipping at the end of the track, and some of the SID sampling needs work, but hey, it’s a beta, and it’s been sitting around on my PC for over 12 months and the only audience have been Wifey and members of my family, so I thought I’d put this one out into the wild. Feel free to leave comments if you’re interested, though I’ve noticed this blog’s not getting too much traffic, which is nice because I don’t the streaming audio to take out my bandwidth 
You might need to turn up the volume a bit as well – I tried maximising the volume further, but it kept on clipping
Note that the various samples are copyright of their respective owners, this is just a little remix I’ve put together for a bit of fun
