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July 13, 2005
Mario Melodies
Do young people still go to the symphony? Maybe if they grew up playing video games. Some orchestras have been performing video game scores and drawing up to 10,000 people. According to this BBC Article, you may be able to catch one of these shows yourself as a touring show has been put together called Video Games Live. All my favourites are in there: Mario, Ghosts and Goblins, Spy Hunter, Frogger--even Pong!
All this reminds me of this great band from Sacramento called The Advantage who play video game music on drums and guitars. Their site is very ugly but there are some great MP3s on it.
Also, Carl pointed me to this video of a guy playing Mario on electric guitar with SFX a while ago and it never gets old. One of these days, I need to record Carl's beautiful duet arrangement of the Mario theme for acoustic guitar that he and his cousin Chris play from time to time.
Now let me tell you about this little melody that's been haunting me ever since I played in high school jazz band (yes, I was in band and I played saxophone). It's the opening bars of a little number called Juan of These Days. I can't believe I found a recording of this via Google! And all I had to do was sift through a few knock knock joke pages... Anyway, this tune has been dogging me for over a decade and just the other day I was humming it while doing the dishes. On a lark, I decided to do it in the Mario brothers style. Then it hit me: the first few notes are exactly the same as the Super Mario theme! Now that I have finally cracked the puzzle, I can live in peace.
Posted by rsexton at 10:14 AM | Comments (3)