Playing a lot of video games from the 90's and up to the mid 2000's, there's a lot of soundtracks that always caught my attention--and more importantly the sounds used. I sometimes think the 'sounds' used are just as important as the music itself; although this has generally been neglected as few wish to capture a specific sound at the risk of there's always 'something better' technlogically, but this ignores the fact that sometimes sounds are unique regardless of the technology.
Mark Knight (TDK) mentioned how plain and uninteresting most music in the video game industry is today both aurally and melodically; many musicians today are utilizing live orchestras and the cream of the crop in terms of technology which tend to be extremely ambient and don't lack the extra aural touches that some of these legacy ROMplers and samplers offer. For instance, I read a comment about one artist writing off the JV-1080 in favour of ONLY using East/West Quantum Leap sounds, but they still have quite a bit of magic in certain situations that both should be used, in my opinion. Use both!
Sune Pedersen is actually the guy who tipped me off about the JV-1080 and said it had million dollar sounds on the cheap, although physical JV-1080s have been climbing up in prices, and the Roland cloud JV-1080 VST doesn't include the SR-JV80 cards.
Games in question: Drilling Billy / The Worlds of Billy
Website: http://www.sonnymaestro.com
Games in question: Glover, Rollercoaster Tycoon I & II, Chris Sawyer's Locomotion, Descent I & II
Website: http://www.amigaworks.com
Games in question: Mask of Eternity, Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim, Civilization II: Fantastic Worlds
Website: https://www.kmmproductions.com
Games in question: Caesar 3, Stronghold 1, Stronghold Crusader
Website: http://www.nightowlproductionsinc.com
Games in question: Lords of the Realm II, Lords of Magic, Pharaoh
Website: http://www.keithzizza.com
Games in question: Warhammer: Dark Omen, Dungeon Keeper 2
Website: http://www.flitkillsmoths.co.uk/
Games in question: Seven Kingdoms, Seven Kingdoms II, Siege of Avalon
Website: http://www.lynnemusic.com
Games in question: Warcraft II, Starcraft I
Games in question: Gubble 1, Gubble 2
Games in question: Age of Empires 1, Age of Empires 2, Age of Mythology
Website: http://www.stephenrippy.com
Games in question: Lands of Lore I-II-III, Red Alert, Nox
Website: http://www.frankklepacki.com
Games in question: Sim City 3000, Sim City 3000 Unlimited
Website: http://www.jerrymartinmusic.com/
Yamaha VL-1
Games in question: King of Dragon Pass
*RIP ~ 2021*
Games in question: Heretic, Hexen, Hexen II, Necrodome, Mageslayer
Website: http://kevinschilder.com
Games in question: Turrican
Website: http://www.huelsbeck.com
Games in question: Knights of Honor
Games in question: Rayman 1
*RIP ~ 2019*
Games in question: Mechwarrior 2
Games in question: Diablo 1, Diablo 2
Games in question: Heroes of Might and Magic I, II and III.
Website: http://www.greenstreetstudios.com
!!! Some sort of undisclosed sampler and undisclosed samples
Games in question: Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood
Advisory: there's *so little* information about Tapio Muley and his equipment. However, I can say I hear identical sounds in Robin Hood as I do with Rayman 3.
Games in question: The Incredible Machine, Return of The Incredible Machine
Games in question: Dr. Lunatic, Spooky Castle: Kid Mystic, Eddie Galaxy, Loonyland
Games in question: Bejeweled, Bejeweled 2, Alchemy
As you can tell from the above, a lot of these artists used samplers with sample products, diskettes, CD-ROMs, SCSI hard drives and the like--which are now virtually unobtanium or actually permanently lost. This is kind of sad because it can be next to impossible to get some of the sounds used on: Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim, Caesar 3, Lords of the Realm II, Stronghold 1, etc. I wish I had the source for some of the more prominent samples used but it's a dead end. Recently I noticed that whatever sample pack Robert Euvino used on Caesar 3 and Keith Zizza on Lords of the Realm 2, was also used on Stargate SG-1 for various music regarding the specific choir sample.
It's one thing to find the sampler, but often a whole other story when trying to find the samples... part of the problem--especially during the earlier portion of the 90's, was that ROMplers were not very mature yet. The JV-1080 singlehandedly was the most used ROMpler for video games (and even film) due to the fact it was, indeed, a very high quality ROMpler. But a lot of samplers were still used before the ROMpler takeover. A big producer of samples then was Spectrasonics of course (of whom Mr. Persing also worked on the JV-1080 and D-50), but not everything came from the Spectrasonics library of course.
Paolo Di Nicolantonio at 'SynthMania' is one of the few individuals who (has) been collecting most of every kind of synthesizer and most importantly samplers. Some of his demonstrations showcase a few legacy sample packs that have been languishing.
Figuring out the synthesizers Allister Brimble used from the very low-def photos was the toughest of any of the ones I looked at, especially since they were so distorted at which point the Korg Wavestation A/D in there almost doesn't even look like a Wavestation. It didn't help that I was absolutely confounded by which ROMpler he was using until I finally found the Yamaha TG77! This is rather curious as I always assumed Allister Brimble wrote the final OST used in Glover as his name is still in the credits, but it was simply due to the fact they never updated them to Paul Weir when the game shipped. What's even stranger about this is after I had discovered Allister Brimble had a TG77, by sheer coincidence it turned out that Paul Weir ALSO used the TG77 (or Yamaha variant thereof) for some of the ROMpler sounds found in Glover's redbook OST. Kevin Schilder and Paul Weir have shared sounds between Glover and Hexen II (yeah, really) so I'm not sure if these portions are the TG77 or an undisclosed sampler and samples that they had (Akai?).
Bjorn Lynne and Stan LePard both used the Yamha VL series, Stan using the (quite sought after!) Yamaha VL-1, and Bjorn the VL-70m. Good luck finding a mouthpiece if it's missing, as the running joke goes. ;)
Jerry Martin and Allister Brimble both owned a Korg Z1, apparently.
Jerry Martin and Frank Klepacki have a fair amount of similar synth modules in their arsenal.
In all of the studio photos I've seen of Frank Klepacki, he always seems to have the same (old!) IBM Navigator Pro mouse from 2002 up until now; it's weird because I thought he would have thrown it out by now, but apparently he must really like the form factor on it. Fortunately you can still find a lot of those new-old-stock so Mr. Klepacki won't have to worry about every changing from his favourite mouse -- ha!
Often the JV-1080 is lauded as one of the most used sound modules, as it can be determined from the above list, it definitely is the only synthesizer that (most) of the above artists have used. And yes! I was able to figure out which people had which SR expansion cards in the JV-1080s (which thankfully unlike lost sampler samples, can be had)... only by virtue of buying nearly all of them (!) and memorizing all of the sounds... heh. If it's of interest I own the following spread across two JV-1080s:
SR-JV80-01 - POP Expansion Board <-- the first expansion card in the series, very old (mine is so old in fact that the ROM chips are branded mitsubishi instead of Roland)
SR-JV80-02 - ORCHESTRAL Expansion Board
SR-JV80-04 - VINTAGE SYNTH Expansion Board
SR-JV80-05 - WORLD Expansion Board
SR-JV80-06 - DANCE Expansion Board
SR-JV80-07 - SUPER SOUND SET Expansion Board
SR-JV80-09 - SESSION Expansion Board
SR-JV80-10 - BASS AND DRUM Expansion Board
Finding samples for the Roland S-700 series is notoriously difficult. I know Kevin Manthei had some of his (most?) on diskette. I believe Kevin has recently sold or got rid of the S-700s, so that means all of the sample diskettes with them, too bad :(
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