A Moment With
Jun Senoue chats to us about being in the Sonic Adventure Music Experience
For over 25 years, Jun Senoue has been shaping the sounds of Sega games, most famously including the Sonic series. Along with
Sonic Adventure Music Experience bandmates Takeshi Taneda and Act, he recently performed for hundreds of fans packed into The Garage in London, playing classic themes from Sonic’s Dreamcast era and new tracks from Team Sonic Racing.
We catch up with Sonic Team’s sound director, Jun Senoue
You’ve previously performed at the UK Summer Of Sonic events, but Sonic Adventure Music Experience was just about the music. How did this event come to happen?
I started Sonic Adventure Music Experience in 2016 to celebrate Sonic’s 25th anniversary as a trio band with Takeshi Taneda and Act. We have performed a couple of shows in Japan and a headliner show at MAGFEST, but this is the very first time that we brought this full-band experience to the UK.
Adam Tuff, one of the organisers of the Summer Of Sonic, came to our very first Tokyo show in 2016 and he and his team wanted to bring us over to the UK. It was the perfect timing to have a show here because we recently released Team Sonic Racing, and 2019 was the 20th anniversary of Dreamcast and Sonic Adventure. I think the audience enjoyed the spontaneous full-band experience and our groove. We were very surprised that the audience in London sang along with all our instrumental songs so loudly. It really made us smile!
Please tell us a little bit about the other members of the band, Takeshi Taneda and Act – will fans have heard their work in Sonic games, too?
Takeshi Taneda is a bass monster. We are the same age, born in August 1970. I first met him in the mid-nineties and we’ve worked together ever since. He is always recording and touring and doing many projects, so it’s pretty hard to book him. Do you remember the slap bass on the song for Station Square? Or how about the wild slap bass intro of the City Escape song? All those memorable bass sounds were recorded by him.
Act is a young drummer from a different generation. He grew up listening to the Sonic The Hedgehog songs I wrote, so he knows the songs very well. He is talented and has some fresh ideas to bring to the group. The three of us recorded lots of songs as a core band when we worked on Team Sonic Racing. This was also Act’s first work on a Sonic game.
What are your favourite memories of working on the Sonic
Adventure games?
Sonic Adventure was the biggest production for me at that time. I had many songs to wrap up, and it was my first time working with a large number of voice scripts. That project was tough but also a lot of fun. Also, having several vocal songs was a challenge for the team but it was worth a try. Every single song was the perfect match for the character theme and their attitude/characteristics. Furthermore, Open Your Heart was the very first song where I teamed up with Johnny Gioeli.
We moved to San Francisco when we worked on Sonic
Adventure 2. I got a lot of inspiration from my life in California, and I got approval from the director (Takashi Iizuka) to make a song with vocals for the first level, City Escape. Both Escape From The City and Live & Learn (the game’s main theme, by Crush 40) are still popular songs for this franchise.
You often perform Sonic music live, and brought back Sand Hill and Final Egg’s themes for Team Sonic Racing. Why is this game one you revisit so often?
For Team Sonic Racing there were several tracks based on the levels from the previous Sonic games and some of them just couldn’t be left out. I thought implementing that kind of music would be a nice surprise for Sonic fans, plus it would fit nicely in the racing game genre with an aggressive arrangement. We worked on those games two decades ago and it was so much fun to revisit them. I am glad that everyone enjoyed the results!
I personally would love to revisit other games like Sonic And The Black Knight or Shadow The Hedgehog if our fans would like to hear it.
When you’re updating past compositions, how do you approach the task – what’s the right balance between retaining the familiar sound and adding new elements?
It was Angel Island Zone for Super Smash Bros Brawl when I started arranging Sonic music. I received positive feedback on it and that was a good reference for my later arrangements. I don’t want to change the melody or structure of the song much, since I want to respect the original. Adding vibe, emotion, passion, and energy when we record the music.
Are there any of your non-sonic soundtracks that you’d particularly like to perform live?
I sometimes record the guitars for Phantasy Star Online 2 songs. These are very technical songs and hard to play, but a worthy challenge. I have only performed them once, but it would be great to do it more.
Crush 40, another project I am working on, includes lots of nonsonic-related songs and they are really fun to perform live. I want to bring
Crush 40 back to the UK as a full-band performance, sometime in the near future. Please check out our latest release, Driving Through Forever!
Finally, there are still lots of Sonicrelated vocal songs that we have not performed live yet. It would be a dream to perform some of these songs in front of our loyal fans. I know our fans would want to sing along with us!