Athletic from Super Mario World (Pico-8 & MilkyTracker)

It was pretty much unanimous on Twitter - everyone preferred the Pico-8 version of Guile’s Theme over MilkyTracker.

So what if I imported Pico-8 samples into MilkyTracker? That was the goal for this one - to make them sound identical. Can you hear the difference? There IS a difference, but you have to listen closely :)

Project files and sheet music are attached! 

Athletic from SMW is a fun, ragtime inspired piece. The sheet music is a transcription from the actual game and isn’t very piano friendly. But if you play the piano, and think you can handle it technically, let me know and I’ll make some better sheet music for pianists (and/or a lead sheet). 

I really enjoy note-for-note transcribing to get into the nitty gritty details of a tune. One of my favourite things is discovering all kinds of oddities, like this one:

In measure 21, the chord progression is C/E - C/Eb for two beats each. The oom-pah oom-pah stride pattern in the bass clef is articulating root-chord root-chord progressions. However, on beat four, the chord doesn’t change to reflect C/Eb and remains E-natural.

I LOVE discovering these inconsistencies. Why did this happen? I can think of a few reasons:

• Oversight (whoops!)
• Musical decision
• Saving resources
• Harmless trickery  

I think it was most likely an oversight. The tempo is so fast, no one would notice. I doubt it was a musical decision because 1) you’d never see this in a ragtime piece and 2) this progression occurs later in measure 29, and the chord DOES change to reflect C/Eb – which, as far as I know, would also rule trying to save resources. 

The best part about trying to figure out why these kinds of things happen is that we’ll probably never know!

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On another note, questions for you:

Any musicians here who play instruments?  Would you be interested in sheet music requests? The reason I ask is because I can transcribe music fairly quickly (the sheet music for Athletic took me about an hour), and I’ve been thinking about adding it to my Patron rewards. What do you think?