Hey Guys!

How many of you are fans of ‘It Doesn’t Matter’ and ‘Escape From the City’? If you’re one of them, I’m sure you’ll be pleased with the news that Tony Harnell has been in the studio laying down vocals for an updated version of ‘Escape From The City,’ that was reported at The Sonic Stadium a few days ago by my friend ‘T-Bird.’

For those of you with a FaceBook account, Tony is asking for more fans as he lost his original page. There’s a kicker though, Tony will donate some goodies to whoever brings in the most new ‘likes’ or fans of his FaceBook page. T-Bird has already began taking in new members and I’d like to extend the reach of all Crush 40 / Jun Senoue fans to help his cause. He’s also promised a giveaway of the goodies, so you could be one of those who gets Tony Harnell merchandise for free just for taking 10 seconds to ‘like’ his official page! All you have to do to is to ‘Like’ Tony’s official page and reply to a status update saying that ‘T-Bird’ sent you there. The status update is here: http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=188867757814436&id=11007457037

-Martin

I’m glad to see / hear people are starting to get their signed copies of ‘Break Free’ in the post! Don’t worry if you haven’t yet, as the first 50 orders are well on their way down the delivery pipeline. The last 20 orders will be shipped soon! On a related note, our own forums lyric master ‘Angelidia’ has kindly typed up the lyrics for the Crush 40 version of ‘Break Free,’ and you can view them here.

Also, T-Bird promised a video and delivered on how to spot the difference between some of the cheap bootlegs and genuine licensed soundtracks. Very valuable information if you’re collecting these soundtracks and don’t want to end up with a cheap, worthless bootleg! You can watch that video Bootleg guide

Finally, I want to wish everyone a happy holiday! See you all next year!

-Martin

Hey guys!

Just a quick update to say the first 50 orders are ready to be shipped. There were around 80 when I closed the shop so the remaining 30 will be shipped soon after!

-Martin

SOLD OUT!

Hey guys!

This is your chance to own the Sonic Free Riders original soundtrack ‘Break Free’ signed by Jun Senoue! It is available in limited amounts from the our shop, and costs $23 plus shipping (dependant on country and confirmed at checkout). The album features 12 tracks, including the latest Crush 40 song ‘Free.’

1. Free – Main Theme of Sonic Free Riders
2. Start-Up Your EX Gear! (Free Riders Version)
3. Theme of Dolphin Resort
4. Theme of Rocky Ridge
5. Theme of Frozen Forest
6. Theme of Metropolis Speedway
7. Theme of Magma Rift
8. Theme of Forgotten Tomb
9. Theme of Final Factory
10. Theme of Metal City
11. Get Ready for the Big Event
12. Free (Crush 40 Version)

For those fancying their chances at winning a free copy of this album, Sonic Stadium’s own T-Bird has some good news for you which he posted in our forums;

Also, as a shameless plug, there is a 24-hour SEGASonic:Radio Sunday the 5th of December – I’ve got the 16:00-18:00 GMT slot, and amongst a whole bag of merchandise, I will be giving away a copy of the “Break Free” soundtrack during the show…so if you want a free one here’s your chance!

For those who want to pre-order today; We currently only accept PayPal, and you MUST add a note on the PayPal payment page to tell Jun how you want your album personalised! Click here for an example. You must also click ‘Return to Merchant’ once you have completed your payment. Please note, if you do not write personalised instructions in the PayPal section, it will be personalised to the name associated with that PayPal account.

Orders will ship within 1-2 weeks once we receive our shipment of the CD’s! Pre-orders will discontinue on Tuesday the 6th of December. Click here to proceed to the official JunSenoue.com shop!

Hey guys!

After many of you have asked, we’ve prepared a small clip of the latest Crush 40 song ‘Free,’ a cover of the main track to Sonic Free-Riders by Chris Madin! The Crush 40 track is all set to appear as the last track on the Sonic Free-Riders original soundtrack, named ‘Break Free’ which is out December the 8th.

You can listen to the track: here

-Martin

ps, I’ve had a lot of emails asking about the JunSenoue.com shop selling both the Sonic Free-Riders soundtrack and the Sonic Colors soundtrack. We currently have no plans to sell the Sonic Colors soundtrack but it looks like we may be stocking signed copies of ‘Break Free’! We are also expecting to stock the Crush 40 merchandise that was sold at this years Summer of Sonic via a combo-pack, within the next couple of months!

That’s right Crushers! Both Johnny Gioeli and Jun Senoue will be attending this years Summer of Sonic festival at ‘The Pavilion’ in London on the 7th of August, hosted by ‘The Sonic Stadium.’ The official ‘Summer of Sonic’ 2010 blog has been updated with the news confirming the attendance of our favourite singer and guitarist, and here’s a snippet of the juicy bits;

Jun and Johnny will also be answering any questions you might have in a Crush 40 Q&A event on stage. They will also be available for a quick chat in the afternoon in a meet and greet session, where you can bring along your Crush 40 memorabilia to have signed!

Not only this, but we are delighted that Crush 40 will be treating Summer of Sonic fans to a very special Summer of Sonic Crush 40 performance on stage at the end of the show, playing a selection of fan-favourites that will rock you to your core!

A massive thank you to Adam ‘T-Bird’ Tuff and Kevin Eva for their special part in bringing Crush40 to London, and another massive thank you for all the other ‘Summer of Sonic’ organisers for putting sweat and tears into organising the only true Sonic event for hardcore fans. We all owe them a drink.

For the full story, head over to The Official ‘Summer of Sonic’ blog!

-Martin

Crush40.net

One of our forum regulars Jenn (djtifaheart) was lucky enough to attend a live performance from Jun’s side-band ‘Kazaly’ and has started a thread with a complete run-down of the show! Kazaly features Shikyoh Iwasaka on vocals, Jun Senoue on guitar, Nabeo on bass and Act. on drums.

The show began at 7:00pm at ‘The Live Station’ in Meguro in Tokyo. Also, a Jun Senoue performance isn’t complete without a couple of live Sonic songs, and Jun didn’t disappoint. He performed a live acoustic version of ‘Sonic Heroes’ and ‘Believe In Myself,’ which he later confessed to Jenn was done especially because he knew she was going! Which meant she also got to meet the man himself. He certainly knows how to treat his fans! For the full review and a mountain of pictures, head over to djtifaheart’s thread in the JunSenoue.com forums…

RadioSEGA is hosting a ‘music from Jun Senoue’ special this Friday (28th May) at 9PM UK time (GMT+1), and RadioSEGA DJ ‘ResidentSD’ is taking requests right here in the JunSenoue.com Forums! As it’s a SEGA radio station it will feature Jun’s work with SEGA games exclusively, so no JxJ / Kazaly etc but there’s still a huge database of tracks to choose from. If you’re stuck for choice, be sure to check out the playlist!

For details on how to listen to RadioSEGA and request a song, click here! (you must be a JunSenoue.com member to request a song via the forums).

Update: Requests are now officially closed due to the overwhelming amount! I’m sure that even if you didn’t get a request in on time, your song will be in there somewhere. Or at the very least, you’ll enjoy the rest of the tracks! Remember, tomorrow (Friday) at 9pm UK time, which is GMT +1. Timezones can be found here (UK is listed under ‘London’).

Update 2: If you missed the show, you now have the opportunity to download the two and a half hour podcast along with the hour and a half ‘XTRA’ podcast that was cut due to time restraints! The show was absolutely fantastic, and props to ‘ResidentSD’ for the professional and entertaining execution of it, not to mention the support of Jun Senoue. Hopefully we’ll see another Jun Senoue themed show! Until then, you can download Friday’s podcasts here. Enjoy!

-Martin

Just a quick update to say that the forums are down for the moment due to a silly SQL database error. I’m out of town until tomorrow but I’ll have them back online soon!

The forums are back online!

Martin

As promised, here is the final part to the Tokyo 2010 interview with the fan-submitted questions and a couple of extra pictures! Enjoy…

T-Bird: Ok Jun, I’ve got some questions from the fans here! First off is from ibbod0; how did you meet Johnny and the rest of Crush 40?

Jun:  Wow, good question…actually, I was a huge fan of Hardline. Usually when I compose the songs and write the melody, I think about who would make a suitable singer for the song or a good singer for the melody or something like that. With the song “It Doesn’t Matter”, the original version for Sonic Adventure, it has a very high note-melody. When I was writing it I thought Tony Harnell would be the ideal singer, and in the end he performed on that song; this in now my way of composing. Talking about “Open Your Heart”, I had Johnny in mind, but I did not have any direct contact with him. Actually my friend who lives in Los Angeles knows Doug Aldrich [The guitarist for Whitesnake these days! – T] . For a short time Doug played in one of Johnny’s previous bands, Brunette, and I knew they still had a good relationship and that Johnny had appeared on Doug’s first solo release [on a track called “Face Down” on the album Alter Ego – T]. That meant maybe Doug could get in contact with Johnny, and so I asked my friend to get in contact with Doug, then Dough got in contact with Johnny…and that’s how I first got in touch with him.

T-Bird: Ok, so SoA, Admin for the js.com forums asks, if say you had to replace Johnny, and of course that would be an impossible task, who would you ideally want as your dream replacement?

Jun:  Replacement?

T-Bird: Yes…if you had to.

Jun: That would mean Crush 40 would be disbanded, seeing as Crush 40 is the teaming of Johnny and myself, in which case you would need to find a replacement for both of us! The lack of me or lack of Johnny would mean…yeah (laughs).

T-Bird: Great answer – I honestly don’t think you could replace him either! Thirdly, Sonic1991 asks how did the collaboration with Emma Gelotte, Tinna Karlsdotter and the legend that is Marty Friedman [Legendary because he was the guitarist on my favourite Megadeth album! – T] come around for the track “With Me”?

Jun: I wrote that song for the final boss in the Black Knight, and I so first I tried to find the female singers for that song. One of my friends in a Japanese record company takes care of dealings with All Ends [Tinna & Emma’s band], and so that’s how I got in touch with them. With Marty, although he was now living in Japan, I didn’t know him personally. I didn’t know his manager or any of the other business guys who dealt with him, so I asked him directly. Originally I planned to ask him to play all of the guitar stuff, but when he came into the studio, he said “hey, we should just keep these backing tracks!” We booked the studio here in Tokyo to record the lyrics and Marty’s guitar solo, but then the other guys came into the studio and wanted me to change the key, so I said “please give me one hour!” Since we use Pro-Tools, it was easy enough to raise the track one note, but it did not have very good clarity. We changed the key digitally anyway, then tracked the vocals, then Marty tracked his guitar. I went back later on and tracked all of the backing guitar in the correct key.

Originally my idea was to have that song in a lower key, and in fact we [Crush 40] did the demo in that much lower key, and that was featured on the Sonic and the Black Knight “Face to Faith” album and it is much heavier. (Ha! I was right after-all! – Martin)

T-Bird: I think a lot of fans liked hearing a heavier version…and thanks for sharing the story! Short question: BlueLightning asks, what was your first guitar?

Jun:  He wants to know my first electric guitar? Actually, before I started playing electric guitars, I got an electric bass, since I was into Duran Duran at the time.

T-Bird: Haha! That’s awesome!

Jun: Andy Taylor the guitar player didn’t play any solos with Duran Duran or anything and the bass player was so much more…

T-Bird: …Interesting?

Jun: Yeah! Originally I played the keyboard, but the drummers and the keyboard players were always at the back of the stage, and I always wanted to be one of the guys in front of the stage. I’m not good at singing, and I was not interested in singing, so I picked up the bass. However, after watching some MTV videos by the band called Ratt [Rock history lesson right here kids! – T] and Night Ranger, I got really into those bands, and so my very first guitar was a duplicate of the guitar the Ratt guitarist had…and I still have it.

T-Bird: Do you remember what make it was?

Jun: I think it was Fernandes, but these days I’ve replaced the neck with a performance neck…I will post a picture of it sometime!

T-Bird: Haha! Definitely! So, Sinister Swiss asks after the remixing of the Angel Island Zone track for Super Smash Brothers: Brawl, have you considered going back and reworking any other classic songs from those classic titles?

Jun: Interesting! It  was very fun to do the remix for Angel Island, and also I made another arrangement of Sky Sanctuary from Sonic 3 for the Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games, and if I get a chance I want to try to do more of those kind of remixes.

T-Bird: Any particular tracks?

Jun:  Ummm…talking about Sonic the hedgehog 3 music…*starts humming*

T-Bird: HAHAHA! YEAH! Death Egg Zone from Sonic & Knuckles! I think that would make a lot of the fans would love that!  I know we’ve covered this in the previous half of the interview, but Michelle Palmer asks if you are considering any tour dates?

Jun: As I was saying, I am going to try and organise some Crush 40 dates around August time.

T-Bird: Ok, last question…Hawkz asks, what would you say has been the defining moment of your career?

Jun:  Hmmm…I’d have to say there are several. The first one is back in ’96, the moment I teamed up with Eric Martin. It was a very special moment for me. From that point I started trying to find direct connection with the artists, and that’s the way I’ve been doing it for years now.

Both Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 are very important games for me and very important titles for me, since Sonic Adventure was the very first time I was the sound director for a Sonic title, and I changed the sound of Sonic music drastically. With Sonic Adventure 2, some of us moved to the States, which changed our lives, and this time around we tried to make the music for the American market. It was very fun, and a very special time for not only me, but for the team too.

Finally, with Smash Bros. We provided several pieces of Sonic music to be used in the game, and lots of new fans – by new fans I mean the players who did not have any experience playing Sonic games – listened to the music for the first time while playing the Smash Brothers game…to me that was a great experience.

T-Bird: Lots of fond memories, and I’m sure a lot of fans hold some of those moments close to their heart too! Thanks loads for taking our questions

Jun…hopefully we can talk to you again soon with more burning questions!