[VGM] Marble Beach Zone (mp3) megadrive

[elPatrixF]

A sonic-styled song conceived as a background music for a Green Hills-esque level.
I made two versions with different instruments. The first one ("CD" version) and a "Megadrive version" using instruments that sound pretty close to the YM2612 fm synthesis.@Soundcloud:
"CD" version: https://soundcloud.com/elpatrixf/marble-beach-zone
Megadrive version: https://soundcloud.com/elpatrixf/marble-beach-zone-16bit

[LPChip]

Very nice song. This is more a sonic 3 kind of level, rather than 1 or 2 which your suggestion would suggest. This is a big difference since sonic 3 music is composed by a different team as for 1 or 2.

I do miss the funk or jazzy style that sonic songs usually have, but only just slightly. I really did feel it was a sonic song, so mission accomplished.

[Saga Musix]

Nice and olskool, especially the 16-bit version.

[elPatrixF]

Thanks!! *u*

Very nice song. This is more a sonic 3 kind of level, rather than 1 or 2 which your suggestion would suggest. This is a big difference since sonic 3 music is composed by a different team as for 1 or 2.

I do miss the funk or jazzy style that sonic songs usually have, but only just slightly. I really did feel it was a sonic song, so mission accomplished.

I got good old memories of that.
Sonic 3 & Knuckles was the first sonic game I played in my life, and the tunes pretty much marked my childhood (and the best sonic game in the series, imo xD).
I made this song with the Angel Island tune in mind, but since "green-hills" is always the theme for most first levels in sonic games I thought it would be easier to recognize. 

Also, I think the whole "Act1 vs. Act2" idea was first used in Sonic 3, wasn't it?

[LPChip]

Sonic 3 & Knuckles was the first sonic game I played in my life, and the tunes pretty much marked my childhood (and the best sonic game in the series, imo xD).
I made this song with the Angel Island tune in mind, but since "green-hills" is always the theme for most first levels in sonic games I thought it would be easier to recognize. 

Also, I think the whole "Act1 vs. Act2" idea was first used in Sonic 3, wasn't it?

Yeah, I could hear that. Sonic 1 and 2 were that for me. I played them a lot in my childhood, and they marked it for me in that same regard. I didn't play sonic 3 and knuckles until much later. I did see the game played in the stores, and the first thing I noticed back then was that the music was so different and it almost felt like the game just was made to go on with a good concept because it is a good concept rather than to make a good follow up. The biggest difference in the music was the completely different kind of sound used as opposed to 1 and 2, and the music style itself was also different. I couldn't put my finger on it when I was young, but many many years later (which is actually a few years ago) I started digging into listening to the music again and listened to youtube playlists. I'd almost say that Sonic 1 and 2 music is happy, while sonic 3 music is more depressed. At a point I downloaded the music in mp3 format for a closer study, and through that, I found out that sonnic 1 and 2 were composed by different people than sonic 3 was. I listened to the songs from sonic 3 a lot too, so I did recognize the style too, which is again different from the most recent sonic games (sonic rush) which I have on my phone.

So I did indeed instantly recognized the Angle Island tune, but it is far from green hill zone, simply due to the sounds and style.

Sonic 1 has 3 acts per level, Sonic 2 has 2 acts per level, sonic 3 has 1 act per level, but in mid-level you switch to a new act if my memory serves me right. At least they made the "theme" switch. Its also the first game that has this savegame system.

[elPatrixF]

Same thing happened to me, but the other way around. Played sonic 1 & 2, some years ago.

Something I forgot to add is that I never had a sega megadrive (Though I always wanted one, all I had was a Famicom back then ) but I rather had the "Sonic & Knuckles Collection" for PC, which included Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckles, and Sonic 3 & Knuckles, and the only difference with the real thing was that the music was rearranged, and played back through MIDI; and some of them were even replaced completely.
_{There were also two versions of each song, a "FM Synthesis" version and a "General MIDI" version; with very slight differences and tweaks (Like more square waves, and synths, instead of more varied instruments), but both of them used the same MIDI playback regardless.}

And boy, it sounded awesome with the Sound Blaster AWE64. I still prefer that over the "Microsoft Wavetable Synth" thing that is the de-facto roland soundfont, or whatever it is--

I clearly remember the first time I played Sonic 3 & Knuckles on an emulator, how the impossible barrel zone carnival Night zone music was completely different to the one I knew; from this funky clown jam to this other thing.
Not to mention the Ice Cap zone theme- which is depressing as f*ck in the megadrive version, but lovely cheesy cheerful in the pc version.
And the launch base, from funky to march.
Chances are that these are the depressing tunes you might be talking about.
There are a couple others that were also replaced, like the mid-boss theme, the competition mode theme, knux theme in Sonic 3, etc.

I've read this could've had something to do with Michael Jackson's involvement in the music of the game, or that the songs used samples that couldn't be played back through midi, or something like that.

I'm a huge fan of S3&K, needless to say, to the point of converting every music in the game (Not just converting the MID files to MP3/OGG/WAV, but rather manually recording the sound-test output from the Sound Blaster AWE64 sound card, to another PC, and then saving it into 2 different files in a "start-and-loop" manner), just for the sake of playing the game on newer PC's with the same look and feel I had back in the nineties

So, by the end of the day I had roughly 101 different files. It was time consuming, but worth the effort T^T