The Jetzons - Hard Times (SEGA Genesis cover)

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Description

If you didn't already know, Hard Times was an 80s synthpop song that wasn't released until the late 2000's. And because it wasn't released at the time, in the 90's the song's composer reused the song as the level theme for Ice Cap zone in Sonic the Hedgehog 3. There's more details to this story, but I'm not recapping the complete history of Sonic 3's music right now.

I got the idea to make this cover after hearing the act 2 arrangements that Isabelle Chiming wrote for all of the Sonic 3 levels that didn't already have proper act 2 music. Her arrangement of Ice Cap took the approach of subtly integrating the melody from Hard Times into the act 1 music, similar to how Flying Battery's act 2 arrangement worked. That made me notice just how different the original Hard Times recording is from what eventually became Ice Cap zone's music. It made me want to create my own Genesis cover of the original Hard Times arrangement, using some of Ice Cap's instruments.

Because I was using so many samples and instruments from the original song, I decided it would be easier to make this in FL Studio using Chipsynth MD instead of using Deflemask. I could've still made a Deflemask copy of this, and maybe I will go back and do it one day for comparison's sake. But since it was so much easier for me to work on my arrangement in FL Studio, starting over in Deflemask felt pointless to me. I still made sure to stick to the Genesis hardware limitations as much as possible. Even the square and noise channels are all coming from Chipsynth MD. I tried to reference volume levels from actual Genesis music so that this would feel a little more hardware authentic. But the biggest inaccuracy is definitely the pitch bends and vibrato since FL handles those differently than a tracker would. Aside from mastering, the only other inaccuracy here is that the release of some instruments may overlap a bit, but it's nothing you'd notice while listening to the full song, and I made an effort to cutoff releases wherever I could, such as with sample playback and the pad synth.

I decided to skip the ending guitar solo since it wasn't quite clear enough to transcribe. And for something that's supposed to sound like video game music, it made more sense to loop straight back to the beginning after the last chorus instead of jumping from a solo to the first chorus or something.

I should mention that for some reason, the video and audio may not sync up perfectly. It seems the video recorded the song slower than my direct render.

Oh, and I've got another big project I'm working on after this one. A project that combines both Chipsynth MD and SFC.

Be sure to check out Isabelle's Ice Cap arrangement that inspired mine. (The other two arrangements she posted are super good too!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdvolwrCZSs&t=44s&ab_channel=IsabelleChiming

Download this song as a wav file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uxtyuNeAvBaymVN1ks2teHIXvpRisulR/view?usp=sharing
Arranged, mixed, and mastered in FL Studio: https://www.image-line.com/
All Genesis samples and instruments recorded from Chipsynth MD: https://plogue.com/products/chipsynth-md.html