Windy and Ripply was the only good track. And even then, the original was more interesting to decompose audibly. That is all.
I'm still a fan of That's the Way I Like it. //forums.sonicretro.org/public/style_emoticons/default/colbert.png
Goes to show how tastes differ, I guess :v: Aside from the obnoxious snare (I will hunt down whichever sample library you used Jun and shame you with it, I swear), I'm not too displeased with these. Nice arrangements of tracks I enjoy anyway, and the one thing I'll say to anyone who wants the original again -- just listen to the original. They still exist! The only other thing I can really mention is because of my desensitized ears I want these louder shajkdhsadut
Oh man, those are reaaaaaally great! My favorite is Windy & Ripply, I think it's the only one I like more than the original. I hope they will release another album like this later, maybe with classics. (I actually want a Heroes one more, but that would never happen. :P)
Mr. Unsmiley, in my opinion, sounds considerably better than the original (that kickass drum fill at the beginning).
Does anyone have the album cover in a good resolution? I'm a big stickler for nice-quality album covers on my music and I can't find anything besides pictures of the CD.
Only luck we'll have with that is if T-Bird over at Sonic Stadium decides to do a booklet scan, which I doubt he will.
I swear, this is Senoue's biggest weakness as an artist. The melodies and arrangements sound relatively fine in Sonic 4, but it's just gutted by how it's produced. He's a decent songwriter, but I would really love to hear his works if someone else produced his music. I like him as an artist and yet at the same time I find him rather frustrating.
^I disagree. In fact, Senoue is one of the few artists on whom I can depend on for quality output on all counts (unless he keeps rehashing old ideas like he's been doing for the past 6 years). His production is especially good when he experiments with different styles, like in SA. Less so with one focus, but that's always true. Unfortunately, he seems to prefer the latter lately. Now's as good a time as ever. Why did people dislike Sonic 4's soundtrack? I thought it was well done and fit the motif they were going for.
A combination of reasons. First and foremost was the instrument choices. They simply didn't sound good. They were too different from the authentic Genesis sound to bring the nostalgia they were aiming for, but didn't really take advantage of the fact that they could be as modern as they wanted either. Instead, they existed in this pseudo-16-bit zone that acts as kind of a worst of both worlds. I have found that many songs that sound garbage in the original game are actually pretty good when either mixed and mastered properly with good instruments or redone with a more authentic Genesis sound. Second, many of the tunes were really repetitive and annoying and repetitive and repetitive. Both remixes I linked for my first point also improved on this by adding original bits to increase the length. It makes the songs less exhausting to listen to for the length of an entire act. Third, and less significantly but still pretty annoying, they forewent many of the stylistic decisions that the older Sonic games' music had in common. One particular way in which this stands out is the absence of intros. Let's take a look at the first zone of each game: Green Hill Zone begins with 15 seconds of intro before the main melody starts. Emerald Hill Zone has 3 seconds of intro. Angel Island Zone has 13 seconds of intro. Mushroom Hill Zone has 11 seconds of intro. Green Grove Zone has 3 seconds of intro. Green Grove Zone (Saturn/PC) has 8 seconds of intro. Isolated Island Zone has 6 seconds of intro. Splash Hill Zone has 0 seconds of intro. That's right, none at all. It just jumps right in. This is especially odd because Senoue has not done music like this for any other game he's worked on; only Sonic 4 had introless songs. Most of the music in the game is like this. There's a few zone songs with small intros (all less than 5 seconds) but even those use the same instrument as the melody, which diminishes them as intros. The only song in the entire OST that both has a *proper* intro that feels truly separated from the measure immediately after it is Boss 1... which was a leftover from Sonic 3D Blast, and not originally written for Sonic 4. This might seem like a small thing, but apart from being not a great way to do music in general, it shows a lack of understanding of the style it was aiming to copy. Senoue is one of my favorite musicians when he's doing what he's good at. I loved this dreamcast-era music, and in general all the songs he's written for 3D Sonic games. But the attempted retro style in Sonic 4 was clearly outside of his comfort zone, and it wasn't well suited to him at all.
I get that, but the motif they were going for was a successor to the old games. Sonic 3 had significantly different music from 1. 4 had fun tracks that stuck with the repeated simple melody pattern set up in the old games and attempted to extract as much as possible from the least amount of notes, something which I admire in music (especially as an ex-composer). The lack of an intro just refines that by giving you the meat of the song as-is and letting it soak in. I also kind of feel like Senoue thrives on production variety. Limiting him to 16 voices or however many the Genesis/Sonic 4 had just stifles the quality and often produces repetitive boring music as we saw back in 3D Blast. Also, a lot of them are just catchy like Lost Labyrinth Zone, Oil Desert Zone, and Boss Metal Sonic. This is pretty much how I feel. Sonic & The Black Knight is in the same category of 'good Senoue' I'd say with some catchy new stuff, but even then it was 70% rehashes. Have you guys heard his Works II CD? It's pretty much all of his worst habits rolled into one CD. It's all rehashes with one ok new(ish) track. It really feels like he just gave up trying after 2006 (Sonic '06 having one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard for a platformer). He was already pulling this crap back in 2005 with J x J, which was an album of old tracks lined with vocals. Sonic 4 was really the only time since then that he's tried to make all-new stuff. Ok, that boss song is pretty awful. EDIT: Though actually, I mostly prefer the tracks in 06 and Shadow that weren't written by Senoue, he was part of a big team in which he sometimes composed, sometimes played guitar. So I guess I might actually appreciate his guitar playing and someone else's composition.
Necrobump, but given that SAME UK happened this weekend I guess it could be excusable. Has anyone managed to find any FLAC rips, or decent transcoded v0 versions of this release yet? I'm not going to download audio that's been extracted from lossy YouTube videos, themselves probably made from below-average lossy rips.
Sorry to necropost, but big news as of late. Both SAME vol.1 and SAME vol.2 were ripped losslessly with 100% logs (using private trackers scoring) as of late. Here's a link to the recent Tails Channel article talking about it. Not going to link the actual rips here, but it isn't hard to find once you read the article. Here's the article: https://tailschannel.com/sonic-the-hedgehog/rare-sonic-adventure-music-experience-albums-uncovered/ The search for both of these albums are over. They're finally out and preserved.
the article says they're on the internet archive but the link is just a generic search link for the repository, and searching "Sonic Adventure Music Experience Vol. 1" or even just "Sonic Adventure Music Experience" doesn't return any results?
When i checked it last week, they were there and easy to find. looking at my browsing history, they still there, here and here to be exact