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The curious case of Masato Nakamura's music in Sonic 8-bit

Discussion in 'General Sonic Discussion' started by Cooljerk, Jul 25, 2024.

  1. Mr. Cornholio

    Mr. Cornholio

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    See yeah that is really weird. It's almost like it's taking a cue from the Genesis version by having Green Hill be near the start of the song...but then just stops.

    I think it might be a 'recognizability thing' as well? Again I think Yuzo wanted to do his own thing, but then received a notice from Sega that they wanted the most recognizable work from Nakamura in the Master System release as well. So maybe he felt obligated to imitate the End Credits medley from the Genesis release? Since that has Green Hill thrown into it, throw it into your credits song as well, and then call it a day. It sounds silly, but I could absolutely see it being something Sega wanted if they were really cautious on making a strong first impression.

    If he is contactable though I'd definitely love to see if he could potentially shed light on it. Assuming he recalls anything about the work there.
     
    Last edited: Jul 27, 2024
  2. Antheraea

    Antheraea

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    I think the biggest tell as to the transcription/development process of these tracks is by looking at their prototypes and comparing them against masa's demo and the final.
    - Both Masa's Demos and the Simon Wai versions are slower than their final counterparts. This makes sense if you, the composer, want to make sure the programmers don't lose any details in their transcription, and tempo can just be automated anyway. My guess here has always been that they were transcribed "as-is" in the tempo department with the intent of being accurate, and after that accuracy is confirmed, they can just set a higher value or something for the tempo. Regarding the question if they are exactly the same tempo, if we really want to know this I can attempt to do visual comparisons in a DAW or even load them both into Rekordbox and see what that program's tempo analyzer says.
    - Both Masa's Demos and the Simon Wai versions have parts of them that don't make it into the final. For instance, the "siren" backing in the Super Sonic theme is both in the demo and in the prototype but doesn't make it into final Sonic 2.
    - However, there are differences between Masa's Demos and the Simon Wai versions that do make me scratch my head. Masa's demo version of Death Egg is not the super fast version Simon Wai has, the Simon Wai version of Metropolis is faster than the demo, and the Simon Wai version of Casino Night 1P has an extra harmony at the end of the chorus that isn't in Masa's version (where it is instead just the same melody at different octaves). It could be that they were given even earlier versions of the demos or incorrectly transcribed them.
    - Speaking of just, weird transcriptions, the record scratches in Masa's demo of Metropolis got interpreted as...like...steam sounds(?) in the Simon Wai version. The stage select/options theme for some reason had taken what were snares in the Masa demo and mapped them to kicks for some reason, which were then changed (back) to snare hits in the final.
    - Additionally, detail is lost between Masa's demos and the transcriptions. The Casino Night 2P theme has more than two kinds of drum sounds as opposed to what got programmed in. Basically all the "flavor" detail in Aquatic Ruin Zone got lost in transcription, to the point that I personally had a hard time interpreting what that song was even meant to be vibes-wise for many years until I heard the Masa demo for the first time.

    I absolutely believe this in light of the above personally. There's stuff that sounds like it got lost when a fallible human ear listens to it over and over. Obviously the prototype stuff is unfinished but I think it's a fascinating insight into how it got made, got polished up later to match the demos properly (god knows what it sounds like when you're trying to program that shit in in assembler too).

    But, yeah, transcription by ear basically would have been the only way to go with it. You can't just take raw midi data and slap it into a mega drive ROM. And even if you had sheet music, that's yet another layer of interpretation between the intent and final - you can't just spit raw midi data out and get readable sheet music out of that either, which would mean someone would've had to, again, either listen to the tracks and write it, or masa would've had to attempt to translate his idea to yet another medium from the midi, and all kinds of stuff can get moved around or lost in there. tl;dr, at that time there was no "pure" way to get the music from Masa's head into the Mega Drive. I can't really think of any way they could've done it unless Masa himself was programming it in (not entirely unheard of). :words:


    re: a mention earlier in this topic about music being made but then swapped out and rendered unused in development, that is not unheard of either given what happened with Sonic 3. ;)
     
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  3. Jaxer

    Jaxer

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    Don't quote me on this, but I recall reading from an interview that Masa very much made the Sonic 2 demos slower than the Sonic 1 ones for this exact reason, as the sound programmers of the first game had a hard time getting all the details down.
     
  4. sonicthesnot

    sonicthesnot

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    I don't think that was ever actually confirmed by Masa or Sega... when the demos were released it was the leading (and most plausible) theory on why the STH2 demos were so much slower than the STH1 demos.
     
  5. Nik Pi

    Nik Pi

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    Idk. I always thought that it's similar to result that you would get if you used mid2smps with Masa MIDI. If you will force your ear- you can hear the parallels, actually (but just me, anyway. And we know that mid2smps wasn't exist.. Damn, I hope sound coders got a good salary, lmao.).
     
  6. jbr

    jbr

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    Hmm, some interesting points. Perhaps it was transcribed by ear after all, although I would take issue with this:

    Sure, but you could easily write code to convert MIDI into whatever format you require, and then tweak it. It's an open standard after all. To me, it seems so surprising that Megadrive sound engineers, who would be very technically competent, would have said "yeah give us a recording and we'll spend hours figuring it out", rather than "give us the MIDI and we'll do something automated with it", especially given how error-prone the former is. Processing the MIDI is going to be quicker, and the composer could have spent ages getting the rythmns just right, why not just use the exact rythmn they wrote rather than potentially fuck it up?

    Anyway, there seems to be no evidence this happened and some loose evidence it was done manually. So I may well be wrong. Jury's out, at least.
     
  7. nineko

    nineko

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    Not to derail this topic, but, for the record, there is at least one game (Andre Agassi Tennis) which uses actual MIDI data, so you can "just slap MIDI data into a ROM". Still, it's a bad idea, that's probably why it's been done only once.
     
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  8. dsmania

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    One particular thing that I believe is worth noting is that the unused Marble Zone theme is a exactly similar to the 16 bit counterpart, while any other shared themes are rearranged with different tones and levels in some parts. I don't have the knowledge to determine how feasible it is, but this particular rendition almost sounds like a port of some sort. I don't know how to interpret this, but it's different.
     
  9. Papa Rafi

    Papa Rafi

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    It's probably as simple as them deciding to take whatever format Masa provided them and roll with it, knowing that they could pull it off regardless. Depending on how technically competent Masa was, it might've just been simpler to have him provide tapes while they handled the "hard" stuff. Or maybe he just didn't wanna give them the direct MIDI data (which would kind of be like the "stems" but also not really).