Commander Keen and blues music

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dark
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Commander Keen and blues music

Post by dark »

Commander Keen and blues music - my two cents.

I have not been able to find Bobby Prince's birthdate, but he seems to be approximately a contemporary of my dad and someone who was a young adult in the 1960s. In the late 1960s in the US, blues music (mostly from the standpoint of blues being infused with rock guitar and keyboard playing) became incredibly popular. One of the most popular bands around 1967 was Cream with Eric Clapton, who styled themselves as a blues band. You also had Jimi Hendrix doing his psychedelic blues, the Beatles and Rolling Stones doing their own versions of blues songs on their late 1960s albums... it was just everywhere. I've had reason to dive into obscure music of the late 60s and early 1970s just out of general interest for the music of that era, and guitarists using the blues scale in their music was just all over the place once Cream got big. My music collection is full of obscure highschool bands of the late 1960s who maybe recorded 2 songs in their short lived history, and all the guitarists are riffing on the blues scale. It was just the zeitgeist for that era and it sounded cool for the time. It also gave musicians a framework to work off of for jamming and playing together instead of more tediously learning how a specific song went. I would also say that music played a huge part of teenage and young adult entertainment in the late 60s/early 70s, with things like school dances or bars in the US often having musicians in (rock) bands providing the music/entertainment over a DJ playing records over a sound system. My dad is of this era, he played in several bands, he idolized Eric Clapton, he has discussed the sudden great motivation amongst teenagers/guitar players of the late 60s to learn how to play blues/the blues scale on the guitar because at the time "it sounded really cool" and also provided a framework for how to play lead guitar compared to tediously learning very specific parts.

By the way, if you are not familiar with blues music or the blues scale, here is an overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eosor-ncv7Y

Anyways, I'm bringing this up because this history of blues/blues scale being popular for people of Bobby Prince's era seems to be a notable backdrop for some of Bobby Prince's Keen music.

It seems that ID basically allowed Bobby Prince to do whatever he wanted for the music in Keen 4-6 without giving him much in the way of specific requests or rejecting much of what he sent them. At the same time, in the early 1990s, Bobby was new to composing music for video games, so he may be relying more on his general background in music instead of thinking about how game music should sound a certain way... It is also reported in some bios of Bobby that he was a member of an RnB band in the late 1960s...

So while I listen to Keen music, I'm thinking stuff like the following sounds like its quite influenced by the blues scale and the popular music of the era when my dad/Bobby Prince were coming of age and playing in bands and learning to play music:

-Keen 4 - Shadowlands
-Keen 4 - Gotta eat your vegetables
-Keen 5 - Omegamatic
-Keen 5 - Be Sphereful
-Keen 5- Snooping
-Keen 6 - Mamba Snake
-Keen 6 - Brer Tar
-Keen 6- Faster

You don't hear blues influenced music a lot amongst popular musicians these days, and in some respects, music that has such an obvious blues influence seems to have been a generational thing that maybe went away as people of Bobby Prince's era moved out of music production. But it brings a smile to my face to hear this Keen stuff with the blues. Its not just a nostalgic memory for me, but also representative of an echo of the 1960s blues craze in popular music, and its influence on many musicians active during that time.

Personally, I'd love to hear the blues scale being used in some future music made for Keen mods :)
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Re: Commander Keen and blues music

Post by Benvolio »

What a great topic! I am sure Nospike will think so too!

I always enjoyed the bluesiness and/or jazziness of Keen music, right back when I first played the games. It was always a really comforting sound to me. The Brer Tar one (which I managed to convince Scifidelity Orchestra to cover) always appealed to me in particular (from Keen6 demo of course) and back in the day though I wasn't a guitarist, I would take my violin in "banjo position" and cover that track.

In the early 90s, as you said, there will have been a lot of enthusiasm for nostalgia for 60s and 70s music. There was also a big emphasis on metal - just think of Doom or Duke 3d. By contrast, futuristic electronica may not have been as appealing - there was a lot of it but as the 80s had just happened, the novelty factor may have hit a low ebb.

Whereas nowadays the appetite for that kind of futuristic electronica has returned in recent decades, stronger than ever. You will hear this in modern mods, notably of course those of Dave216. Absolutely astounding atmospheric soundscapes.

That said, composition in modding has always been quite varied and some bluesy and jazzy stuff has achieved prominence (unofficial TUIT trilogy comes to mind), if nothing else in an effort to emulate the original Keen soundtracks and achieve greater Keenishness.

All the varied aesthetics can be wonderful and there is no one right answer. But the blues retains a special place in ones heart. In fact, my earliest Keen playing experiences (Keen1 which obviously has no music of its own) were often to the sound of none other than Cream themselves, as well as others including the Beatles, Abba and the Electric Light Orchestra.
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Re: Commander Keen and blues music

Post by dark »

I thought the map theme to suburban shenanigans is another great bluesy number, to my mind, quite in the spirit of some of the Bobby Prince keen music.
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Re: Commander Keen and blues music

Post by dark »

By the way, has Bobby Prince published any new music since the year 2000? I understand he had some serious health issues at one point, and his personal website /blog hasn't been updated in years. Is he still around?
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Re: Commander Keen and blues music

Post by Nospike »

There's a clear pattern of 90s Adlib-era composers choosing to add a bluesy touch or outright just composing blues songs for game soundtracks. Namely a lot of games by Apogee, from Keen thru Bio Menace all the way to Word Rescue. Although given how prolific Bobby Prince's work is maybe it was just him who composed all that. I dunno if he's still around... I would hope so, but it sounds like he's getting up there in age.

I have this theory that blues is just really suitable for kid-friendly games. It can be made to sound cheerful, groovy, chilled out, exciting, or just plain cool and, critically, all of this can be done without it sounding like antiquated old man music. The composition is usually pretty uncomplicated and easy on the ears so it can loop for a long time without the player getting tired of it. It's catchy and easily gets you tapping your foot or humming along. It was also still a fairly popular mainstream genre through the late 80s, when a lot of 60s/70s blues rock artists were still at it playing slightly more up to date sounding versions of their old jams.

You know, maybe Keen is in fact one of the reasons I like it so much. :p It's been 23 years since I first heard Brer Tar and I still love it.
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dark
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Re: Commander Keen and blues music

Post by dark »

Nospike wrote: Fri Oct 18, 2024 15:27 There's a clear pattern of 90s Adlib-era composers choosing to add a bluesy touch or outright just composing blues songs for game soundtracks. Namely a lot of games by Apogee, from Keen thru Bio Menace all the way to Word Rescue.
Indeed, Bobby Prince was very prolific in the shareware scene in the early 90s, especially stuff made or published by Apogee such as Major Stryker, Biomenace, Blakestone, Rise of the Triad, Wolf 3d, Cosmo with its ZZTop tunes, and others. I have read that Scott Miller of Apogee bought him his first sound card in the early 90s after he'd been contracted to make game music. While I don't think the credits of Word Rescue and Math Rescue mention him, he shows up on Mobygames as having done the music for those titles as well!

I know ID Software eventually started sending him metal songs to cover or use as inspiration for Doom and thereby influencing him away from blues a bit, but based on one of the posts in Bobby's blog, his usual manner of working was to receive some concept art or screenshots of an in-progress game, make whatever music he felt might be good, send it to the game developer, and most of the time the developer would simply accept the music without asking for changes.
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Re: Commander Keen and blues music

Post by dark »

I just found this series of videos where Bobby Prince is interviewed about the Doom music (while playing Doom coop) from a couple years ago. The discussion goes in many different directions, Bobby talks about other music he made for shareware games in the early 90s, how he got connected to Apogee, tools and techniques he used to create music and SFX at the time, etc. But somewhere in the middle of the playlist, he starts discussing the fact that you can get sued if you are influenced by a musical artist and try to copy them too closely, or if your music incidently happens to sound like theirs (if there was no conscious copying), and that is a reason that he likes the blues - due to its older and folk-music nature, it is less likely that an artist will try to sue you over copying their music for a blues-style riff you used in a song.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... 9W1N1qYy7j
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Re: Commander Keen and blues music

Post by Snortimer »

Great thread! Yeah, I've always been curious about this myself.
dark wrote: Mon Jul 22, 2024 1:09By the way, if you are not familiar with blues music or the blues scale, here is an overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eosor-ncv7Y
Thanks!
This one showed up for me on the recommendations while I was watching the above, and also seems quite good and a bit more in-depth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJu-wptS6Ng
It also mentions the major Blues scale (your video only talks about the minor) and shows how you can switch between them while improvising.

I wonder if anyone has tried to do a harmonic analysis of the Keen songs.

P.S. I think this topic about live jazz performances of the Keen songs should be mentioned here somewhere: https://pckf.com/viewtopic.php?t=6782
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Re: Commander Keen and blues music

Post by dark »

I was listening to the Doom II soundtrack and there is a blurb by Bobby Prince about how he intentionally made a song in the blues style. It seemed pertinent to share here since the subject of this thread is Bobby Prince and his blues style.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeOGqrW ... B6&index=8
"Between DOOM and DOOM II, I worked with John Carmack and Dave Taylor at id to help port Wolfenstein to a video game platform. At that time Dave was doing the sound code for the port and I was designing the instrument samples and tweaking the MIDI files to keep the number of notes to a minimum. Somewhere along the line, Dave mentioned something about a blues song and it stuck in my mind. When I wrote the music for DOOM II, that idea became a song which I named in honor of Dave.

Dave has since left id Software to go with his own company, Crack Dot Com. That is the company that developed Abuse which is now distributed by Origin.

This song follows the "classical" blues chord progression, which is 12 bars long. The chord progression is as follows (a slash separates each measure and each measure has four beats):

I / I / I / I /

IV / IV / I / I /

V7 / IV / I / I /

In the key of E, the I would be an E, the IV would be an A and the V7 would be B7.
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