[steveswede]

I am not sure at all when listening to this. I know Roland pretty well, and the drums are weak, and reverb is high, which is not MJ's style. The "claps" in the Mid-Boss music (or whatever they are supposed to be), are not snare drum beats as Blood On The Dancefloor has an already powerful snare drum, and the "claps" are played on another channel, indicating they might even be a full sample (the whole beat), and not just some snare drum combination.

LOst I'm surprised you say this because in the video you uploaded it shows Brad Buxer using a Roland MKS-70 module while practicing (and the AKAI MX1000 is a midi keyboard by the way) but also you should know yourself that no professional music artist would just stick samples together without properly mixing them down. Considering how high profile and how much a perfectionist MJ was, it would be fair to say that he would be using some of the best hardware effects so he can get the sound of his samples glued together and his sound perfect. Not only that but trying to emulate sounds is one the the hardest things to do, even impossible without the proper equipment and parameters. Also with you saying Roland drums are weak and reverb is high, you should know that you can give the illusion of higher quality drums by adding reverb to them but also reverb can be trimmed to produce dry samples so to nit pick on stuff like that doesn't hold up.


You have stated yourself that Buxer worked with MJ and it's pretty obvious that there is his work in MJ's stuff. Don't think that it's all MJ's ideas that make up all of his songs. MJ was mainly the singer, dancer and the front poster boy. MJ had a team of people working with him bouncing ideas to make good tunes. It could be fair to say that Baxer showed this sample, MJ loved it and just put in his track.

Shocking, yes.
Unbelievable, no.

Also you say that you know Roland pretty well. Listen to this.



Recognize the pattern. Are you so sure that MJ did not use Roland products.

[E102]

Is there something I'm missing? Because I wouldn't think that matching up Sonic 3&K's music to MJ music (chord changes, etc) would tell us anything at all. Are we really supposed to believe that each song in the game was a ripoff of an existing song, or that the ones that weren't were reused later on MJ albums when he ran out of ideas? If songs sounding similar meant anything, then Frank Sinatra composed Sonic 1, and Jeff Lynne composed Sonic 3.

You're right. It could all very well be meaningless, but until the day those early versions surface I would like to believe in this fairly legit circumstance.

Besides, the 10 that can be attributed to Jackson et al. aren't exactly the best fitting either (with the exception of Staff Roll for obvious reasons); they're really only favored by the actual situation. The MJ-definites sync to the same degree as the others from what I'm hearing, and that is why I think pursuing the others is a worthwhile endeavor - they sync just as well. So what if the people at Sega handled those tracks? That doesn't necessarily mean they went in a completely different direction from what was originally given.

Getting back on track with the thread topic, I have no issues with him doing the "Come on." It seems right enough, therefore it must be right. I've learned not to think too much about this things, or else I'll only become increasingly more wrong.

[Nora Kisaragi]

Are we still debating Michael Jackson's involvement in Sonic 3?

SEGA and Sonic Team already confirmed this in Sonic Gems Collection (or was it Mega Collection, I forget?)

[LOst]

Are we still debating Michael Jackson's involvement in Sonic 3?

SEGA and Sonic Team already confirmed this in Sonic Gems Collection (or was it Mega Collection, I forget?)

I guess so. No, this is more of finding individual credits since there were so many composers in Sonic 3.

[Qjimbo]

Shame about QJimbo, though; sounds like he's been exhausted. Fortunately people like Yuzo, murphy341, Ferr986, pitlight and myself (the ones for Can't Let Her Get Away, Remember the Time, Ghosts and Streetwalker are my personal suggestions) are here to further his ambition and finish unraveling this mystery.

I'm not really exhausted, just busy with other stuff. And as much as I enjoy mashups I hardly count that as unraveling a mystery, since most that work are just coincidental (or at the very least, there will always be people who say it is coincidence). Finding more facts showing a link between MJ and Sonic 3 are where it's at.

Cool find LOst, could be grasping at straws but those samples are so dead on. Have you tried cutting them out and comparing them directly to the Sonic 3 DAC samples?

[SpeedStarTMQ]

Are we still debating Michael Jackson's involvement in Sonic 3?

SEGA and Sonic Team already confirmed this in Sonic Gems Collection (or was it Mega Collection, I forget?)

And where was this?

[OKei]

Are we still debating Michael Jackson's involvement in Sonic 3?

SEGA and Sonic Team already confirmed this in Sonic Gems Collection (or was it Mega Collection, I forget?)

And where was this?

Sega confirmed this with Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection, I believe.

[SpeedStarTMQ]

Oh, that's a totally diferent game I'm interested now. What did they do/say to confirm this?

[Ch1pper]

I was thinking it was in the PS2 Sega Genesis Collection myself. I recall chuckling at the timing of reading the small factoid (something vague along the lines of "Michael Jackson was once considered to compose the music for Sonic the Hedgehog 3") shortly after reading one of Retro's last big MJ topics.

It was either that, or a similarly vague factoid about Howard Drossin's work on S&K shortly after one of Retro's "Who did Sonic 3?" topics. The two are so intertwined; I forget which was on the PS2 Collection, just that it was one of the two. I've noticed Sega's habit of presenting things to the general public after they've been thoroughly discussed here. (MJ on Sonic 3, "Speed is a reward," etc.) I'd check right now but I don't have the console/game at the moment. If I visit my sister in the next few days I'll certainly check.

[Yuzoboy]

I have recently been speaking with Howard Drossin and I was surprised to hear that (as much as he can remember) he did not compose any of the music for Sonic 3 & Knuckles apart from the S&K Knuckles theme, Invincible theme and the "Game theme", which I assume is the Title Screen. These are of course tracks that were replaced in Sonic & Knuckles from Sonic 3. Furthermore, he also mentioned he was unsure who did the Act 1 and 2 tracks for S3&K.

This means that all the other composers, who were Cirocco, Bobby Brooks, Geoff Grace, Doug Grigsby III, Darryl Ross and Jun Senoue, have produced the other music for Sonic 3 & Knuckles, which of course cements the idea that Michael Jackson's contributions could have made it into S&K and not just Sonic 3. This is also possible from the fact Sonic & Knuckles was developed alongside Sonic 3.

Sorry if this is known already and a bit off-topic but I didnt want to start a new MJ vs Sonic 3 debate in a new thread.

This post has been edited by Yuzoboy: 22 July 2011 - 09:45 PM

[muteKi]

That matches up with what I'd heard so far. I don't suppose you'd know if he still has any other music he might have done for the project still around somewhere?

[Hendricks 266]

Have you been asking him by linking him to all the songs themselves for him to listen to, instead of only naming names? That was probably discussed in one of the other threads, but it's good to make sure.

[LOst]

Yuzoboy, on 22 July 2011 - 09:45 PM, said:

I have recently been speaking with Howard Drossin and I was surprised to hear that (as much as he can remember) he did not compose any of the music for Sonic 3 & Knuckles apart from the S&K Knuckles theme, Invincible theme and the "Game theme", which I assume is the Title Screen. These are of course tracks that were replaced in Sonic & Knuckles from Sonic 3. Furthermore, he also mentioned he was unsure who did the Act 1 and 2 tracks for S3&K.

This means that all the other composers, who were Cirocco, Bobby Brooks, Geoff Grace, Doug Grigsby III, Darryl Ross and Jun Senoue, have produced the other music for Sonic 3 & Knuckles, which of course cements the idea that Michael Jackson's contributions could have made it into S&K and not just Sonic 3. This is also possible from the fact Sonic & Knuckles was developed alongside Sonic 3.

Sorry if this is known already and a bit off-topic but I didnt want to start a new MJ vs Sonic 3 debate in a new thread.

This is pretty much old news, except you actually got to talk to Howard Drossin again.

The biggest problem is the credits in S&K giving Drossin all the responsibility, and this in its own makes a lot of fans bug Howard Drossin for stuff he didn't make, like asking "DID YOU DO LAVA REEF?". Please keep in mind that Howard Drossin's kind of music is what you can hear in Comix Zone, so asking him about music that isn't even his style of music is kinda annoying to him (my guess here). And S&K's theme, as fitting and glory as it seems, is a remix of the real song which is a cheesy country song that kind doesn't fit Sonic at all if you ask me. Prove me wrong, but I have a feeling Masaru Setsumaru did the cool stuff in the title screen song, like the intro, the high middle part, and of course the cool fading ending (which was a full section in the country song).


My suggestion is to leave Drossin alone, unless you have other things to talk about. If he got midis he wanted to share, he would have given them already. Bugging him just makes it harder to get any information in the future.

[E102]

@YuzoBoy
The only problem with what you said is that Drossin includes Invincibility as one of "his" tracks. According to the 2009 interview he said he just composed the "Knuckles theme" (S&K Knuckles) and the "Sonic theme" (S&K Title) (as proven by Sega Tunes - Virtual Sonic and ICEKnight's hack of MD Sonic 3D) and, in the 2008 interview, says that Setsumaru handled the arrangements of the latter theme, including 1-Up (as proven by ICEKnight's hack). So wouldn't Invincibility also be Setsumaru's arrangement?

"I only composed single versions." - Drossin

"The music was composed separately and input for the genesis by someone named Setsu (I think). didn't do any sound efx for Sonic 3." - Drossin

Looking closer, there's one thing that I admit I completely overlooked: Virtual Sonic was recorded in 1993; it was just released three years later. So all the arrangements (not just Invincibility, 1-Up and All Clear, but also S&K Knuckles and S&K Title) could be Setsumaru's period. At the very least, the fact that those compositions existed before S3's release with the intent to be used in-game (be it S3, S&K, or S3 in the whole sense) should be the reason for Drossin's "Sound Special Thanks" credit in S3. Drossin being a "Music Composer" in S&K and S3&K then should be because those compositions were then implemented/put into place in the game. In actuality, everything he did was originally composed outside the context of the game the music wound up on. No wonder he's so bewildered about this game.

If I ever spoke with Drossin I'd like to know just how much of MD Spinball's music is his. Drossin was the only one from the Institute; Blum and Coburn were from the Multi-Media Studio (different from OUI Multimedia) (credits taken from manual).

@LOst
Agreed. We've pretty much got all we need/can get from Drossin that made it into the final version, and that's all we should ever really ask of him as Sonic fans. If anything we should continue the chain to Setsumaru. The beta credits from S3&K are an excellent place to start, as the final part (S3 All Clear) was replaced by S&K All Clear (a Setsumaru arrangement), making the former two potentially Setsumaru's as well. Given that, the tracks chosen for the medley could be the versions Setsumaru arranged. Drossin said he did "remixes;" he didn't say they were the "Act 2" versions.

"That would be Setsu doing the remix." - Drossin

Mario Kart 64's voice sample credits are another good example of crediting only what is new. In the Japanese version, Charles Martinet (NoA) (Mario), Tomoko Maruno (NoJ) (Kinopio/Toad), Asako Kozuki (NoJ) (Peach), Julien Bardakoff (NoE) (Luigi), Thomas Spindler (NoE) (Wario), and John Huraton (NoA?) (Menu Voice) are credited, but the voices of Yoshi, DK and Koopa/Bowser are not because they are based/created from pre-existing sound effects (Yoshi - SMW - Koji Kondo) and voice samples (Koopa/Bowser - SM64 - Isaac Marshall). When Mario Party 1 and 2 were released, not additional voices for Toad, Luigi or Wario were necessary, so Maruno, Bardakoff and Splinder were uncredited (Eriko Ibe did Baby Bowser, not Toad). As for the US version of Mario Kart 64, Martinet replaced Huraton (as well as Bardakoff and Splindler), Leslie Swan replaced Kozuki and Isaac Marshall, despite having done the voice of Bowser (and most likely DK since both were replaced/overwritten around the same time) is only credited because he replaced Maruno as Toad.

In keeping with the forum topic, Buxer is confirmed to have worked with MJ in creating S3's Staff Roll (the basis of Stranger in Moscow) and worked with C. Cirocco Jones (Scirocco) on the composition and arrangement of a "Level 2" and "Level 3." Combine this with the fact that Buxer's usual role when involved with MJ was arrangement (ex. HIStory album) and it can be assumed that Buxer was the one who did the majority of the production work (MJ was more-or-less a coordinator). He is listed first on the list after all.

[Yuzoboy]

LOst, on 23 July 2011 - 10:39 AM, said:

The biggest problem is the credits in S&K giving Drossin all the responsibility, and this in its own makes a lot of fans bug Howard Drossin for stuff he didn't make, like asking "DID YOU DO LAVA REEF?". Please keep in mind that Howard Drossin's kind of music is what you can hear in Comix Zone, so asking him about music that isn't even his style of music is kinda annoying to him (my guess here). And S&K's theme, as fitting and glory as it seems, is a remix of the real song which is a cheesy country song that kind doesn't fit Sonic at all if you ask me. Prove me wrong, but I have a feeling Masaru Setsumaru did the cool stuff in the title screen song, like the intro, the high middle part, and of course the cool fading ending (which was a full section in the country song).


My suggestion is to leave Drossin alone, unless you have other things to talk about. If he got midis he wanted to share, he would have given them already. Bugging him just makes it harder to get any information in the future.

I agree with you there. I understand he can do without people bugging him about stuff rather than take interest in what he can provide in the present.