Back when I first got in to converting other people’s MIDIs to nicer-sounding MP3s, one of the earliest songs I did that made me step back and go “Whoa, I’m really on to something here” was a version of Hilltop Zone I did. Since then, I was kind of afraid to touch it, because it was sort of a cut above everything else I did in the years to follow. Even when I posted it to my Soundcloud a couple years ago, it was just a higher quality rendering of the same *.flp file I’d done back in 2006 or 2007.
I decided to see what I could do to it today.
There’s a nice simplicity to the original version, but at the same time, I like how more robust and “full” this 2017 version sounds.
I’ve caught some flak over the years for going with an alto saxaphone in this song. A lot of people think the original Hilltop Zone uses a harmonica. I dunno why, but it just hit me one day that no, this couldn’t be a harmonica. It had to be brass of some kind. There’s a kind of “bounce” to the instrumentation that suggests a horn, to me.
I was validated a few years ago when Sega released the Sonic 1 & 2 Anniversary soundtrack, which contained the original demo versions of each song before they were converted to work with the Genesis’s FM Synth. It’s not quite a saxaphone, but it turns out Masato Nakamura originally envisioned Hilltop using a Mute Trumpet.
I still think alto sax sounds better.
