I Rewrote Mario Music in Different Styles

today we're going to do some musical style swaps where we take different themes from Mario Brothers games and adapt them as if they came from different film and video game franchises so besides it just being kind of fun the main takeaway I hope you get is that it's not really the Melodies and ideas that you use that really matters as much as how you use them by the way this video is sponsored by Cube from lunacy audio we'll talk more about them later in the video so I've got these two different spinner Wheels here let's give the first one a spin to see what our first theme is going to be [Music] all right we've got Delfino Plaza from Super Mario Sunshine now let's see what style we're gonna put it into [Music] right Lord of the Rings so Delfino Plaza in the style of Lord of the Rings let's get going all right so to start let's just have a listen to what the Delfino Plaza theme even sounds like so one of the first things I'm noticing is that that theme is very Jazzy and syncopated and I don't think that's going to really work well with our old Noble heroic Adventure Lord of the Rings kind of style so the first thing I want to do is just kind of square that off a little bit so I've changed it instead of instead of being all syncopated like that I've made it more square and Noble the other thing I noticed was that that Harmony was pretty Jazzy as well it was like a one two five progression with a leading tone chord it was just very uh you know appropriate for Super Mario Brothers but not really appropriate for Lord of the Rings again and there's a technique that Howard Shore uses constantly in The Lord of the Rings score called chromatic medians which is where you have chords that are Roots a third apart but they're from different keys so for example maybe a major and C sharp major and the sound you get and the reason it's so appropriate for fantasy and like cinematic film scores is something I've said a lot before is that major chords from outside your key feel more major minor chords from outside your key feel more minor and so what we end up getting is kind of a lift and a more Fantastical sound I didn't really settle on a chord a third away that I thought it was a really good fit for the DMB but I did think the G major was a pretty good choice that's the flat 7 chord so we're borrowing the flat seven from a different mode so we end up with this one quad seven one sound which is very bold and Noble and then we can kind of move into this chromatic median thing [Music] and so for the entire a section I've only used major chords even though the root is moving all over the place it's just a very major sound it's very big and heroic now for the B section I'm going to do the opposite and I'm going to lean heavily into minor chords and go for that kind of Rivendell mixed with maybe like the ring theme kind of thing [Music] so I've adapted it with minor chords to be more like this foreign [Music] again notice minor chords whose roots are a third apart and they're from different Keys next thing I wanted to focus on was the arrangement before moving to orchestration just figuring out what's the general idea so here we're going to have the melody on top it's very featured and just these very bold block chords behind it that's going to give us that very strong bold Noble sound that we need and then we're going to go with something more of the Rivendell orchestration and arrangement for the middle which is these rising and following arpeggio lines in the cellos [Music] with the melody very high I think I'm going to do in violins and then we'll come back to that same original sound for the return to the a theme so it'll be a b a so the reason we do that Arrangement first is that it makes orchestration a lot simpler a lot of it is more about just kind of choosing colors and getting the right voicings and placement in the right instruments so I think French horn is definitely going to be the right opening color because they have that very bold Noble heroic sound and we'll support those with the trombones and the harmony underneath and I'm going to back that all up with the strings as well then for that b section that's where we're going to get those arpeggios I've got them in the cellos here here's just that cello line foreign violins [Music] and then when we come back to our a theme we'll go back to our big bold brass and strings orchestration so now I'm going to do a mock-up of this in logic and we'll take a listen to how the whole thing came out [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] thank you foreign let's do another one let's give the wheel another spin underground theme from Super Mario Brothers so if you don't remember that sounds like this [Music] Celeste okay let's do it so Celeste is a pretty synth heavy score so I'm going to probably lean pretty heavily into Cube on this one but the first thing I wanted to do was just find a reference from the soundtrack of kind of which which part of that soundtrack are we trying to imitate so I have First Steps From the Celeste soundtrack by Lana Rayne as the kind of main inspiration of what we're gonna do [Music] so it's a really sound like first steps and make it pretty clear that that's what we're imitating here I think we should just knock off that piano lick at the opening blatantly completely so I think we're going to start with this so now we have to think about that underground theme and how we can adapt that to kind of make sense with this so it's kind of nice we're opening with this suspended chord we could call it an esus4 we could call it an Asus 2 doesn't really matter it's very open and adaptable so what I found is I could actually get the theme to sound pretty good if I focused it kind of around that e as the starting point and ended on the D so I don't know we end up with like an E7 sus4 or something it doesn't really matter and then when we move it up a fourth it still works we end up with this just kind of like G minor sus4 thing so we have that idea also this is going to be in four four so we're going to adapt the original three four theme to the four four here like it happens many times in many future games we're actually going to look at that in a video next week the next thing I decided to do was figure out what's going to be the main sound of that that main theme so because the main theme is the main focus I ended up layering a couple different sounds from Cube to get it so the first one I have is this post Rock Cinema keys God which you can hear if I hold that down has a lot of motion and that's coming from the cube which is kind of modulating through the different sounds that build it up here we can see here we have all these different sounds that it's made from all those different elements come together and then in the cube are actually triggered at different times depending on how we set the orbit so it ends up sounding like this all right from the next layer I went with one that was a little more plucky [Music] and this one you see has a much slower orbit so the sound is changing differently over time and then the last sound I used for that main theme was Red Alert which is a little more of just like a distorted bass sound so next I wanted to replicate that arpeggio that's in the background the synth arpeggio not the piano and so I went with kind of a Sawtooth sound I used the patch saw C which is another one that has a very slow gradual modulation and I also used a bit of automation here to filter the high end of the EQ so I'll open that up as well so you can hear as the sound comes out it slowly brightens up as the piece introduces got a couple percussion elements here I also have a keyboard sound called synesthesis which is giving us these background chords see how every time we're playing one of these notes the orbit restarts and we get like a new transition and motion and then the last thing which I think is the most important was actually found this synth that reminded me a lot of the kind of Madeline speaking sound from this Os game that had that kind of like little bit of Bend and wobble to it so I ended up using this take the lead and use the bends for certain moments I was really glad when I came across that one because I thought that really fit the sound really well so my apologies to lay in the rain but let's hear how the underground theme sounds as if it came from the game Celeste [Music] foreign [Music] let's do one more real quick before I get to that thank you again to lunacy audio for letting me try out cube it was organically moving synth sounds actually worked really well for that sounded like so that worked out well they're currently having a spring sale with 40 off everything until May 7th so check for a link in the description all right let's go to the next style swap all right let's get our third and final theme Good Egg Galaxy from Super Mario Galaxy alright and now let's get our style [Music] Harry Potter so here are the two parts of Good Egg Galaxy I've decided I'm going to adapt all right so I think the most Harry potter-ish sound that we could adapt this to would be hedwig's theme [Music] so first thing I'm going to do is bring this to 3 4 instead of 4 4 get rid of kind of that syncopated Adventure feel and make it more of that light bouncy magic feel and also I think simplify the melody a little bit and then the other adaptation I've made here is actually changed it from C major to primarily C minor with some chromaticisms as well so I ended up with this which has much more of that kind of Wizarding feel to it and for the second theme I did the same thing I changed it to C minor and just added in some chromaticism so we ended up with all right so here it is with the harmony I've come up with [Music] so everything is just a little more spooky and wizardly like it's magic but it's also a bit of a dark magic right so then the last step will just be to orchestrate it so we're gonna go pretty simple I'm just gonna again kind of copy the hedwig's theme so we're going to start with the cholesta which is that classic Harry Potter sound foreign and then later on for the second version of the theme I brought in these insane violin arpeggio runs which are very similar to what's in the original orchestration as crazy as they look but they're really based around arpeggios so they're playable even if they're a little wacky and they're doubling with the Celesta here I also put in a little Pizzicato pluck on the cello which will kind of keep the time going and I've moved the main Melody here to similar to the original orchestration Alto flute English horn and bassoon I'm going to just use no performer for this one but let's hear how good egg Galaxy would sound if it was in the Harry Potter universe thank you [Music] [Music] so this was fun thanks for watching all the way through I hope you enjoyed these let me know in the comments if you think there's a better or different Mario style swap you have in mind or who should do this again with some other franchise and thanks again to lunacy audio I will see all of you guys in the next one

Channel: Ryan Leach

Views: 104,381

Keywords: music composition, film scoring, film composer, how to write music, film music composer, how to write film music, how to write video game music, how to be a composer, how to compose music, compose music, how to score a film

Id: 3PoKG8FJjok

Length: 15min 29sec (929 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 19 2023