I’ve often wondered what the result would have sounded like if Peter
Howell had tried to stay as faithful as possible to Delia Derbyshire’s
original realisation of the Doctor Who theme, when making his 1980
version. I did this mix as an experiment to see how close I could get
to the 1963 original, using just Arturia’s CS-80V synthesiser and some
sampled “hissing” loops from tho original. While making this mix I
listened quite a bit to the bassline of the original theme to try and
work out what elements were in there, and realised that for over a
year I’ve had the bassline melody wrong in a particular section,
making the same mistake in all my mixes… it’s not really noticeable
to the casual listener but to me it now sticks out like a sore thumb.
Anyway, I digress. There are 3 basslines, a continuous drone that
follows the root note of the chord, a repeated buzz that marks the
start of each “bumbley-bum”, and the “bumbley-bum” itself. There are
two melody lines, the classic sine melody (actually made up of two
sine waves, one quieter and slightly detuned to give a flowing quality
to the melody) and the high-pitched electric organ that emphasises the
melody. The bassline tracks were MIDI-sequenced and recorded, the
melody tracks were performed “live” on a MIDI keyboard driving the
synthesiser and recorded also. The final layering and tweaking was
done in Sound Forge, with quite a bit of re-equalisation and some
light reverb added to the bassline to make it feel a little more like
the original. After placing the melody sections on, I took my
“standard” hissing samples from the ’63 theme and mixed them in, also
adding the classic drone to the end.