When it comes to James Bond video games, the one that tends to stand out among gamers is Rare’s 1997 release for Nintendo, Goldeneye. One of the game’s fans, composer Rich Douglas, has recently released an album of many of the tracks from the original game and re-orchestrated them to sound like a modern Bond film score.
Goldeneye N64 Orchestrated, which is available for download, is 40 minutes in length and includes a classic sounding version of the James Bond Theme, which bookends the album. We caught up with Rich last week to ask him about his new album.
What made you decide to do this album?
I’ve always been a huge fan of Goldeneye 64 and James Bond in general. In fact, I’ve been producing my own fan based James Bond tracks now for over a decade (all of which can be found via my 007 music archive) and this is a project I have been wanting to tackle for a while.
The music in the game has some really amazing themes and motifs which all work extremely well when presented in more of an orchestral/cinematic form. Speaking of which, the whole purpose of my Goldeneye 64 Orchestrated project was to re-orchestrate much of the music heard in the game to make it sound more like something you would hear in a current Bond film.
That’s why I kept all of my instruments and instrumentation similar from track to track – to give the album a very cohesive film score vibe.
What equipment did you use?
All of the orchestral material is synthetic and comes from a various array of VST plug in instruments. As I’m a video game composer full time I have quite the collection of production quality instrument libraries at my fingertips – many of which are utilized in many popular game and film scores.
The only “real” instrument was the guitar on The James Bond theme (listen below) which is a fender strat that I personally played (and had damn fun doing so).
For those that are more musically inclined or into digitally producing music, all of the brass came from Cinebrass, the strings from Spitfires wonderful Albion libraries, and the synth work was primarily from Zebra – all of these instruments are run and recorded through Reaper, which is my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) of choice. The mastering was done via Adobe Audition CS6 utilizing many different mastering plug ins – mainly from Ozone.
How long did the album take to create?
I did the entire album, start to finish, over the course of a week in between gigs. I like having a tight time frame like that – it usually gets the creative juices flowing rather nicely.
Where to buy ‘Goldeneye N64 Orchestrated’
Goldeneye N64 Orchestrated is available to download in a number of different formats. Click here to listen to samples and find out how to purchase.
