Green Hill Zone was my first song to achieve 1,000 views on Youtube. If you split the 2010 era into 2 halves, the rough first half and the better-but-not-amazing 2nd half, this would be the most popular of the first half.
This song suffers from my dreaded ‘drum lag issue’. It happens in this song, the song before it (King Dedede), and Tecmo World Wrestling, the next song. Here’s the story: I had changed my drum sound starting with King Dedede and along with it I had put an effect on the drum track to make it sound better. When I was recording, everything sounded ok, but when I would go to listen to the song, the drums would sound like they were dragging.
Compounding the problem was the fact I was still an amateur drummer at this stage, and it felt like I was losing my mind. I thought for sure I wasn’t dragging when I was playing, but then I would hear myself dragging in the playback of the recording. So I thought I was being delusional, and that’s not a good feeling when you really aren’t. To make up for the dragging, I started recording slightly ahead of the beat. This worked a tiny bit, but you can still tell the drums are a little bit off.
It wasn’t until I was recording this songs sequal, Emerald Hill Zone, 2 songs later, that I found out what the problem was. That effect I was using on the drum track that I mentioned earlier was causing a split second of lag on said track. So I wasn’t dragging the whole time, it was the damn lag from the effect that was making me sound bad.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about other stuff in this song. I feel I had a pretty good arrangement going on with this one. For those with a keen ear, you might notice the drum intro I played here makes a reappearance in the middle of the Flying Battery Zone remix.
The intro is the start-up music from Sonic 1, then after that we go into Green Hill Zone. Listening to it now, the synth solo after the first guitar solo is pretty neat. I was wanting to do a pretty long solo bit in this song, cause I wanted to start getting into doing some longer solos.
Like I said earlier, this was the first song/video I had on Youtube to gain 1,000 views. Back then that was really good for me, so this song appears in the Blast from the Past medley at #8.
Overall an alright remix that would be a lot better if it did it now-a-days.. maybe someday I will.