Andrew Barnabas is a computer musician, who's songs are guiding us through computer- and videogames since 1990. Starting as a scene musician (his handle was Nightshade) he tracked many great tunes for the legendary demogroup Crusaders. Soon the games industry discovered his talent and hired him for several projects, including Amiga game classics like SWIV, Double Dragon III, Cool Spot or Aladdin.
In 1991 he was one of the founding members of Dens Design, a music studio. Together with Bjorn Lynne and Volker Tripp (aka Jester/Sanity - who left them soon because of studying at university) a successful time began for them. Andrew even found the time to work on his debut CD called Shades, which unfortunately is sold out meanwhile.
After Bjorn Lynne decided to continue his musical career on his own, Dens Design was history. Andrew became the head of musician at Millenium Interactive. Later this company was acquired by Sony and together with Paul "Bob" Arnold he was running Sony's largest European audio facility and worked on titles like Gran Turismo 2 & 3 or C-12: Final Resistance.
In 2001 Andrew Barnabas and Paul "Bob" Arnold left Sony to set up their own sound production company. As Bob and Barn they're now prepared for the future of composing music for videogames and more. Their last finished project is the soundtrack for the PS2 game "Primal". An audio CD is available, of course.
Let's get back to the nostalgic corner, because Andrew Barnabas found the time to write down a few lines about some of his old Amiga tunes. We don't want to hide this interesting information for you, so please go on and read interesting facts some about classic Amiga tunes:
Cool Spot - Wipeout:
The original Megadrive game had a version of Wipeout by the Beach Boys on the title screen, so naturally they wanted a similar thing. The original idea to save loading time / memory was to use samples from the in-game music, but after much persuasion I managed to convince Virgin that first impressions last, so therefore let's have something that sounds as good as possible. They gave me 100k to write the title track in, but I was convinced I could do something which sounded better than the MD version. I employed the services of the guitarist in my uni band at the time to come in and play the lead line for me so I could sample it in. Surprisingly enough it survived the conversion to a sampling rate down to 8-bit 8k (necessary to fit it into 100k!).
Cool Spot - Ingame:
Tommy Tallarico sent me the score to the original game which used the Megadrive's polyphony to the max (10 notes), so it became a big headache having to squeeze this into the Amiga's 4 channels. I also used the multi-mod method that Bjorn Lynne had demonstrated of having a single bank of samples but a large amount of patterns all self contained (looping) within one module. I'm happiest with the latter tracks where I took Protracker's ability to control samples far better than Midi for the MD to make the funk tracks (esp. on the train level) stand out.
Double Dragon III Title:
This track was originally written as a follow up to my 3rd demo track - Water. Water II (cunningly titled I thought) was entered into (and won) the Anarchy Party music competition July '91. A very Jarresque track, using samples I'd made from the Akai S950 and Roland MT32. I actually wrote this track on the piano first (a rarity) to make sure that the themes were as memorable as possible. It also made it onto my debut CD 'Shades' renamed to Water '97. A pain in the arse since I recorded that version at University but had to arrange to come back to my original 6th Form College in South London to take a copy of the Akai S950 samples. Well, it helped retain authenticity with the original track!
I took the song to Sales Curve offices, they were having a laugh and joke whilst I was playing the other tracks, but all went _silent_ when this came on. It was a good feeling.
Double Dragon III Hiscore:
Originally titled Mellow II, the follow up to the hi-score music from SWIV (a suitable choice). Can't remember where I sourced the drum samples from, I think it was a Madonna song or something like that. The original version had a saxophone playing the lead line, but alas the sax samples were somewhat flat and with the sampling tools at the time I didn't have option to alter them. The piano was from the Roland D10 and the chords from a sampler.
Global Gladiators Music:
The first project I worked on for Virgin. Unlike Cool Spot, I chose to use all of the *exact* samples from the Megadrive version. So it sounded _exactly_ the same as the Megadrive original where possible. Again utilising the same multi-tune mod ideas I did in Cool Spot. All done by ear this time, I had no music score or Midi to work from.
SWIV - Decimation:
SWIV - Mellow:
These are the main and hi-score tunes from SWIV, in their original form (the title music from SWIV was cut down to save memory).
Aladdin - Whole new world:
The title track from Aladdin. An interesting story about that track, Virgin wanted me to do the title track using the in-game samples, but I fought like **** to get them to allow me to do a seperate big as **** title tune, and it did get noticed in ALL of the reviews. So I won!!
Aladdin - Ingame:
Aladdin in game is the multimod idea which I pinched from Bjorn Lynne.
That's all from Andrew Barnabas. If you need music for your own games, check out Bob and Barn. | 
Double Dragon III Hiscore
Double Dragon III Title
Aladdin - Whole new world
Cool Spot - Ingame
SWIV - Mellow |