#jun senoue

Flying Battery Zone - Act 1

I've seen some people start to get bent out of shape about it and I think they really need to cool their jets.

This was the video I saw on the subject, but there's also a voiced video essay going around, and its causing some people to get super critical of Jun Senoue's work on Sonic 3D Blast.

Basically, if you can't or don't want to watch the video, there's a specific brand of KORG MIDI piano that contains a variety of different preset loops that ended up being used in a handful of different Sonic 3D Blast songs on the Sega Genesis.

Instead of compose the entire, complete song himself, Jun Senoue took these backing track loops and simply inserted his own melody into them. So the drums, the bass, the chorus, it all came from these presets. Jun merely modified somebody else's work.

Now, as the above video points out, that's exactly what these KORG loops are made for. They are for professional musicians playing live music. And when you have a keyboard like this, it makes sense. You don't always have a band with you. You need bass and drums and chorus, so you can just dial in one of these presets and play your own song over it.

You've still written a melody. You're still performing that melody. But everything surrounding that melody is a preset.

And people are getting bent out of shape because this means "Jun Senoue didn't actually make his own music, he stole these songs, he took a cheap shortcut," etc. And it's like, I think those kind of people are really ignorant of how music sometimes gets made. Sampling happens a lot more than some people realize.

There's a great website out there called "WhoSampled" and it tracks this kind of information for all kinds of music, including video game music. So, for example, did you know that Tomoya Ohtani used a lot of loops for Windmill Isle in Sonic Unleashed? Here's the guitar, it's from a loop pack called "Soundscan 16: Bossa Brazil." That's right -- Brazil. For a song meant to represent Greek culture. Some of the drums come from Lalo's Bossa Nova (Samba #2).

You can back out and see how many different songs Ohtani has sampled from in his career, and which songs sample from him in return. This is not me putting Tomoya Ohtani on blast. This is just what happens.

And it's not even just that these are small time guys that are "getting away with it." This kind of sampling happens even in huge name musicians. Listen to Will Smith's Grammy-winning Men in Black, and then listen to Forget Me Nots from Patrice Rushen.

The thing to keep in mind about music is that, technically speaking, there is a mathematically finite number of songs in the world. Note progression is sort of a solved equation. There are only so many keys a note can exist in, and the chorus and backing track has to support that in a specific way in order to harmonize. Harmonization is the thing that makes a lot of music enjoyable to listen to. So there are only so many ways you can combine notes to make a song that sounds good, and courts have already decided how long (or short) a sequence of notes has to be in order to be copyrightable.

All of this is to say that a lot of musicians use "shortcuts" like this, at all levels of skill, and something like these KORG loops were created specifically to be used like this. On purpose. And there are hundreds of loop packs just like those, probably even thousands. It's normal.

Calling all Crush 40 fans all around the world. Following the recent release of my 2N2R merge, I've recently started working on a big project.

Introducing "The Crush 40 Archive", an initiative aiming to preserve Crush 40's history, both live and in the studio.

The project aims to cover everything Crush 40 and Crush 40 adjacent, preserved in the best quality possible to be shared for everyone to see.

The idea would be to share as much of this material with proper credits given to the original sharer(s) on YouTube and elsewhere where applicable.

Did you see Johnny and Jun between 2008 and today and have pics, videos or audio you'd like to have preserved? Maybe you've seen Axel Rudi Pell or Hardline shows between 1992 and today too? The Crush 40 Archive's got you covered.

No matter the quality of the material, you never know what kind of gold you might be sitting on, so if you have anything, even if it's not much, feel free to send it at the following contacts:

Email: [email protected]

Discord: worksofmagic_

With Crush 40 ending soon, and the Speed Of Sound Tour right around the corner, let's preserve the story of our childhoods, together.