The Super Mario Theme Was WAY More Intricate Than You Remember
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- Опубліковано 30 сер 2022
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Dude I forgot so many great snippets from this soundtrack. The game over theme??? Beautiful! Even the way it freezes for a second when you die and then just chucks you into the abyss with that stupid happy little theme that made me want to throw my controller through the tv. In other news, how did your anger problems develop as a child?
I do know how intricate it was 8-bit theory already told me!
Facts, game over screen used to scare me tbh
do a video on why bohemian rhapsody is so good!
Sounds like a sequel might be a good idea ;D?
Also the underground music! I was really thinking you would be talking about it some time. But yeah so much to talk about, limited time...
Don’t forget about Super Mario Advance 2 where they just changed the main theme from major to minor for the castles :D
Mind blown on the power-up sound connection with the completion theme... wow.
Yo 🔥ua-cam.com/video/rdJ9bsN7JAw/v-deo.html..
Yeah that was the part that blew me away too.
Yes🔥
It's actually not the same. Look up "Nick Oakman super Mario power up sound" for a good video that explains it
Game devs did this a LOT up until like the PS2 era. In Super Mario 64, the Boo's laugh is just a sped up version of Bowser's laugh, and even in Super Mario Bros. itself the pipe sound is the same as the "you got hit but you had a power up" sound.
I work at a warehouse where we drive forklifts and we have to honk the horn at every corner. Sometimes someone would honk the rhythm pattern for the first 6 notes of the super mario theme, and someone else would honk back the seventh note. Now that's an iconic theme that even with just the rhythm pattern of the melody, you can already recognize it.
At one point a coworker was drumming two triplets repeatedly and I went "You have Duke Nukem stuck in your head" and he "HOW THE F***!?"
I can do that with just four notes.
.. . .
@@Kumquat_Lord MEGALOVANIA-
@@JRENZO10 ayyyyyyy
We do the same thing with Oye Como Va
8-bit music is the perfect encapsulation of the phrase "necessity is the mother of invention"
Here’s something you kind of implied, but didn’t cover too much: another reason this theme is as good as it is, is because of the limitations of the hardware. Put two musicians in two different rooms: one with a million dollar studio, all the top end preamps, instruments, microphones, etc. the other with a laptop and a copy of FL Studio and no third party VSTs. Which one will produce the best song? I’d argue the latter because, writing with limitations more often than not will produce better results than one who has unlimited possibilities. Koji Kondo only had four instrument channels to work with; two squares for melody, a triangle for bass, and a noise channel for percussion. That was the limitations of the hardware of the NES, and to me that’s more why the Mario Theme became so iconic. It became iconic because Kondo didn’t have to worry about what synth to use in what place; all he had to worry about was writing a good melody, the instruments were chosen for him.
Yes, Charles mentions modern soundtracks being orchestral, but they often don't have much in the way of hook, emphasizing texture and mood, which with enough equipment / software isn't hard to conjure, over an indelible melody, which will sound great played on basically anything.
Assuming the two musicians are of the same exact skill in the same exact things, then possibly, sure. Tho I suppose the one working the latter condition doesn't have the skill of choosing the right instrument for the right job ;)
Also, everything in mono.
Or, more succinctly, every note matters.
I believe Charles mentioned this when he went over retro Pokemon tracks in another video.
One subtlety about the starman theme I never thought about until watching this video: it subconsciously compels you to go faster because it's uptempo. Imagine a completely new Super Mario Bros player who comes across a starman for the first time. Without the game holding their hand that invincibility is only a few seconds, they intuitively know that because the starman theme is so fast that it makes you want to move Mario faster. Just brilliant artistry in this game all around.
That's the beauty of the game. It teaches you how to play in the first level.
@@brandonbuchner1771 Super Mario Bros. 1 has one of the best video game tutorials ever designed. And most players never even recognize it as a tutorial because it's blending so seamlessly into everything else. It's as close to perfection as game design ever gets, really.
8:51 the bVI - bVII - I progression is also sometimes called the Super Mario cadence, which I think is a super cool funfact
It was invented by the Beatles btw
@@GameyRaccoon yeah, no.
@@Septimius no, yeah (i flipped it)
@@GameyRaccoon No, it wasn't. They did like to use it as a resolution to their songs though. The fact that the final chord is major instead of minor makes it a Picardy Third. There are some good videos about the use of the Picardy Third throughout music history.
I actually discovered this in the Guitar Theory for Dummies book the other day, interestingly enough.
That 5x speed finish level theme blew my mind. I genuinely had absolutely no clue that they were the same.
Can we just get Charles playing 5 minutes more of jazz interpretation of this theme like we got at 8:25?! Yes please!
Yeah I love the abstract Jazz Vibe it has
7:33 Charles basically plays the arrangement of the Ground Theme from Super Smash Bros. Brawl
9:32 Charles basically plays the begining melody of the Ending theme from Super mario World
Just goes to show how interconnected these things are, no matter what mario game we're talking about
I just noticed when he's "jazzing" the theme, he's in the same key as Jump Up Superstar. Or at least, the chords are right around there.
i think it was CJ or someone a mario oddesy speedrunner was watching other mario game speedruns and he said the more mario games he sees the more he realizes all the music in odyssey is just remixed versions of old games.
the music in the series evolves for sure but they always keep it in theme so nicely
Because it was taken from original Super Mario brothers. Smash didn't have original music, just remixes.
@@emulatorretro i mean we were talking about mario odyssey but yes smash did the same thing
@@concretebuilding I noticed that one!
My mind is blown! I NEVER realized the "Stage Clear" theme is also the mushroom power-up sound! That's amazing.
It's actually not the same, it's just similar
@@kumada84 Ohhh. Even then, I still find it neat! 😊
@@kumada84 nope it's the same
The funny thing is that while we can't often easily "quantify" swing in acoustic music, in chiptune we absolutely can quantify it because of the limitations of the hardware. The time base for those systems operated on the "tick" which is the smallest unit of time that you can use. Each "line" of the musical code has an amount of ticks in duration. You can manually delay notes by a certain number of ticks, but you are always operating at integer-values of ticks. There are a couple ways of achieving tuplets. If the music is predominantly tuplets (like a persistent 6/8 or something like that) you can just treat a the line (or groups of lines) like your basic time unit. If you're in predominantly non-triplet straight time but use occasional tuplets, you would then have to delay notes so that they sort of play "between" the lines, but that delay value is again a very easily defined integer offset of the basic time. So say each line takes 6 ticks, so four lines would be 24 ticks total duration. Therefore if you wanted a quarter note triplet you'd have to divide this 24 tick duration by three for 8 ticks per quarter note triplet. So you'd have a note on the first line, then a note on the 2nd line but delayed by 2 ticks (the first line took 6 ticks plus 2 ticks into the second line would give you 8 ticks). As you can see, you could delay the note in a given line by a number that didn't give you an even division (say 1 or 3 in the above example) and you'd now have an actual swing, but a very quantifiable swing.
Thank you for making this point. Sort of quantized, but not quite?
@@FarkyDave Yes, you could think of it that way.
@@FarkyDave you can't imagine my relief at someone using the word quantized correctly.
the main theme is inspired by Sister Marian by T-Square, and the star theme is inspired by Summer Breeze by Piper.
The 80s J pop and fusion influence is strong in Nintendo's music, and the Latin influence is strong in them both
This
God that's so nice to hear even now ! Other bands from that era to suggest ? Thanks !
@@DeadUA-camr1953 Casiopea, Makoto Matsushita, Tatsuro Yamashita, Hiroshi Sato, Masayoshi Takanaka, Katsumi Horii Project
@@kito- i would add NAOYA MATSUOKA, dimension, akira wada, prism, kazumi watanabe
I think it would be great to have a video on which actusl pop/jazz tune influenced the VGM - I hear all sorts of influences especially in 90s VGM but also in more recent tunes eg DRR's Kind Lady, recalls Edwyn Collins A Girl Like You Edit: Also I hear lots of Pet Shops Boys in Sonic stuff eg. Heart in Lava Reef Zone or Paninaro in Ice Cap Zone
Spent too much of my childhood years trying to finish this game without dying XD. I wish you would have talked about the underground theme a little, I always loved that.
Just going from what I hear in my head, I think it's a minor diminished variation of the start screen theme
Its very inspired by "lets not talk about it" by the band friendship. apparently koji kondo was a big fan of western music, especially fusion jazz:
Theres a good video about this: ua-cam.com/video/dBNJ5cAxcQ8/v-deo.html
@@burgerbeatz6293 that's crazy. I always thought he was influenced by River People by Weather Report
@@xbb88fx afaik the Mario main theme is inspired by river people. The underground theme is inspired by let's not talk about it, I'd recommend to check it out because it's very awesome
Denim denim denim.
Koji Kondo was heavily inspired by 70s Japanese Jazz Fusion bands such as Casiopea and T-SQUARE. The main theme from Mario can actually be heard in the T-SQUARE song SISTER MARIAN as the start of the chorus. That's also probably why most music from Koji Kondo is extremely jazzy.
That's cool af. To my ears his work on the Mario games sound like he's channeling his inner Duke Ellington, I wonder if it was intentional.
I heard YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA, one album of theirs in particular, not sure which, was a major influence too, but not sure if it was on Koji Kondo.
@@highstimulation2497 Solid State Survivor. Thing sounds like SNES soundtracks, but about 10 years before SNES was a thing.
The end level sound being used as the power up sound blew me away. Always liked the bit of swing, the bass helps it too.
Oh man, there's a lot of fun to be had when exploring video game music from the 8-bit era. One of the great textural tricks was to use really fast arpeggios to give the impression of block chords--saved limited polyphony on early game systems.
just like great saxophone players!
5:31 I've played that note wrong my entire life and Charles Cornell has saved me
I heard it the moment he played it off. I am garbage at creating a tone with my voice, and I struggle to find the right chords or notes (that's more of a practice thing). But, if I hear someone else play or sing a tune, I die a little inside when a note is off or missing. Arguing with the person has always been futile, because even if I play the original through a speaker, they usually say "that's exactly what I sang!" And repeat the mistake with a smug look.
You can really hear the Latin and Caribbean influences in the Mario theme when a full orchestra plays it. It’s absolutely stunning.
I always found it was more leaning towards Caribbean and Reggae with the staccato melody kind of implying the sound of a steel drum.
@@santibanks the Steel Drum is actually used in the Mario All-Stars version of SMB1
FULL ORCHESTRA!!!! 😍
Why have I never seen that?!?!
@@CommonCommenter The version by the Boston Pops is the best imo. It really emphasizes the swing aspect that Charles talks about.
I always thought it sounded more ragtime, but yeah there's definitely a latin flavor there.
Nothing on the Underground Theme? That's the second most iconic theme in the game. If you asked people to sing the next theme they think of after the main theme, they'd likely go straight into the Underground Theme. The contrast it creates after hearing the happy, bouncy main theme is epic. You could do a whole video just on how different the two themes are from one another.
The underground theme is OK but basic. The second most iconic theme in the game for me at least in terms of melody is the underwater theme.
@@stakebuster I strongly disagree that it's basic. The rhythms are really interesting, and you've got a heavy use of chromaticism.
I came here to say the exact same thing. I can't stop thinking about Kevonstage's dad joke about this. "What are Mario and Luigi's pants made out of?"
"DENIM DENIM DENIM"
12:42 this actually just blew my mind how did I not know that. It was always just a subconscious thing.
I’m an amateur guitarist and normally my knowledge is so beginner that i can’t quite follow everything you say in your videos. But due to my love of Salsa, and recently getting into blues playing (which has a lot of swing), i was able to follow this video pretty well, really interesting stuff
There are a few classic NES chords that are the result of Japanese video-game composers at the time were very influenced by Jazz but due to having a limited number of voices they are common jazz chords where one note has been dropped. It was very common and kind of defined the NES sound
The intro to Megaman 3 is jazz, although I prefer the intro to Megaman 2..
And Ninja Gaiden 2 intro (best 8 bit intro imo) is inspired heavily by classical music
As a kid I noticed the harmonies and bass and drums and stuff as a kid who was a huge fan of Mario. Once I got into music though, I looked into the Mario theme and actually noticed how complex it is.
The starman tune really displays how music can be a form of communication. Among the other tracks, so that you are told how the situation is you're in.
You know you're old when a dude's grandmother had the NES, not him.
🤣 so true!!
You're in your 40s
It's been argued that Nintendos focus on making good music for the games was a huge reason they became so dominant in the 80's. Other game developers didn't really hire composers to write soundtracks before Nintendo did. Personal favourites from that time are Metroid, Zelda and Castlevania, both for the gameplay and the music.
Hiring professional instead of doing it in house is always a better idea.
As a fairly experienced drummer it was interesting hearing you talk about swing and how to implement it/understand it in context outside of a drumkit, very intruiging to see how you make it work in your mind! Pretty cool as always, love the vid :)
Me and my friend would always play the mario theme on piano in High School, much to the non-delight of our teacher. That secondary dominant voicing is so recognizable, all we had to do was play that chord for him to go "NO!" from his office lol.
😂 Your teacher would have had a field day with The Consouls ua-cam.com/play/PLSWV0usaPRr4wMEjmdDXGfNeLu_l0vmnQ.html
Your teacher’s “NO!” Is also instantly recognizable as a crying wojak
What I love most about early video game music is how much composers did with such limited sound tech. The NES and Game Boy had 4 channels for sound: 2 square waves, a saw wave, and a noise channel (IIRC). So at most you could have 3 notes + percussion at any given time. And composers found ways to imply complex harmonies and different styles/genres, creating beautiful and iconic music.
what's interesting is there's a 5th channel on the NES, which can only play samples. Some composers used samples (like sunsoft's bass sample) to add an extra note.
Also, the NES has a triangle wave, not a saw.
The most impressive thing about game music from those early days of gaming is how composers with limited resources available managed to make music that was not only listenable but long lastingly memorable. As much as today's space and lack of restrictions allows for great music there is just something about the ingenuity of those older systems and what they accomplished.
I love this..the way you literally just dissected a melody I have had engrained in my head my whole life. But somehow I have never listened to it so close with so much thought
The fact that the "level completion" is the "Mushroom" theme, sped up -- BLEW MY MIND. -- I had no idea and ive heard it a zillion times. Thanks Charles. Very well done.
I recommend you to check out "Super Mario Bros. Deluxe - Credits Roll"
it's pretty underrated and it's basically an extra jazz and longer version of the starman/invincible theme
I was gonna make this comment if I didn't find it. This is a great version of the track!
I love the basslines in all these songs, you could do a breakdown just of those alone. The Underwater Theme is DOPE.
Love that idea!
Where's that bass-heavy 2nd level sound? That's almost as iconic!
Back in the BBS days when there were mod music groups, I finally understood the concept of swing when I saw how someone achieved a swing beat in the tracker software. The mod format and other related formats were essentially a MIDI type package that contained sound samples of your choosing. Imagine something like Synthesia, but the columns for the keys are tracks for specific sound samples and the rows represent a beat (and you can't start a note between two rows). The swing pattern was achieved by altering the BPM as the music played. If you just looked at the notes, it looked like a steady rhythm, but if you watched the BPM setting while it was playing, you would see the BPM swing back and forth.
_"...the BBS days..."_ God, I feel old.
Shout out to Charles for keeping my music knowledge intact by making it entertaining and interesting for the last few years. Keep it up my guy 👌
I think that cartridge is 32 kilobytes. The amount of stuff they crammed in is crazy. Even a heavily compressed youtube thumbnail is probably a dozen times that side, and yet they put in this iconic soundtrack along with all the pristine level design and gameplay
The Earthbound soundtrack could be interesting to explore too, has plenty of hidden jems. The game really shows off what the SNES was capable of soundwise.
battle with a weird opponent is the JAM
Yeah that music is unique and weird and probably more complex than I can comprehend.
Chrono Trigger, except hardly hidden, shows off the range of the hardware, more even than FFVI
I do think it’s sequel (Mother 3) has a better, if less unique soundtrack though.
@@landrypierce9942 perhaps, the game does center more on its battle music. But mother 3 is a lot less well-known than earthbound, and the Gameboy advance's sound engine was arguably more powerful than the SNES was. The battle music mechanics could be a fascinating technical exploration (especially the songs with an irregular time signature).
I literally only ever played Super Mario at my grandmother's house because she had a SNES and we didn't. I'll forever relate Super Mario to memories of my grandmother's massive house.
Thank you!!!
Thank you!!!
Thank you!!!
This game/song was my life for so many years. I no longer feel crazy for loving it sooo much!
great video! just a correction about a bit of a common misinformation that gets thrown around: while the powerup sound and the flagpole music do have a lot in common, they are not exactly the same sound but sped up to save space, the arpeggio in the powerup sound has some notable differences if you slow it down, and for a bonus fun fact, each "sped up" version of the level themes is in its own separate "music slot" - all starting with the "hurry up!" sound, at least that's how it is in the code, though i imagine they don't just have copies of the songs "but faster" and there might be some trickery to reuse the compositions even if they put them in a different slot (im no expert), there is even a slot for a "hurry up" version of the cutscene of mario going down a pipe (only the intro of the main song), which is... impossible to get because mario moves on his own, so it goes unused. just a bit of fun trivia
I haven’t looked at how the music was encoded in the ROM, but that could be because of how the commands are sent to the SPU. It might have been more trouble than it was worth to figure out how to program the note-on events and decay timers based on a faster tempo without affecting the sound or feel of the tune. However, they were under severe space restraints (the ROM is 32K IIRC, and nearly 100% full), which means the code to modify the tune might have just been larger than hard-coded fast versions, since there weren’t that many tunes anyway.
Yeah isn't there like an extra two notes of fanfare in the 'hurry up' or something that throws it off from the regular theme... I saw a vid on it back before I had a stroke and now I'm relearning theory and things like this help keep it interesting.
Interestingly enough, Super Mario *World* actually does speed up the same track when you get under 100 seconds. This can be proven using the one level in the Special World with the green figs; by letting the timer get under 100 seconds, then using a fig to get back over 100, then letting the timer go under 100 again, you can stack the speed-up effect. If the game used separate data for the sped-up version of the music, this wouldn't work.
@@djkates1916 yeah, that one im aware too
I got my nes for my 8th birthday the year after it came out. That theme song has lived rent free in my head all these years. Loved the breakdown. The way you explained how they did the powerup jingle gave me a chuckle. I will never hear it the same.😁
Hearing/seeing you play this, especially the star power theme, had me grinning from ear to ear… ❤️
Love your videos man music is a huge thing for me, I like seeing you break stuff down like this
Hearing this and understanding the feeling it gave me sent me down a rabbit hole and I'd LOVE to hear your take on something that touched my childhood and later when the show was rebooted:
Ducktales, moon theme.
YES PLEASE. This song is freakin iconic
Since no other NERDs have mentioned it already (as far as I scrolled down anyway) the NES only had 5 sound channels, 2 square waves usually for the melody, 1 triangle wave for the bass, 1 "static" channel used for percussion, and the 5th channel was unique in its ability to play samples from ROM. That's it in a nutshell, here's a link to the video I saw a year ago explaining the NES sound chip if you want to learn more! ua-cam.com/video/8RrQrATnXXY/v-deo.html
Also here's a link to The 8-Bit Guy explaining even more about old school sound chips used in various systems, and the differences in their capabilites. ua-cam.com/video/q_3d1x2VPxk/v-deo.html
You are truly gifted, I love your videos. I love it bc it feels like we're figuring it out together. I'm a sax palyer and I really appreciate your anaylysis.I appreciate your videos even more bc I understand the work it takes to be good
Although this soundtrack is unquestionably iconic, for me, the most iconic theme (and my personal favorite) of all time from Mario is Dire Dire Docks from M64.
👍🏻 If you haven't already, you might like to check out The Consouls jazz covers of Dire Dire Docks and Mario Theme etc
@@cooldebt I have indeed, and it is a very good arrangement. Pretty sure I've checked out pretty much every cover of DDD out there, but I always appreciate anyone pointing me at more I might not have, so thanks for that anyway. :)
If you poll a random person, they're going to know the main Mario theme and the Underground theme before anything else. Popularity/ubiquity has to enter into the discussion of "iconic."
Check out this guys version of Dire Dire Docks it’s so beautiful
ua-cam.com/video/AH8uNvP9iOE/v-deo.html
Start at 5:05 it’s only a snippet but it’s nicely arranged with the vocals
I played this game in what must have been '89 or something. I'm 36 now in 2022. It makes me really happy that you're diving into this tune. Great video!
I remember a couple decades ago doing a midi extraction of the music and sound effects from an emulator just to see what was going on. I was a bit surprised how it was actually voiced among the three pitched parts; the way the square waves and triangle waves line up often create the implied appearance of other notes. For instance, in the phrase where you discovered the melody had a G# rather than a G, the upper two voices are initially in thirds up to and including the G#-A-C in the melody, and then subtly switches to sixths under the A-C-D. The ear expects the thirds to continue. This is one of the many creative tricks in the 8-bit sound that keeps me up at night.
The balance of being complicated enough to be interesting, simple enough to be memorable and diverse enough to be looped without being boring is just an absolute masterclass of being creative within limitations.
You really break down the music really well, and in such a way that makes it interesting! On most channels music theory is very boring. This helps me get better at piano too!
9:49 that last note always gets me
Man this brings back memories. I can't remember the exact time, but I believe this was the first game I remember was the start of the speed runs. I love the sound track to this game. My favorite song was the under water song. I think it was lvl 3. I also liked the bowser theme as well. Oh the heck with it I loved them all. Watching this video makes me want to go find a ROM and an emulator to be able to play this game again. Awesome video! Thanks for bringing back my great childhood memories!
I’ve always loved Super Mario music. Thanks to your eye opening, awareness expanding insights I now have many more reasons to go on with an even stronger love for Super Mario music. My heart became younger after seeing this video. Beating with the spirit of my inner child. Thank You.
I would watch a whole series on you breaking down the music for the Mario games. Because they are SO GOOD.
Agree!
I love your facial expressions every time you show the "jazz" version of something. so jazzy!
Haha me too my grand mother had it and we played for hours in the basement after the meal while the adults talked and drank wine. Good times! That soundtrack is a true classic in most everyone in their low/mid 40s now. Thanks for this, it was very interesting!
The sped up arpeggios for the growing sound was a real "Ah...Ha!" moment.
Thanks for this breakdown! 8-bit theory also did a breakdown and also mentioned 'syncopation'. It's amazing just HOW MUCH insight and theory you can get from this one little iconic piece.
Did you know that most of the rhythms in Koji Kondo’s songs for SMB1 were lifted from other bands? It’s true! The main SMB theme is from a song called Sister Marian by The Square. You’ll find it at 1:03. And the Starman theme was basically taken straight from Summer Breeze by Piper. The underground theme is Let’s Not Talk About It by Friendship. Koji Kondo was listening to these Japanese musicians at the time.
9:31 - In fact that's exactly what you here in Mario Odyssey's "Jump Up, Super Star!"
Never really thought of that music as Latin. That also explains a lot about the sharp contrast to the waltz of the water stages!
Watched several videos this guy is a genius talent.
Yes, this is amazing. The Underground theme is also ridiculous. I love the original Super Maro Bros. Underground theme, and the upgraded funky beat version in Super Maro Bros. 3 Then there's the Waltz of the Underwater theme. Amazing stuff.
Don’t know if you heard but the Drum Corps International season just ended a few weeks ago and the music from a LOT of the corps were freakin amazing. Love to see you take a look at maybe the Keytar Solo from The Bluecoats or The Blue Devils’ ballad 🙏🙏
Don't forget it had colorful worlds, loveable characters, and was easy to pick up and play which helped its music be accessible and memorable for everyone
From the very first time I heard this music, playing Super Mario Bros, at the convenience store in my neighborhood, the theme sounded like it was for steel drums. I still hear it that way, to this day.
One of my favorite tunes.
Honestly I feel like I need an explanation on the underground theme because it’s so weirdly simple seeming but there’s something odd about, at least rhythmically but because there’s so little context it’s hard for me to actually tell, and it’s not exactly very much harmonically either, it’s basically just a melody over silence but it does way more with that then I would expect
You might like The Consouls covers of Mario tunes including Underground - they 'flesh out' the 8-bit into actual jazz by picking out the underlying musical structure ua-cam.com/play/PLSWV0usaPRr4wMEjmdDXGfNeLu_l0vmnQ.html
I was always amazed by this theme and the (syncopation?) between the main notes and the background bass notes.
Whenever I see piano tutorials on it they rarely cover that
Wow, happy/mind-blown that this video should show up in my recs, I found the super mario themes/sounds on spotify and couldn't believe how complex everything actually is, and with a greater appreciation for it.
Koji Kondo is legitimately the Mozart of gaming music. He is truly masterful in what he does, and never fails to make an interesting and memorable composition (obviously!). Something that I thought was really cool that he has done recently was in Mario Maker 2. Due to them using new setting themes (jungle, winter, desert, sky) in the retro game styles, he was asked to make new music that follows the style and notes of the original games, while making entirely new compositions. They really are amazing and fit right into the OSTs of these old games, really shows how he hasn't lost his touch.
See? A BAMF
Super Mario on NES… The first console game I ever played.
You should also do a review of the Persona 5 OST - would love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks for your videos!
I used to actually use snippets of the original Super Mario Bros theme when playing a particular song on piano at church, cause it used a very similar chord progression and was about the same tempo. :) Midway through the song I'd do a variation on the mario growing bigger sound effect, then going into the last phrase I'd do the Mario theme intro, then a section kind-of near the middle of the theme, then at the end of the song I'd do the Mario dies sound, combined with the extra life sound effect, then sometimes end with the game over theme.
I made a SMB “remix” several years ago which was mainly just turning the different tracks off and on and yeah it’s surprising how much is going on there! The purpose of the mix was try to peel back the layers and highlight what all is in there. Like many works of art you don’t fully appreciate just how much went into it.
Videos like these remind me how under appreciated music theory is.
Why is the Mario theme so iconic? One often overlooked reason: in the game's code it's not a piece of music! A modern game would probably just stick an MP3 in the game files and play it. The NES was coded with the game's 'sheet music' and instructed to 'play' the music, as covered. But that means the music CANNOT be out of sync with the game play. Every sound effect must occur in tempo with the music, because they're all bottlenecked by the same processor. Every action had to occur in tempo with the music. Even if the console lagged, the whole lot would slow down. They were inseparable. That made every jump, every coin, every star completely a part of the soundtrack. It almost feels like procedural music. As the gamer, your actions contribute to the composition of the sound track. And that is the NES generation of soundtracks are so much more iconic than most other gaming history.
that's a beautiful piece of factually incorrect prose :)
you are technically correct, the processor is playing the music.
however, the rythm percieved by the player is approximately 30 times slower than the rythm that the processor can do, meaning the processor can play music which, for it, is naturally in-rythm, but for the human listener, it would be off-rythm.
this is obvious when you watch any Mario gameplay and listen to the jump/coin/whatever sound effects, and immediately notice them to be off-rythm with the music.
Yeah, nice thought, but no. The console won’t “lag” - it runs an instruction cycle on every tick of the CPU clock, and that’s that. The time-sensitive stuff is handled on scheduled interrupts that happen at regular intervals, like the screen vertical blanking interval. When a game lags, it’s because the game logic took longer to run through than would fit in one cycle of that interval, so it didn’t update the screen for two (or more) frames instead of just one. But the timed stuff (like music) was still done when it always is.
A great example of how you can read into the harmony is the video of Tom Brier playing it. He hadn't seen or heard the piece before being handed the sheet music and being advised that it was something of a fast tango, and his first attempt through as written gave him a few snags (he even commented "I think you got me on this one"), but then he slowed it down to "tango speed" and really dug in and found beautiful harmonizations. I also highly recommend his take on the end theme for Zelda.
8:04 Koji Kondo and his coleagues did something like that in latter rearranges of the Mario theme, examples: Super Mario Sunshine's "athletic non-ACUAC levels" and Koji's own reversion of the theme for Smash Bros. Brawl
You should check out Mega Man 2 music. The opening song is great, and each stage has a very distinct style and sound. It's great!
👍🏻I only know MegaMan 2 from this ua-cam.com/video/LZo0GhWrMt8/v-deo.html
Mega man’s franchise has some great soundtracks!
Uuuh yes Mega Man Willy wars, it sound so good to me especially in PAL50! That Yamaha YM2612 ❤️👍
Yes! Darkman Castle stage 1 is my favorite
Fun fact: When Takashi Tateishi submitted her first soundtrack for MM2, the developers nixed it for sounding too cute, so she recomposed nearly the entire soundtrack to what we have today. Only one “cute” track from the first rejected draft made it into the final game: Crash Man’s theme.
You absolutely blew my mind at 12:43
Been playing/watching/generally obsessing over Mario my entire life and only learned from this video that the "grow" sound effect was a sped-up version of a segment from the "course clear" theme. Awesome. Thanks.
12:40 100% correct, and great explanation. Sometimes restraints make us the most creative, and that was certainly the case with 8-bit composers
Nice video! I didn't know about the level complete music sped up for the mushroom effect, that was interesting!
Also, I suggest you the Hollow Knight Soundtrack! You won't regret listening to it!
7:20 When Dora music ends up in the Mario video
The most impressive thing about this song is how the melody and bass are like a call and answer between each other. The bass notes fit perfectly in between the melody notes. The best way to hear this is to look up Tesla coils Super Mario on UA-cam. I've never heard any song in my life where it happens like this.
This was excellent. Everyone enjoying this would likely enjoy "the soundtrack show", a podcast, he also did an episode on the SMB1 soundtrack. Koji Kondo is brilliant.
Would love to see you break down the Halo theme! It's another one of those iconic "needle drop" themes!
There's a subtle detail about swing that you missed: the drums are syncopated, the other instruments aren't. That sort of understated contrast is a big part of what makes jazz what it is.
Isn't that more or less what he said from 0:40-0:54?
@@fresem not quite. He said it's in between a triplet and a dotted eighth, rather than _a straight eighth contrasted with_ one of those
@ESports Academy dude.
who asked?
@ESports Academy .. who are you talking to? Because 1. I'm not a boomer, and 2. I was giving _more reason_ to enjoy something, so if you were talking to me that's extremely disingenuous
5:07 :p
When I started listening to samba music, I was surprised how much the rhythms and chord progressions and melodies reminded me of a lot of familiar video game music, especially throughout the Mario franchise. There's a great deal of influence. I'm sure it's not just specifically samba, but that's a great jumping off point.
It seems to me that Japanese musicians really took to the Latin rhythms and there is a ton of bossanova in video games music - eg. Final Fantasy and for the faster beats, eg.Sonic has a fair bit of samba. Australian jazz ensemble The Consouls really bring it out in many of their brilliant jazz covers.
The editing...omg. I kept rewatching the part with the swing explanation...the sudden close up of the eyes.... genius
Fascinating as always - so many clever elements - Koji Kondo is a genius. The 'growing' tune blew my mind! (And funny I also hear the tune with that wrong note in it.)
It blew my mind too! He was playing it slowly, then faster and I'm thinking, there's something I'm supposed to realize here .. and when it hit me I looked around the whole bar like DID YOU HEAR IT?? lol
Super Mario original music is literally a song that you could fight to.
Amazing analysis. Impressive how he can suss out all the intricacies and details of this “simple” little jingle of a tune.
Love that these progressions and variations showed up as themes and leitmotifs in later Mario games. Your ideas sound like, say SNES Super Mario World.
There’s a last section of the main theme you forgot to analyze. So good.
Also, what about the underground theme? And the water level one??? Everything in this game is iconic!
Yeah, I said the same thing. To me, the Underground Theme is the 2nd most iconic video game theme after the main theme. If you asked people to sing the next thing they thought of after hearing that main theme, most of them would sing the Underground Theme.
Yeah he completely forgot the chromatics and offbeat rhythm of the last section
Please do Level 1-2 next. In fact, do the entire SMB soundtrack. That would be great. 😀
Yes, I would like to know more about the underground theme.
My favorite. Especially in Mario Bros 3 when they add the hip hop beat.
This video made my heart feel good.
Beautiful set up of events: just subbed to you some days ago, realized you had a video about Transformers (favourite show) and now Mario (favourite videogame)
Hope one day you analyze Ninjago's theme