By the way, I’ve been reading quite a bit of your blog and I find the stuff you dig up just fascinating, especially the irregular time signature post. If anything, you’re dissection of the Ocarina of Time songs actually taught me a bit more music theory; something that I’ve always been interested in but have never had the chance to learn about. All in all, great blog. I’ll be sure to keep reading.

dfan: Hey, thanks for coming by! Hooray for Harmonix. :-) Good catch on the G#, I’ll update that soon.

I just wanted point out a transcription error since you seem like the sort who would care: in the Mystic Cave Zone theme, the last note of the first measure is a G#, not G natural.

Man, I loved the music in those early Sonic games.

Yet

What are your thoughts on the Sonic 3 Soundtrack and the “possible” decline of Sonic style soundtrack over the next iterations of the games.

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The Unknown: No worries — I don’t expect you to have memorized the archive! :-)

AlexB: I unfortunately don’t know much about animation, so I don’t think I can help you there. Two out of three ain’t bad, though, right?

Sharky: Excellent point about Spring Yard, and one that I conspicuously sidestepped in my post. ;-) I noticed the oddball harmonic progression as I was working out the bass part, but figured I would save it for another day since it wasn’t the focus here. I’ll be sure to get back to it now that I know it’s not just me who’s curious.

However, I’ve recently started taking a look at the inner workings of a few songs, and one that has me completely baffled is Spring Yard. The very prominent opening riff points strongly to D minor (A A B B C C C# C#) but then it completely throws you off by going straight into an A minor arpeggio.

The rest of the A section also features an F# note, and with it, the outlining of a B minor triad. Out of all the chords that could possibly be borrowed in the key of D minor (Via mode mixture, use of harmonic/melodic minor) this is certainly not one I would expect.

The B section is mostly just in F major (Obviously, to serve as a more consonant section, a sort of structural cadence, I guess)

Sorry if I’m going a little off-topic here, but I’d really like to hear your take on an analysis of Spring Yard. All of the songs in Sonic 1 are amazing, but this one always stood out to me, and I guess this is the reason why.

Oh, and it’d be extremely rude of me not to thank you for the post I’m commenting on. Great job! Marble Zone has always been one of my favorite Sonic basslines, simple, but effective.

I was under the impression that certain tracks, like those with the voice-sampled stuff in Sonic 3, were at least co-written by Michael Jackson’s songwriters. I.e. the miniboss theme, the Launch Zone music, and so on.

All of the music on the Sega Genesis all had that weird distortion on it and it all sounded like the same keyboard. The first music you hear when you turn on the Spiderman game is, to me, the epitome of all Sega Genesis music.

With the Super Nintendo they didn’t have that – all of their music was a bit clearer. It made me feel just a tiny bit better when I would argue against my cousin about who had the better system.