Rest in peace, Geoff Folin, who co-created this soundtrack with his brother, Tim Follin. He passed away of pancreatic cancer just recently, and it is extremely hard hitting news. Thanks for all the masterpiece OSTs you contributed to, Geoff.
I just found out today about this and was very sad to hear. I did a guitar version of Tim's solstice years ago. I'm thinking Geoff needs something like that done in his memory. This track might be the perfect candidate.
I found this on a "Worst Video Game Music" playlist. I was shocked to say the least. (Just to clarify something, the playlist I found this on was deleted years ago)
using 5 channels for sound is limitted but also an advantage beacause it doesn't happen that problem of sound channel used to fx sound making the music hear terrible.
@@PallomemberNo, but you’ve got the right idea. Depending on how you feel the main section, there may or may not be an extra sixteenth note in the last bar. This would make it 7/8, 15/16, or 7/8 followed by 1/16, but not “8/8” (the correct term is 4/4, btw)
"Sorry Mr. Follin, this soundchip is sample-based, there's no saw wave..." *records 0.001s of saw wave and shoves it aggressively into the S-SMP without breaking eye contact
Wait is that true? You had to use samples? So these fellas pulling all these dense waves out of their asses are really doing runtime frequency modulation to get these sounds? That's......so badass.
@@JesseLeeHumphry The only thing the SNES soundchip could generate was noise, at 16-ish different frequencies. Yep, everything else is samples and the reverb/echo effect
2 years later from 1993 in Japan, Kenji Ito and the sound designers for the Romancing SaGa games basically overclocked the Super Famicom It’s insane what the SNES was capable of
Ok if you aren't listening to this on headphones that can do directional audio you should be. This track is full of sliding sound from left ear to right ear and back again that you don't get without them. I feel like I'm driving donuts around a guitarist in some kind of sweet car. Plain old stereo audio was barely even a thing for TVs at the time, but Tim Follin went hard with not only stereo, but full on 180 degree sliding gradients in his rando game soundtrack. On a SNES. Holy shit, bro.
the sliding guitar riff is one of the most genius things i've ever listened to, you can like actually feel it going around and around in 360 degrees lol
Believe it or not, this wasn't the max power of the chip, there were limitations on the track, one being that they used 5 tracks instead of all 8, leaving the 3 for sound effects.
Welcome to Tim Follin. He worked on many bad / obscure games and always had the best music. Check out Pictionary, Solstice and Puzznic if you havent already. The stuff Tim did with even 8-bit is god tier
@@shizukajonouchi2562 A Genesis version of Time Trax was developed but never released, and he gave it a totally different soundtrack from the SNES version. A rom of it surfaced in 2013, letting people hear it for the first time, and I can definitely see why Follin said he regretted not working with the Genesis more. Check it out! ru-vid.com/group/PLMvG7kcJiPGiwlSCN-Bfu3hClkQaZhttp
Rest in peace the legend Geoff Follin, without you or your brother Tim Follin, we would've never had such amazing music on the NES, SNES, Genesis, or any other machine in the 8-bit and 16-bit eras of video games.
RIP Geoff Follin, you blessed us with some of the greatest VGM OSTs and I'll forever be grateful for that. You were truly a master composer and I thank you for your work.
Fun Fact: every song in Plok, excluding the Title Screen, uses 5 of the 8 tracks of the Super Nintendo, which means this is just a small glimpse at what the Follin brothers were capable of at the time
Bro hol up, I just listened to the Boss theme, now I'm hooked on this game's ost, props to whoever composed this. Need to listen to more of their work!
fun fact: the creators of the snes had to check the snes plok was running on to make sure it wasnt modified because they didnt know the snes could make these kind of sounds
I’ve been looking for this song for what feels like an eternity and I never would have thought it was goddamn ‘Beach’ from SNES Plok. Where has this game’s OST been all these years???
Exactly what happened to me after looking for Gentle Breeze from Trauma Center 2 lmao. Glad you found it. It’s infuriating looking for obscure music sometimes
in the hall of VGM composing greats, this piece stands up with Yuzo Koshiro and Matt Furniss's efforts in my opinion. with Geoff recently passing, its now worth its weight in gold. I never played Plok but i hope geoff knew the impact he made making some of these extra special soundtracks with his brother. sleep well, maestro.
It doesn't seem that hard though. 3 quarter notes are thrown at you, and then an eighth note is thrown at you. Now let's take the 3 quarter notes. If there are 3 quarter notes in a bar, it's creates a 3/4 environment. There is also an eighth note too, so you need to translate the 3/4 to 6/8. 6+1=7. Boom, 7/8. It's how I figured it out. For some songs (Cough cough Strong One Masked Man) it's a bit different.
I love how the guitar solo just subtly drops back from common time to 7/8 so when the full instrumentation comes back in you don’t even realize it. That’s SONGWRITING. Artistry.
Jsyk: "I've been diddled again!" Is an actual line in the game. P.S. Jsyk is short for 'Just so you know' This has been 'Unnecessarily Explain The Joke' with Curtis Sillo! I'll be here all night!
The transition at 0:50 is so fucking good man. There's a lot of thought put into it. The song starts off in 7/8 (seven eighth notes) instead of 4/4 (4 quarter notes). Basically, 7/8 is 4/4 with half a beat shaved off it. Now... the transition hits the half-beat before the bar starts. Considering the track was in 7/8 before, what is happening is the transition is hitting at the end of the 7/8, but it adds an extra half-beat before the next bar... which is in 4/4. So it completes the last 7/8, turning it into 4/4 by having the transition start on a half note accent before the next bar starts. It changes the tempo slightly but you barely even notice because the way the transition was done was THAT smooth. It's some next level compositional shenanigans. Tim and Geoff were masters, full stop.
Tim Follin famously wrote bangin music for bad games. Really, he just didn't care about the games at all, he just wanted to write game music. See also his soundtracks for Silver Surfer, Pictionary, Gauntlet III (actually a good game), and Solstice (I'm told that it's also good). His brother Jeff wrote a great soundtrack for the Genesis Terminator 2 game.
I've heard before that VGM composers were often inspired by Prog rock which in turn was inspired by classical music. I gotta say this does remind me of Cinema Show by Genesis for one
This song has reached 1M views, who cares? Rest easy Geoff, you and your brother, both of your music inspired me a lot. I’m not good at music but someday i’ll get good at it :)
I was wondering why this was so high quality and then I saw that it was made by Tim “Pictionary for the NES DOES deserve the coolest fucking music you’ve ever heard” Folin and then it all made sense
Not too many other obscure standalone SNES tracks approaching a million views. Stood the test of time. RIP Geoff- thank you for all you did with your brother, we are forever impacted by your art.
Every now and again I jump down the Follin Rabbit hole on YT, and I find something I hadn't heard before. This is stunning, he blows my mind. He did 1 year of music college and his brother showed him how to code pulse width modulation. I've been plinking around for 30 years, nothing.
Oh yeah btw this song only uses 5 of the 8 channels, same with the rest of the songs from this ost besides the title track. Tom and Geoff, absolute mad lads.
@@AdiCool88 absolutely! i am definitely not trying to diminish the music in this game. tom follin is a fantastic composer, and i think most of his compositions utilized the sound chips at the time to their fullest potential. i was just responding to the part about it being more "futuristic than popular music" in the original comment, since the music composition in itself isn't really futuristic, because it's prog rock
@@snailevangelist Yeah I get what you mean, no worries! ✌️I don’t know how but I sometimes forget at how good the SNES soundchip was. It was too good for it’s time.
I only know this song because of a Mario Hack game called "Super Mario world Kaizo" it had a different note from that game to this one or could be my ears messing with me lolol
This sounds amazing. Didn't know the SNES could put out such varied music quality. Though the same composer(s) also did the music for "Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge" but I was very young and little way back then and my brain didn't really notice or care about details such as that... 🥰😅
Emulate it, it’s hard as a mother f$&k but damn good. It’s very tricky though. Lots of thinking required to solve problems in the later levels but done very clever
Geoff and Tim Follin did a WONDERFUL job making this OST to fruition! A shame they're so under-recognised in the videogame OST scene, maybe one day they'll get the love they deserve? One day, they will :]
I was listening to this when I had a sudden realization. In a second window, I pulled up the Spongebob "lost episode" walk cycle and tried to sync parts of it up to the song. It was magical (I swear I'm not high).
