the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

I'm the hedgehog masque replica guy

嘘だらけ塗ったチョースト


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One of the funny things about Masque that I don't think about a lot but has become more pronounced to me as I've been collecting bootlegs of MMEB is that it really it doesn't have much use of the Minimoog. It had become a staple of Mann's touring kit even just a few years into the band's formation, when the synthesizer was still very novel. For most live performances, it was the main expressive instrument for Mann, supported by an organ that was frequently overdriven so loud that it blended in with the electric guitar. On some level, the Moog was like a part of him, in the natural way we approach talking. When Robert Moog received the Polar Prize, it was Mann who was invided for a tribute performance. And yet there's barely any recognizable Moog passages in the entire album. Where they do exist, they're usually supporting the texture of other synths. The Yamaha FM synth (SY77) "trumpeton" was more prominent as a synth lead, and so were the various digital sequencer patterns used throughout the album.

It's, frankly, shocking to me to think about in the context of what was by then a decade and a half of live shows and albums. Even the previous album, Criminal Tango, was going much harder on the digital synth side of production, but you still had moog solos, and the live shows to pomote the album regularly called for it, both in the classic tunes in the setlist and in the live arrangements of some of the new tracks. While there was no tour for Masque, Joybringer did show up in a few live performances when the Earth Band started touring again in 1991; a bootleg recording from the Mean Fiddler is the one with the best sound quality I've heard, and notably, doesn't shy away from using the Moog. Joybringer would later be excerpted in the opening instrumental (dubbed "I'll Give You", leading into Dylan's Shelter from the Storm) performed through tours at least from the mid-90s into the earlier 2000s, an uptempo swinging tune that I've made reference to in a buried post here that you'll eventually see reference to in a later project.

Ultimately this is one of the reasons Masque is an odd album, and definitely one that doesn't fit well in a prog-rock oevure, though I do quite enjoy what it is. Sill, Mann without a Moog feels like a guy who works in old Yamaha FM synths switching to a sample-based tracker. Could you imagine?

All kidding aside, I think there's a very clear reason why the Moog doesn't focus much in this project. You see, if you wanted a Moog adaptation of The Planets, it already existed for about a decade by the time Masque had come out. It was a fairly loose arrangement at times (I mean, not that any part of Masque is particularly faithful to Holst's originals), but for the sort of people who listened to Switched-On Bach, they were probably quite familiar with the work of other arrangers of orchestral music for synths like Isao Tomita. In 1976, he did a moog-focused arrangement of The Planets; Tomita's other work includes adaptations of the Firebird Suite and Debussy's Children's Corner, both of which had also been tapped by the Earth Band for material on some of their previous albums. Pictures at an Exhibition (which was, in fact, the first Tomita album I'd ever heard, right at a time when I was old enough to be forming long-term memories and no doubt plays a huge part in me becoming the kind of sicko I am today) was already the domain of ELP. Mann was certainly familiar with Tomita at this point -- Tomita's adaptation of Bolero opened MMEB live shows in the 80s; the Budapest 1983 concert DVD includes pre-concert footage using it, as do several bootlegs. You might be able to hear the end of it here, from a 1981 concert, if your speakers are good.

Tomita of course chose to adapt The Planets for the same reason Mann did -- the piece is iconic; Holst is one of those musicians like Elgar whose works are even more iconic than the composers are -- like Elgar's graduation march (Pomp and Circumstance No. 1), these are orchestral pieces whose work is massively influential either used directly as program music or as significantly inspirational to their own program music. The number of film scores that adapt ideas from Mars, the movement that forms the backbone of the song from Masque we're looking at today, are countless. Even if you don't know it off the top of your head, you've probably heard it, and you've almost definitely heard references to it in more modern music.

For example, here's Mars. Here's the SMB3 Airship Theme.

But we're not here to talk about Mario. We're here to talk about Sonic. Let's get to the Sonic Music.

Present, Good Future, and Bad Future.

As with Collision Chaos, Metallic Madness is a level whose music was made by Sterling Crew with Peraza and Vega. The style once again sticks out heavily; both stages share the more minimalistic arrangement, with prominent percussion (bongos), resonating distorted guitars, and synthesizer arpeggios. The feel is, I think, different, and appropriately so: while Collision Chaos carried with it a sense of melancholy and energy, Metallic Madness is angry and threatening. Even the usually-calm music of the good future here has a sense of dread in its sound, to me. Certainly an appropriate tack to take for the last stage in the game.

The present track has easily identified A and B sections, with the B section having the most concrete melodic passages in the guitar. While the original PC version of the game didn't include it, Sonic the Hedgehog Boom (the Sonic CD remix album) added it to the Bad Future mix. For the remakes and their mobile ports, that B section guitar melody was edited into the game soundtrack, which is reflected in the link above. Another guitar riff, heard in the Bad Future's A-section, was present in the earlier versions of the game's US soundtrack. The good future is spartan in comparison, lacking any sort of guitar line, mostly focused on the synth arpeggios and percussion. Because it shows up in two of the versions and seems to be intentionally removed from the other, I think trying to retain that melody should be a focus of the past track.

Given that Metallic Madness as a stage takes many structural cues from Sonic 1's Scrap Brain Zone it once again makes sense to adapt some ideas from it. We also have A and B sections -- an A section obviously derivative of the Blade Runner theme by Vangelis, and the B section working in a major key.

The most menacing song on Masque that fits with those ideas is probably A Couple of Mates, adapted from passages of Mars and Jupiter (mostly Mars), which replaces the angry guitar of the Metallic Madness tracks with a searing saxophone, the intense percussion with a looping train sample, and the haunting pads with the previously mentioned "trumpeton" (see previous posts). It also has a B section that, like with Scrap Brain Zone, is more calm and built more around major chords.

Here's A Couple of Mates:

There's a heavily chorused guitar line in A Couple of Mates that starts playing when the song returns to its A section that I want to bring particular attention to it because with it and nearly everything I've brought attention to, we'd be creating a song that bears more than a casual resemblance to the song that plays over Chaotix's final boss, Oriental Legend. It also has bongos, it has square waves arpeggios that resemble the guitar lick in A Couple of Mates, and it shares a comparably (and appropriately) menacing attitude. Again, I wasn't so much actively seeking any ideas from Chaotix so much as the source material seemed to make the similarities plain as day to me; it was a matter of happenstance.

Since I've basically laid out every part of every song that I took influence from, now's a good time to actually post the finished product:

In addition to the other features I've noticed, I've attempted to replicate the thundering timpanis from Scrap Brain Zone here. The chromatic movement on that song's melody in the B section is also replicated in the distortion guitar sample I used at the end of the phrases. Similarly, the bassline is taking a pattern very close to that of Scrap Brain, whereach note is a repeated eighth note. Of course that guitar is also more prominently playing, in the A section, the melody from Mars. What's the point of a good reference if you don't use it?

I should also point out the guitar strum sample that becomes prominent in the B section is under a CC attribution license; the source for the sample was https://freesound.org/people/NoiseCollector/sounds/58074/.

I'm unsure that there's a lot more commentary to be made about this one. Again, Mars is iconic, and so much music, especially in soundtracks, borrows or otherwise owes a debt to it.

With that we've finally completed the Hedgehog Masque Replica series, and accounted for all the past tracks to add to the game. Right on time for the weekend of Sonic CD's 30th anniversary in the US. Not the anniversary of the game as a whole, given it had been out in Japan since September, but certainly the US soundtrack. I'll probably add a post or two after this about other motivations behind the music project and this series of posts, but I can speak a little bit to some thoughts about the feasibility of actually implementing these songs on a real Sega CD, adding them to the game's data.

If I'd known about these tools at the time (and had a sample pack or two at my disposal) I could have done something like this back when I played the old (Win 95 era) PC version. While it required some manipulation of DLLs to run on a Windows XP system, it was (and still is) eventually playable, and was distinct from the original Sega CD copy in that it actually included the past tracks on the CD (at the expense, it seemed, of having a CD-quality copy of the soundtrack). While this meant losing out on continuous looping, creating some wave files and ripping them to the CD was well within my power at the time (or using something like _inmm.dll to reference music files on the HDD) and so I could have had custom past soundtracks for most of the time that I've been playing this.

This obviously cuts into the potential for this project to pretend to be a real, authentic "lost soundtrack" that could have gone on to inspire later Sega music, though, as if such data had existed at the time, it would have probably been available for the team porting the game to Windows to use; after all, those rips of the past music had to come from somewhere in the first place. I certainly did that sort of file-replace shenanigans with other games in my library!

As nice as it would be to think that Sega Multimedia Studio had made some tracks to fit in the past stages like this, it seems unlikely that they did. The timeline of the project seems to explain a lot, as they likely did no work on the game until the Japanese version had released, whereupon they had a couple months to create a new soundtrack, from September to November (and even then this is being generous, as this isn't including the time meant to actually ship data and actually produce the hard copies of the game). While hard limits on the sample data (about 64 kilobytes if my math is correct) would have probably meant that alternate tracks couldn't have taken up more space on the disc than the ones in the Japanese version of the game, and the flexibility of CD-ROM data access meant that the data had a proper filesystem format rather than just being hardcoded addresses into a ROM, the lack of time meant that any issues that might come up would not be correctible in time, and that time would be better spent producing music in a more reliable workflow, for the CD audio tracks.

That's a shame, because the team clearly had enough technical savvy with the hardware to create tracks for the game. After all, these guys had made custom music for the Sega CD's BIOS, and it used a variant of the SMPS (Sample Music Playback System -- 'sample' here as in demonstration rather than audio recordings) that was used in the Sonic series. In fact, that same sound engine was used for Sonic CD, so they would have been able to make custom music with the techniques that they used to make the BIOS tunes.

All that said, there are some logistical issues with trying to implement these songs in Sonic Cd, were someone to try to port them from modplug tracker. Most of them come down to sample allocation: to deal with the relatively small sample space (well, it was a lot of memory in 1993, but not so much by today's standards). The existing samples are set to be streamed from the CD into the sample memory, allocated into RAM mostly per-channel (I haven't actually tried to look at this code, so I'm going by what other people have posted, mainly someone going by the name of Devon on the Sonic Retro forums). While it's possible to fix sample locations into memory, these can be overwritten by streamed samples since those may not respect the already-reserved memory. While I have created these modules in such a way that I believe their sample data should be able to fit into memory all at once, that comes at the expense of some sound quality in some cases, and may lead to issues for the handful of sound effects that use a PCM channel to play. In order to prevent collisions with playback between the sequenced data and those sound effects, the original set of songs avoid touching the 7th PCM channel. I have not reserved a channel for sound effects; at some point every tune in HMR has 8-note polyphony. The sound engine has priority flags to ensure these are handled in a consistent way, so that whatever sound has priority gets the appropriate channel, but that won't prevent collision from occurring and means that careful decision on which channels to reserve should be taken in seeking to implement these tracks in a real copy of the game.

However, the YM2612 is pretty unused during the game, as it only gets used for SFX, and only needs a few channels to play them. If we put at least one instrument from each track as FM, we can get around this priority issue. I've chosen lead synths for most tracks that would sound pretty good when implemented (or as close to implemented as they can be) on, in my estimation, a YM2612, if such shifts were necessary.

Otherwise the only real difference between a Sega CD implementation and the tracks I've provided for this series is that they'd probably sound just a little scratchier due to conversion between formats. I've already used 8-bit samples in this project to make that switchover less jarring..

It would certainly be possible to play all these songs on a Sega CD, and as those who have followed the hedgehog masque replica tag can see, I've even tried doing this. Most of the tracks have been designed to be able to fit all their samples in memory for the whole song, and those that do only have one or two places where samples would need to be overwritten. This would probably better suit a modified version of the engine where sample writes were designed to be much rarer. Have a data structure to keep track of what memory is available for samples being streamed in (signposts saying 'future', Sonic's extra life voice clip, "I'm Outer Here!", etc.) and use that for managing sample index data.

While I would like to see that happen eventually, it's a task that I don't have tools to accomplish efficiently, and I'm not prepared to start learning Sega CD programming for this one mod. I've released an earlier version of these tracks for the 2011 mod and later. I plan to update this (and an equivalent mod for the tweaked version of that game, Sonic CD Restored) over this weekend as well. Those who would prefer to play Sonic Origins can also look forward to a mod for that game as well.


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