ReMix:Sonic Adventure "Aviated Spirit" 6:58

Last but never least, our third Dreamcast 20th birthday mix comes from Rexy (Beverley Wooff), who gives us a fantastic solo piano arrangement of Sonic Adventure, from The Sonic Stadium Music Adventure 2012

• Arranges: "Theme of 'E-102γ'"
• Cameos: "E.G.G.M.A.N." (Sonic Adventure 2; heard in intro), "Open Your Heart" (heard in mid-section)

"Much like "Flicky's Night Out" before it, this is a track that I originally put together for the Sonic Stadium Music Adventure 2012. Of all the tracks I did for it, I strived to give them all their unique character -- and this take on Gamma's theme from Sonic Adventure was the token solo piano submission.

I was inspired after finally playing it for the first time not long after the release of Sonic Generations and saw a surprisingly dark tale for Gamma's campaign. With the way it all played out, I envisioned the structure of the piece in a similar fashion to the overall plot -- creation by the hands of Dr. Eggman, serving for said evil scientist, realising his organic Flicky heart was too pure to keep serving, and ultimately deciding to save the other birds inside the other E-Series robots. It's a surprisingly compelling story among the other SA1 campaigns and I aimed to represent it with this delicate solo piano direction.

Why did I not submit it? Firstly, the track itself is around 7 minutes long, so it would've been difficult to evaluate by length alone; and, secondly, while EAR did a fantastic job at mastering this beast of an album, the difference between his production skills on this one instrument and my own are like night and day -- and so I kept saying to myself that I'll re-master it myself. I guess I never got around to that part...!"

Sounds great to me, and I really love the spiralling patterns & sense of drama Bev put into this. Larry Oji writes:

"I've actually never gotten to play Sonic Adventure before, but through OCR, I'm very familiar with a handful of themes, especially Tikal's. When I first heard Gamma's theme and thought of the game's composer team, I immediately suspected it was Fumie Kumatani due to the awesome Phantasy Star Online vibes from the composition and instrumentation; I was happy to be right, and this was a tremendous source tune choice.

I laughed a little at one of Beverley's reasons for not submitting this, i.e. this being difficult to evaluate at 7 minutes long; this was beautifully adapted for piano but followed the structure of the source fairly closely, so I had no problems at all making out Gamma's theme. And let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good on production too. Performance-/production-wise, there were a few stilted moments (:09-:10, 2:12-2:21), but the overall delivery was otherwise extremely dynamic, delicate, and lovely. :-D"

Roger that. It sounds weird, but I dug this mix even more after doing the YouTube/visualizer vid for it, as seeing the frequency spikes spiral outwards in realtime gave me a deeper appreciation for the structure/patterns employed; beautiful work. Some minor gripes here & there that Larry pointed out, but overall this is a wonderful, substantial solo piano interpretation of the theme, and it shows how very, very far Rexy has come with arranging & performing for the instrument. Excellent!