Idea : The track succeeds "Goodbye Summer", which takes place during the day. "Midnight Escape" is the "sunset" version, as our character contemplates the night sky after a long day cruising on an unnamed road. He reminisces about the past, or a place he's never set foot in, and he eagerly awaits for the coming days...

Song key if you ever need it : 12A / Dbm

Tools used :

• Cubase Pro
• Korg M1
• LinnDrum
• Yamaha DX7

Inspirations :

• Sonic the Hedgehog 1 & 2 (Masato Nakamura)
• The Rippingtons (notably Russ Freeman)

Production techniques :

So to get that "16bit" sound, I went directly to the source. The Genesis/Megadrive uses a Yamaha YM2612 sound chip, a lower-end version of the chips commonly found in the DX7 synthesizer from the 80s. It was a picture perfect match as you can hear, and required little to no compression in quality to simulate the sound desired. Luckily, the school I study at has one of those synthesizers that were free to use, and to my surprise, loads of the presets available were directly used in the Sonic games !

The drums were different as they were re-sampled from LinnDrum recordings (too expensive

and I don't think I'll ever afford that machine), compressed and downgraded in bitrates.

The little synth riff in the middle of the track uses a Korg M1 preset, obviously in reduced bitrate as well.