ReMix:Sonic Adventure 2 "Chao Cave Rave" 4:41

Air3s (Adeseye Agbaje) debuted back in 2013 with a rather sick arrangement of "Chemical Plant Zone," and now follows that up with a playful, melodically minimalist EDM take on the melodically minimal "Chao Cave" music from Sonic Adventure 2. He controversially opines:

"I just wanted to give Ableton a try, but with its crap meters and poor plugin performance, I will just stick to mixing in Cubase. Much easier to work on."

Different DAWs for different folks; obviously people have made & continue to make amazing music with Ableton Live, and I actually moved AWAY from Cubase recently and switched to Studio One & Bitwig, but what matters isn't the tool itself, but what you can make with it. Adeseye keeps the plucky, running eighth note melody intact & repeating, here, but builds a new home around it, feigning a beatdrop early on and playing with expectations a bit before REALLY letting loose @ 2'15" (love the latency/timing here) and later @ 3'07", where the funk is thick. Without knowing that the judges were on the verge of rejecting the initial version of this mix, the artist sent in a revision that addressed many of their concerns; serendipity ensued. Some judges still nevertheless had concerns over the repetitious nature of the source usage and the textural similarity with regard to some of the accompanying FX, but the presiding sentiment was that the context changes things dramatically and that the repetition makes sense given the genre & structure; Liontamer's a stickler for these sorts of things, and he wrote:

"This is a melodically conservative mix, but Adeseye did a nice job putting his own spin on it, retaining many of the original's patterns, but crafting a more driving beat with richer, more evolving textures than the source. I can see why there'd be some concern on the tone being too similar, but IMO this struck a fine balance of sounding melodically close to the original while changing the instrumentation, adding original backing writing, and shifting the textures regularly to present more than enough interpretation."

DarkeSword made what I think is an appropriate comparison:

"Nice embellishments on what's a pretty simple/sparse source. Feels like a Sonic version of what we did with Super Cartography Bros. No problems here. I'm bumpin'."

I too am bumping, and furthermore I concur with the likening to SCB, which had several tracks that:

1. Arranged minimal sources
2. Didn't emphasize melodic development/variation that much
3. Instead focused on building an EDM structure around the source usage
4. Ended up awesome

Fun stuff from Air3s that takes a pretty basic source and builds an entire EDM jam around it; much head-bobbin' & toe-tappin' was had by yours truly, and while I tend to favor mixes with more of a melodic hook, I enjoyed this quite a bit!