DESCRIPTION:
Samples taken from an original 1990s Sega Genesis Mortal Kombat and imported into Ableton Live. All sounds in this remix were sampled, processed, and resampled from the original game. No extra virtual instruments, third party one shots, or loops were added.

This is my son, Silas.. He loves video games..
He was given an original early 1990s Sega Genesis from his
uncle Dan in 2006. It still works!
I've had to splice a new end on the wire. We have the power cable rigged up with eletrical tape to hold it in place. And of course we have to blow into the cartridges. But, it's supplied us with hours of good times.
One of Silas favorite games is Mortal Kombat. A fighting game with six scenes and theme music for each. So, my journey began. I wanted to sample each levels theme song and sound effects and do a remix.
The first obstacle was how to get the sound into my rig. The old Sega Genesis only has coax out? So, I grabbed my dusty VCR. Plugged the Sega into the VCR Coax, Out the VCR Coax into my tv for a visual. Out the VCR phono jack into my rig converting to quarter inch. Pure 16 bit quality at it's finest.
I first imported the Theme songs and time stretched them to 128bpm. All the Themes were close to this tempo and 128bpm fits into 2 minutes perfectly. 64 measures/making 16 four bar phrases.
I have a chart available for download https://www.dropbox.com/s/0jlgpksa0wr1dzf/Number%20of%20Measures%20in%201%20Minute%20of%20Music%20at%20Various%20Bpms.pdf if your interested? It shows how many measures fit into 1 minute of space at any given bpm. It's commmon for tv ads and jingle spots to be in even 30 second increments. So, I use this as a quick reference.
Once I captured the audio, I proceeded to chop, edit, stretch, cut, paste and effect. I built a drumkit in Impulse by grabbing short samples of kiks and snares from the theme songs. Impulse is a simple sampler made especially for drum sounds. You can edit the start & end points, stretch, pitch, set volume and various filters.
I built a bass sound from a 1 second sample from theme 4? Dropped it into a simpler. Set its loop points and gave it a small envelope filter sweep. I wanted more bite so I added some processing: EQ, Saturator, and Overdrive. Then applied a Low Filter Oscillator to the Filter and Amplitude. I used midi learn to assign a fader on my keyboard to control the LFO speed. This was a fun sound to work with.
I ended up with about 20 tracks of various samples to mix and mash together. All the sounds in this song were derived from the game samples. No extra virtual instruments or 3rd party samples were used.

Alby Odum