I suppose I should chime in here.
I have a complicated relationship with the Microbe Stage soundtrack. It was very early work for me and doesn’t reflect my current ability as a composer, but at the same time I don’t think I could really recreate it now.
Mostly that’s my own fault: many of the tracks were exported from one project, then messed with as pure audio (using Paulstretch, phasers, flangers, reversing, etc.) with parameters that I didn’t save. So it would be very difficult to go back to the original project and come out with something that has the same recognisable characteristics at the end. Not to mention, some of the original projects are likely corrupted now as they’ve moved through two new PCs and the instrument settings sometimes get lost with each transfer.
On the other hand, I do still like most of it. I get what people are saying about Unicellular Organisms for example, but I’m still too attached to it. LegoHoss came to me with the original track and I thought it needed something else, and that turned out to be reversing the track and playing it simultaneously with the original in each stereo channel. The end result is a track that’s a perfect palindrome. I know it’s silly of me, but I still find that cool and don’t want to give it up.
I’ve considered the Microbe Stage soundtrack done for some time now for a few reasons:
- It’s available on our Bandcamp page and YouTube channel as the full soundtrack. It strikes me as wrong to go messing with that after we’ve given people the “final” version of something.
- I personally don’t want to go back to producing music in the same way. Again, that’s mostly the workflow - making fundamental changes to a track by editing the exported audio is not how I want to do things anymore.
- Even so, doing it all that way did give the whole thing a nice coherent aesthetic, which is more than can be said for the rest of the soundtrack. Creating more tracks in the same vein might be difficult as I’ve moved on and adopted different musical preferences.
All that said, the arguments in this thread are convincing.
If people are truly in favour of a revamp, I guess I could go looking through the original projects to see what could be salvaged or recreated. If that doesn’t work, I could always “remaster” the audio. I think Unicellular Organisms could be made less grating with a few filters and stereo narrowing. I’m also continually cursing my decision to put flange on the entire mix for some tracks, as it totally messes up the bass frequencies in a way that almost hurts. I can correct that with just the audio files too.
As for new tracks…maybe I’ll have to let go and say we can change the track listing after the fact. I definitely agree with all of @psychochef’s guidelines for anything new we make, especially the leitmotifs which I wish I’d included in the original soundtrack. I can even suggest a few more but this post is long enough as it is so I’ll wait to see what everyone thinks first.