Ghoul School (NES) - Library and Hallway Themes (All Instrument Cover)

Here's a quick medley I put together of the Library and Hallway themes from the somewhat obscure 1992 NES game, Ghoul School! Ghoul School is an early metroidvania type game that I had never played, but I stumbled on the soundtrack for this game recently and thought the main hallway theme was pretty jammin'!
The Hallway theme features a fuzzed out bass as the main melody, with to melodic accompaniment lines, and a deep pocket groove for an NES soundtrack, whereas the Library theme is a minimalist pedal tone based song which modulates some pretty spicy intervals as it progresses through each of its 4 iterations. My approach was to use a heavy arrangement on the Library theme, influenced partially by Juular by Devin Townsend, to build it into something bigger sounding than the original song without obscuring its minimalist quality. For the hallway theme, I just tried to dig into the groove of the original harder allowing it to breathe more in comparison to the Library theme.
Hopefully you enjoyed these two obscure gems from Ghoul School as I did playing theme!
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[@jamesschallert9479]

I never played this, but the tune rocks!

[@thesosomusician]

Same here! Check out the original soundtrack, it's pretty mean as is too: kzbin.info/www/bejne/b2PCnIiEa8afrsU

[@BassicBits]

Very nice! I’m gonna go look up that game and soundtrack now!

[@thesosomusician]

The Hallway Theme is where it's at, super deep pocket for an NES soundtrack! The Library theme is minimalist so I kind of took it on a devin townsend kind of angle to have some fun with it.

[@sarkissamuel]

Nice. One of my fav games.

[@thesosomusician]

Cheers! I never played this one, it kind of looks to me like a cross of The Addams Family, The Goonies, and Back to the Future 2 & 3. It was released pretty late in the NES life cycle.

[@dahunlee_acousticguitar_covers]

Your drums sound awesome as always man. edit: that breakdown after the one minute mark is cool af btw

[@thesosomusician]

Thanks, I've been trying to be a bit more judicious with the parallel compression on the drums, I think it's helping. The segue riff I took the chromatic line I wrote on the bass and played it in two different octaves on guitar, and did a parallel harmony I think in 5ths (might've been 4ths, I forgot already!). Cheers!

[@dahunlee_acousticguitar_covers]

@@thesosomusician all greek to me, but sounds cool lol. I never played the game (although I did play the Nes a bit as a kid), but I also dig the name of the game. Have a nice day btw man.

[@thesosomusician]

Ha, it all used to be greek to me too! Parallel compression is when you blend a sound you compressed with the dry uncompressed signal. Compression can make drums sound beefier and punch harder, but they sound a bit too slappy/barky if you use too much, so doing it in parallel tends to blend the compression in better. If you do it right, you get punchier drums but they still sound natural-ish. Have a good one!

[@dahunlee_acousticguitar_covers]

@@thesosomusician oh I see. How interesting. Kind of reminds me of layering vocal tracks to get a different effect (but too much can make it really muddy). But if you track them panned to the left, center and right channels you can maintain a bit more of the clarity (at least in my limited experience lol). Thanks for explaining!

[@thesosomusician]

Np, there's always something new to learn about recording, it's just like playing an instrument. For things getting muddy when multitracked (it happens also with non-doubletracked instruments like bass and kick drum), you can get more bang for your buck with EQ over stereo panning. When a mix is getting too muddy, it's from a buildup of too many instruments occupying the low mids and mid frequencies, and some instruments benefit from a little judicious cutting of frequencies in those ranges (guitar particularly doesn't need much low frequency for example).