I am once again calling all junglists & drum & bass battlers—the latest edition of the elektronauts drum&bass&jungle battles is back, with Battle Rescore/Remodel!
This month’s mission takes us to the movies with two elements, one open-ended, one prescriptive:
Choose a movie or TV show and create a new main theme for it. Your new theme can be a cover or re-imaging of the original score, a remix, or it can be entirely new. It can use samples from the source or not. How recognizable it is is up to you.
Your new theme must to have a “main character” motif that appears in at least two sections: An intro (as if for intro credits) and an outro (end credits). Each different sectionmust have its own feel, such as tempo, time/key signature, dynamics, etc. The “main character” motifcan be a melody line, a bell pattern, a repeated sample, harmonic interval, or other recognizable element (like say a distinctive patch or specific use of an effect). The “main character” motif CANNOT BE A BREAK Yes, you can use breaks, but it does not count as your motif!
To take part, first post examples of favorite scores and themes in the thread! Not necessarily the one you plan on redoing, but stuff that does a good job establishing key melodies, telling a story, shifting feels and dynamics, etc. Y’know, the classics.
The Rules:
Create a drum n bass or jungle track to serve as a new main theme for a movie or series.
Make sure it has at least 1 leitmotif and 2 different movements.
Allright! A new OST for a 1995 video game coming right up. If all goes to plan, no samples (not even drum samples) will be hurt in the making of my track, and it will all be done with a single hardware thingy.
Since I breached the topic of Video Game OSTs, here are two of my absolute favourites, one new, one from a awhile ago.
Recent: Clair Obscure: Expedition 33. All the art direction in this game is jaw droping, and the orchestral, sometimes intimate, sometimes epic OST does thug at your heartstrings all the time. The characters leitmotifs don’t seem to lend themselves much to DnB/Jungle but some of the upbeat battle music could perhaps be re-purposed. This song about “Alicia” is kind of the main theme, but every character has one, each better than the last.
Older: The secret of Monkey Island. Wacky Piratey Soundblaster goodness. Also works very well in the various orchestral versions that were done in sequels, and the main motif is beyond iconic. And… since all of the games have the mandatory jungle sequence, I think a Jungle remix would be most appropriate.
Great challenge! Here are some examples - most of them are quite old.
But here we go:
One of the lesser known games with music from Chris Hülsbeck ( He also created other great video games soundtracks, e.g. Turrican, Apidya). This was done on the Commodore C64- there is also an Amiga version.
One my first sci-fi experiences as a child. I loved the soundtrack (which was done for German TV):
Ok, this one can only be explained with old childhood memories (no big fan of military in general). But the theme is great:
With this theme, the D&B track will create itself :
Could it be that modern TV shows don’t have themes anymore? No time to waste, they just start after showing the title for a few seconds.
OK, I’ve skipped too many of these DnB battles. I’m in! These three tracks immediately spring to mind:
I’m a huge fan of the XCOM games, but as an American had no idea that the series was pretty much ripped off from this 1970 UK series, and the whole intro is just a banger. And it’s right around 170 BPM!
The title sequence to Archer, which has a lot of that swinging 60’s jazz feel that fed so many sample folders:
And in that same vein–and because somehow nobody’s posted it yet–the best title sequence of all time, Cowboy Bebop:
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