A Behind-the-Scenes Look into Doominal Crossing’s Remaster of the Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Soundtrack

Hello folks, it’s Doominal Crossing! In case you missed the news, I released a couple of remastered Metroid soundtracks this month to celebrate the series’ 40th anniversary. Most relevant to this post as you’ve probably gathered from the title however is the conclusion to the festivities; the Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Remastered Soundtrack! I wanted to take you all behind the scenes to show everyone a taste of the work that went into remastering this gorgeous collection of tunes from Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano, as there’s so much I wanted to talk about that just couldn’t be fit into the release article. This piece is written similarly to the behind-the-scenes article I made for my remaster of Metroid Prime’s soundtrack, and I would encourage the readers to check that out as there are several similarities between the two projects I don’t want to regurgitate in the same amount of detail. Just like that article, there will also be direct audio comparisons to hear the before-and-after differences of the remastering process.

It’s about to get real nerdy in here!

 

“What motivated you to do a dedicated soundtrack release for Metroid Prime 4?”

Truth be told, I was waiting for others to rip the music and download it for my own enjoyment. However, I couldn’t find any releases online that contained the complete soundtrack. So in the words of Thanos, I said “fine, I’ll do it myself”. That being said, this was not in fact something I could do all by myself. A huge thank you goes to both Bearborg and idonom of the Metroid Prime Modding Discord server for walking me through how to access the game’s files and helping me locate the “Volcano Heart” track in the patch folder. Bearborg has also helped me with other projects in the past, including ripping the Metroid Prime Remastered menu backgrounds we use on the podcast!

 

“This game isn’t even a year old, why the heck does it need to be remastered?”

Fair question dear reader! My initial plan was to simply rip and release the full soundtrack for everyone to enjoy. However, upon listening closely I started to notice something familiar; the presence of several recording errors similar to the ones found throughout the Metroid Prime Trilogy. I knew right then and there that I would have to carefully listen to each piece of music and give it that same care that I did when cleaning up Metroid Prime’s soundtrack. That should have been the end of it. That is, until I started messing around with some of the game’s music in my DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations), experimenting with various plugins just to see what would happen purely for fun. But something unexpected happened during these tests…

I liked what I was hearing… A LOT.

 

The Mixing and Mastering Vision

When Metroid Prime Remastered came out, it was the first time that soundtrack had been presented in the 48kHz sample rate. Previously, the best sample rate for the majority of the game’s music was 44.1kHz via the Japanese CD soundtrack release, and any songs not included there were still only listenable at 32kHz. This is not the case for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. All of the game’s music is sampled at 48kHz, including the small selection of tracks currently available on the Nintendo Music App. The app however has a maximum bitrate of 320kbps, whereas the Nintendo Switch game rip of Metroid Prime 4 averages between 400-500kbps. As such, it was decided early on to use the game rip as the base for the soundtrack since it has the highest audio quality.

With this in mind, the primary goal of this release was identical to that of the Metroid Prime soundtrack remaster; clean up as many recording error artifacts possible.

 

 

The secondary goals however were where this project gained it’s own identity. Unlike with Metroid Prime where I took a hands off approach and let most of the original mixing vision shine through, that’s not how I approached Metroid Prime 4. Here I commited to a more interpretive mixing vision based on what I thought would benefit a dedicated listening experience. One thing that’s important to consider is that an in-game soundtrack and an album have different goals with their mixes. Unlike an album which only contains the music itself, a game has up to hundreds of other layered sound effects and ambient drones playing in quick sucession alongside it, most of them at random! As such, it has to be mixed in a way to balance the entire soundscape as a cohesive unit. Metroid Prime, with a substantially lower amount of sound effects didn’t need this extra treatment for the most part, whereas I saw a lot of opportunities with Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.

 

Fixing the Recording Errors

This process is identical to how I fixed the errors in Metroid Prime. I used spectrographic imaging to visually locate unintended pops, buzzes and clicks in each recording, then made a microscopic cut that cleaned up the error without compromising the music. In the example below, you can see how “Samus’s Record” appears through a spectrograph with and without these changes.

 

 

It’s one thing to see it in action, but it’s another to hear it. Here’s the selections above in musical form:

 

REMASTER

ORIGINAL

 

Ending  Tails

Similar to Metroid Prime, I wanted to create definitive endpoints to several songs where I had the ability to make it sound completely natural. Several of these used the same reverb and paulstretch plugins I outlined in that soundtrack’s behind-the-scenes article, however there were a couple of oppurtunities I had to get even more ambitious with how I could end the song.

 

Vi-O-La

The track, “Vi-O-La”, first appeared in the third Metroid Prime 4 trailer at the September 2025 Nintendo Direct. During the trailer, the track has a definitive ending during the final scene that is not present in the game. I ripped that short section from the trailer and blended it into the equivelant section of the game soundtrack. Below you can hear the remastered ending alongside the original transition.

 

REMASTER

ORIGINAL

 

Volt Forge

This is where things get REALLY crazy! I was able to isolate certain selections of instruments on a handful of tracks by using phase inversion, a process that flips the peaks and valleys on a selected sound wave. On its own, this doesn’t change the audio. When combined with other sound waves is where things have the potential to get really interesting. If you layer a normal sound wave on top of a direct copy that’s inverted, the two sound waves will cancel each other out and you’ll be left with completely muted audio. It’s pretty wild to hear (or not hear I guess) in action!

Now, let’s say you have two measures of music. These two measures are completely identical except one of them has added drums which aren’t present in the other. If we use this phase inversion technique on any one of the measures and layer both of them on top of each other, we now have isolated drums! Now I can take those isolated drums, apply phase inversion, and layer it on any portion of the piece with those same drums to mute them. The possibilities are endless!

Using this along with reverb and paulstretching, I was able to create both an extended intro and outro for “Volt Forge”, the latter in particular which goes on for quite a bit before resolving.

 

REMASTERED INTRO

ORIGINAL INTRO

REMASTERED OUTRO

ORIGINAL OUTRO

 

Mixing

As I talked about earlier, mixing played a much larger role in this project than it has in previous releases. The ultimate goal was to bring a greater sense of clarity and consistency across the music, emphasizing pieces that focus on live instruments. Several plugins were used to achieve a wide range of effects on a case by case basis, so I thought I’d highlight some specific examples below. The phase inversion process discussed above was also used in places where I wanted to target specific instruments.

 

Noise Gate + Equalization

These are two completely different processes, however I have a great example in the remaster that utilizes both together. A noise gate decays the audio on any channel it’s applied to once it falls below a designated threshold. Equalization, or EQ for short, is a process of altering the volume of specific audio frequencies. This is usually with the intent of changing the texture of the applied sound. In the below example, I wanted to show off the bass drum from the “Xelios” boss battle theme. This bass drum is thundering throughout the entire piece, but makes an especially powerful entrance as it transitions the music from the introduction to the first verse. In the original piece, the drums sound rough and scratchy, but not in a way that feels like an intentional choice. Rather it sounds as if the drum itself is producing artifacts. The bass drum also tends to drown out the remaining instruments and can sound a bit muddy when everything is playing together. To alleviate the bass drum overpowering the instruments while simultaneously boosting its prominence, I used the DD Gate plugin to decay the trails of the bass drum hits during the parts where it overlapped with several other instruments. This allowed it to keep it’s pop while also letting the rest of the instruments blossom in a way they weren’t able to prior. I also used ReaEQ to create a parametric shelf that alleviated a lot of the artifacts that were produced in the original recording.

 

REMASTER

ORIGINAL

 

Reverb

With the greater prominance of electric guitars used throughout Metroid Prime 4’s soundtrack, I found myself applying reverb more often where I wanted to exagerate the instrument and contextualize it with the setting it’s played in. The very first track I tested out in my DAWs was “Generator”, and reverb helped give it a whole new life. The guitar was sharpened as a way to represent the lightning powering up Volt Forge, while I used TAL Reverb 4 to dampen those same tones with the purpose of representing the rainfall pouring throughout the storm.

 

 

REMASTER

ORIGINAL

 

Stereo Widening

A lot of the more bombastic pieces in the Metroid Prime 4 soundtrack feel claustrophobic with how squished in the instruments are. This is great in-game for a series that’s known for instilling powerful emotions to the player through isolation, but in the context of a listening experience can feel fatiguing. To alleviate this, I used the Melda Productions Stereo Expander to create some distance between these instruments. Below is an example from the “Theme of Sylux”, where the instruments are squished in normally, but spread out more in the remaster.

 

 

REMASTER

ORIGINAL

 

Fixing Loop Points

Similar to the Metroid Prime soundtrack remaster, there were a few loop points I thought sounded a bit wonky out of context from the game, so I redid them to make those transitions feel seemless. “UTO Research Center” is a great example of a track with a pretty rough cut between its loop points. You probabaly won’t hear it in-game with all of the other sound effects happening simultaneously, but listening to it on its own makes it stick out pretty badly. The remaster completely fixes this hard cut and allows the piece to flow much smoother as it transitions.

 

REMASTER

ORIGINAL

 

That’s a Wrap!

That’s a summary of the most common processes done throughout the remaster, and generally the changes and enhancements you can expect going in.

I hope you all enjoy the Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Remastered Soundtrack! It felt like a perfect coda to the 40th anniversary celebration.

Keep it locked-on at OmegaMetroid.com for all updates on our future soundtrack remaster projects!