Bobby Prince: "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.
Listen for the echo on the rhythm guitar. This is one of the first songs where I experimented with doing a MIDI echo. The idea is to play a note and hold it. Then you play the same note over and over again, reducing the volume of each succeeding note. The results are an echo that is almost as good as those played through digital reverberation/echo units. It sounds like some of the original analog tape echo units of the 60's.
The lead for this song gets pretty weird starting at about 3 minutes 37 seconds, but I love the dissonance it causes. It is the same dissonance I felt the first time I played DOOM -- a feeling of almost standing up straight while almost falling on one's butt at the same time".
Map 08: Tricks and Traps
Map 14: The Inmost Dens
Map 22: The Catacombs