Music

The music of the show:

One of my favorite things about Sonic SatAM is its season 1 music, by Michael Tavera. Unlike many 90s cartoons, several season 1 episodes for SatAM seemed to be scored from top-to-bottom. Episodes like "Sonic Racer", "Sonic & Sally", or "Sonic Boom", appeared to be given a bit of special attention, both in terms of music and cinematography.

As many others have mentioned over the years, much of Sonic SatAM's creative direction seemed to have a "Star Wars" quality to it. Tavera's music further embodies this context. From beginning to end, we hear foreshadowing harps, playful flutes, bouncy strings, epic horns, and moving arrangements. This subtle opening motif, for instance, feels like it was lifted straight out of Star Wars (1:12 to 1:18).

But Tavera's music wasn't just well-scored ambience. His more thematic music was simply phenomenal.

Sonic's theme is an unforgettable ballad of heroism that came in a large variety of shapes and sizes, all tailor made for the context he was performing in. The same was true for Robotnik's menacing and iconic theme, the second central theme of the show. And perhaps most magical was when both themes would be woven together as Robotnik confronted Sonic with a trap or obstacle, and Sonic bested it. Check out the incredibly satisfying scoring going on from the start of this clip (19:56 to 20:37).

In this little 1 minute segment, we get:

• Panic about Antoine's situation
• A Sonic fanfare, to momentarily engage us with Sonic's context without taking too much away from the growing panic over Antoine
• Now the panic is building into its own theme
• As Sonic sees the signal from Sally, a very powerful Sonic fanfare builds
• What I think makes the use of the Sonic theme so powerful here is what it is saying about Sonic the character
• We also aren't actually sure at this point if abandoning the race to assist in a mission is something Sonic can easily do; and the scene immediately before this one where Sonic is visibly having fun with the race, helps accentuate this point
• But this singular moment is really what the episode is all about:
  Sonic choosing duty over ego, service to others over self
• Finally, a Sonic success wouldn't be complete without a reaction to that success from Robotnik. That's what we are given here and it is beautifully accentuated by a noticably anxious version of Robotnik's theme

Let’s talk about the game now.

The music of the game:

The balance I constantly need to strike here is in how much I try to leverage exactly what Tavera put into the show (which is A LOT), and how much I should either do myself, or rework to fit a slower, and often more repetitive, RPG context. RPGs don't often get access to the level of bombast and movement that SatAM perfectly executes, although there are of course opportunities (battles, boss battles, etc).

Here's a taste of what I've sequenced and/or composed thus far.

Note: I've been working on midi music for years and I use ghetto old tools to do it (Anvil Studio).

Unfortunately this often means that the music I make sounds dated, even if I'm trying to go for a SNES sound. I don't tend to spend a lot of time looking for "good synth" instruments, I instead focus on quality composition and arrangement, and try to just use whatever the standard midi synth gives me. It's a happy accident however, that whatever synth Tavera used for the SatAM score basically sounds like a higher end version of standard midi synth instruments, so the music I've made doesn't sound too far flung from his work (At least in my opinion).

I don't want to do a super detailed analysis of every tune here--many are self-explanatory.

I do want to highlight one in particular, however, that I spent a fair amount of time on--the Boss battle theme. It was largely my own original composition, and I thought struck a decent balance between classic Final Fantasy RPG and SatAM thematic bombast.

Anyways, I think that covers it for music. There's still a lot left to do here.


If you love SatAM music as much as I do, please comment below and tell me your favorite music from the show.