The "Sonic The Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles" Quest for Music Composer Research

And then imagine how different Sonic music after those games would have been. Senoue has a ton of work/direction in the Adventure games...

 

Fine, Hard Times is better than the proto Ice Cap, yes. But I'd happily trade that to have proto CNZ1, CNZ2 and LBZ2. I admit I prefer MJ's LB1, but I hate the Act 2 mix lol.

My preference list is like this

Proto CNz1 > MJ CNz1
Proto CNz 2 > MJ CNz2
Proto ICz1 < MJ ICz1
Proto ICz2 > MJ ICz2
Proto LBz1 < MJ LBz1
Proto LBz2 > MJ LBz2

 

I imagine Jacques would've had more work... Which would've been cool, since his JSR/JSRF contributions from that era were great. Fumie, Tokoi, and Setsumaru surely would've still contributed what they did too.

 

Well, Jacques's music for 3D Blast isn't the best stuff, while it keeps a common theme on the tracks it seems quite repetitive and seems a bit too generic. I'm glad they had Senue and Maeda for that game, and I would kill for a high quality CD version of the soundtrack.

 

EDIT: Fuck me running. In my sleep deprivation, I confused "shoot 'em up" with "first person shooter". After veiwing Metalwario64's post below, I now agree; that DOES belong in a Shoot 'Em Up.

 

It sounds an awful lot like the original Twinbee to me:

 

I'm now thinking about it. Sky Sanctuary might be a Senoue track.
He remixed the song twice, and both versions feature very different notes on the second loop.




The original arrangement of the track featured new sections on the second loop. There's a chance these were added just for the album though.

 

That actually makes a fair bit of sense. The more info we can gather on this kind of stuff, the better.

Off-topic, but I’ve always personally found it weird that Sonic Generations used Sky Sanctuary Zone instead of something earlier-game. I know Sonic 3 wasn’t represented at all, but they could have placed Hydrocity or Marble Garden in there instead - both are early-game levels, rather than literally being right before the end of the game - or, as Knuckles, being the end of the game.

 

I imagine level-theming was the main idea, but totally agree. Hydrocity, Flying Battery, Marble Garden or Lava Reef would have been superior choices.

 

I think Sky Sanctuary was probably the level in the game that can be least compared to anything from Sonic 1 or 2. Those games had lava levels, flooded ruins, airships and ancient temples as well.

 

Speaking of that album —forgive me if this has already been mentioned, but I've meaning to mention it for days now—, some of the instrumentation choices and arrangements (more so the former) are strangely similar to what was done to these songs in S&KC. The instrumentation choices for Death Egg, remind me of the version from the GM set. And then there's the final boss; specifically the part at 1:00



That synth arpeggio riff that plays before the song loops (at 1:00 for this version), is present in the S&KC version of the song as well, at least for the GM version —if I recall correctly, it is present on the FM Synth version as well—. And the way the shaker hits in the CD soundtrack version is the same as how the cymbals hit in the FM Synth version on SKC:

 

That and Sandopolis. Unless you're filing it under ancient temples, which is fair.

Oh yeah, wouldn't Mushroom Hill be safe to be considered a Jun composition given that it was used in Generations 3DS?

 

I noticed a lot of the panning of instruments in the GM set is similar to this album. Where the panning for FM set is often similar to the final Genesis version. There's occasional differences here and there though.

 

Be careful of drawing conclusions like this. It may be a pretty safe assumption but that's all it is. Let's not start mixing up what is and isn't confirmed.

 

Agreed. It’s like when people assumed and even treated as fact that Sawada done 8-bit Sonic 2’s Underground Zone music based on him composing for both that and Sonic Gems Collection, despite said track not even sounding like his style (and he himself confirmed it wasn’t his track). The same goes with Mushroom Hill, as that doesn’t sound like Senoue to me, it was more likely Maeda or Ogawa but who knows. TL;DR: Rearrangement doesn’t imply composition most of the time.

 

Sky Sanctuary in the 11/03 prototype sounds a lot more closer to 11/03 Launch Base Zone 1, which absolutely sounds nothing like any of Senoue's work.

 

MJ almost certainly directly worked on any tracks his team made. While its known he typically didn't play instruments on his own, save for a handful of songs, he definitely created the references for his producers to work around via beatboxing. Bill Bottrell, one of the producers on Dangerous, said as much before in interviews, and we have audio proof of this in a Thriller-era demo, plus Cirroco has stated he has similar beatboxed demos/concepts MJ sent to him So MJ was definitely hands on with the cues, and to anyone taking that MJCast interview with Buxer at face value, take it with a massive grain of salt about the Sonic 3 stuff.

 

Hmm, they do sound similar. I wonder if they were made by the same composer. The arrangement, indeed, seems to have been done by the same person, though.

Anyways!

I've talked with Dissident93 and we speculated the proto Credits theme was a Maeda track because how similar it's arragement is to Diamond Dust's.

But now, I actually think the arpeggios at 0:32 onwards



...sound really similar to the arpeggios at 1:12 in Panic Puppet 2 (also a T. Maeda track)



So yeah, the Staff Roll is definitely made by Tatsuyuki Maeda, or at least, the closest to 'definitely' we can get with the fragile legal situation of the tracks and the long time passed since their composition.

 

My guess is that Maeda did Sky Sanctuary and proto Launch Base (along with several other tracks). I haven’t properly analysed them but they do carry his vibes (like chords and echoed lead).

I’m also starting to wonder if Cube’s tracks even made it into the game. Some people have stated Marble Garden doesn’t sound like Takaoka’s style, although I’m not particularly familiar with her work. Her bonus stage music is known to have been scrapped too, possibly Sega ran out of time to implement all of the 3rd party tracks? If that’s the case I’m guessing Maeda done that track, leaving him and Ogawa as the ones who likely done any tracks with unconfirmed composers.

 

While I'm the first one to agree that staff roll is 'definetly Maeda', you can't mark that as a true fact. We need something to make it official.

PS: I fucking love PP2's bassline.