Red Hill Zone

Note: This post was written in 2025 and backdated to appear on the day I wrote and published the track.

As the Pythons would say, “and now for something completely different.” If you listen to the month’s playback in sequence, the appearance of this song directly after the thunder of Mare Marginus fades out is like getting in the car in the morning and having the radio at full blast because you forgot you’d lost most of your hearing at the concert the night before.

While I don’t remember the exact impetus to do this style of track, I strongly suspect that I was combing through my various plugins and doing my best to use things I’d never used before. In this case, it was Chipsynth MD from Plogue. I’m a huge fan of their other plugs, especially Chipspeech, which I’ve used a lot more than I expected to when I bought it.

Chipsynth MD is an extremely accurate model of the FM synthesis chip in the Sega Genesis.¹AKA the Sega Mega Drive outside the USA I won’t go into a lot of detail about it, but I did link to the product page if you’re interested. The one thing I do want to highlight is that it’s so accurate, you can load music files from Sega Genesis games and it will play them back. My procrastination time before actually starting today’s track consisted of me loading in tons of music from the old Genesis games I played back in the 90s, a highlight of which was the Sonic the Hedgehog series.

One of the most famous and popular of the Sonic music tracks is a level called Green Hill Zone. After loading that particular one, I discovered that you could copy instruments and load them into other instances of the plugin. So what you’re hearing when you listen to this is the exact instrumentation that was used in Green Hill Zone.

Constraint or Shortcut?

Using the exact instruments from that famous track was simultaneously limiting and freeing. On the one hand, I had to live within the limitations of a chip from the 1980s/90s. Only so many notes can be playing at once. There’s only one sample channel, meaning drums are extremely limited unless you’re using a synthesized drum of some sort.

On the other hand, I didn’t have to bother with choosing instruments and figuring out how they would work with each other. If the instruments are good enough for Masato Nakamura, they’re good enough for me. I even used the original composition as a guide for my own arrangement – it’s the same length and loops at the same point.

It’s probably worth clicking on the Green Hill Zone Wikipedia link above and listening to the track if you’d like to see how well I did.

So That’s Where I Got That!

There are some references that become so ingrained in our daily use that we forget where they came from. You know they’re not yours, but you don’t remember the source. Every so often I’ll be watching a movie or comedy special from the 80s and suddenly realize that this is where the phrase I’ve been using for 40 years came from. Most of the time, it’s not too embarrassing to discover my earlier tastes.

If you know me, you probably already know that I’ve been composing the soundtrack for an upcoming video game called Bomb Sworders. Listening to both Green Hill Zone and today’s track makes it pretty clear to me that GHZ and other game music from that era ended up being a huge, if forgotten, influence on my composition style for the game. Once the game releases and I have the soundtrack album for sale, I’ll link some snippets here for comparison. Trust me for now, though, the influence is very apparent on some tracks.

So it was pretty fun going through the Green Hill Zone track, music of profound influence on my own style, and very illuminating to be able to dissect it and find out exactly what made it tick. I’m pleased with my own composition and would definitely do this as another future production exercise.

And there’s a chance that Red Hill Zone might end up morphing a bit and turning into a full-fledged Bomb Sworders track. It definitely has the right spirit!

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Chipsynth MD

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

FabFilter, Gullfoss, MOTU Trim, Valhalla Delay

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Notes

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  AKA the Sega Mega Drive outside the USA