ReMix:Streets of Rage "Hydraulic Beat" 5:30

Hooray for debuts! Adrian "gravitygauntlet" Wahrer bares his knuckles, dropping a Streets of Rage tribute that's perfect for the game's 33rd anniversary today! gravitygauntlet recently contributed to the soundtrack for indie visual novel ValiDate: Struggling Singles in Your Area, which looks hilarious, but now it's time to get mean and throw down in the streets! Part of gravitygauntlet's personalized approach to Yuzo Koshiro's music involved similar yet modernized sound design to take this from an SoR1 to SoR4 feel:

"I think Streets of Rage 1's soundtrack gets overlooked a lot because its arrangements come off as simpler compared to 2, which is why I thought it would be a fun source to expand on. Genre-wise, I didn't want to stray too far from the original, so a lot of the instrumentation are FM synth recreations. The idea was to remake and extend the source tune to have it be more in line with the production on Streets of Rage 4. Production-wise, I wanted to achieve a fidelity closer to SoR4, but with some "90s arranged CD version" elements, i.e. Sound in Action, to help it feel more like a throwback. The remix also has the same BPM as the source tune (90) because I wanted to keep it downtempo/funky like Streets of Rage 1 and Revenge of Shinobi, since a lot of the SoR4 tracks are a lot more fast-paced, and compared to 2/3/4 being more inspired by Detroit techno.

The arrangement is also somewhat based on in-game context; "Stealthy Steps" is the BGM for Level 6 which is an industrial/factory stage. The preceding level is a sunset boat/harbor stage, hence the helicopter/siren ambience, and the 3:30-5:05 section was meant to be more repetitive so it could be used for the boss fight at the end of the stage.

For more faithful instrumentation, I'm using a lot of instances of FMDrive and FM8 to recreate Genesis synths; the only thing sampled directly from the game is the "bongo" loop that starts at 0:50 in the remix and it's been processed/chopped up a lot. The more original instruments/other synths are mainly being done through a combination of u-he's Diva/Hive/Zebra2 and a microKORG, and the piano is a tweaked version of the Hammer Klavier from zircon's Impact Soundworks company. I mainly do progressive electronic, so this is a pretty hot/dense mix for me. I'm mainly trying to avoid any excessive muddiness or anything sounding too compressed, and it was definitely a challenge to give everything enough breathing room. Including the FX buses, it was something like 150 VST instances total."

Not lost in the ambitiousness of the "upgraded send-up" goal was the enjoyment aspect; prophetik music called this "a fun track" and appreciated gravitygauntlet's aforementioned Instrumentation focus:

"sfx noodling to start. remixer plays with the main theme a bit before getting into Stealthy Steps. beat comes in at 0:49 and is appropriately angular for the synths around it. bass is super FM and has some real grumble in it which is fun to hear. interesting lead comes in at 1:33 with some heavy buzz and movement to it - really liked this one. the snare's a bit bright but i get why you had it so meaty throughout.

cruises through some transformations of the theme for about a minute after this section, then noodles a bit around with what sounds like a theremin. at 3:30 we get into a much more developmental/transformational section. there's some interesting chord work in here to keep it moving forward and at least one key transposition for a while. around 4:46 it starts to back off some more until we get a short recap of Stealthy Steps. [...] this has some really interesting synth work throughout!"

Anyone with nostalgia for this theme's going to love the FM-centric sound design! Cool twinkly sounds for the intro, with the melody finally arriving at 1:12. Digging the comping style variations on the melody from 2:37-2:59, which was a nice touch. The piano line at 3:30 was cool, and the orch stabs added some purposefully cheesy (but welcome) flavor. Love the shimmering outro sound that quietly faded in around 4:46 and how it finally rose up to stylistically bookend with the intro. You also can't go wrong using a lot of sounds similar to the original music, yet this is far from sounding like a cut-and-paste or simple sound upgrade of the original source tune. Much like CJthemusicdude a few months ago, credit to gravitygauntlet for skillfully striking the balance between retaining the sound design of Streets of Rage while also having these production, textural & interpretation approaches meaningfully stand apart from the original. We're looking forward to hearing more from you, Adrian; nice job letting this simmer. Now we've got three worthy ReMxes this year that Yuzo Koshiro himself needs to hear from us! :-)