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The Video Game Pianist

Posted by timothy on from the tickling-ivories-for-extra-lives dept.

Neil Halelamien writes "Many enjoy listening to video game music arrangements, like those offered by OCRemix, Project Majestic Mix, or the Minibosses NES-rock band. A newcomer on the scene is the Video Game Pianist, an accomplished performer studying at the Cleveland Institute of Music. His skills garnered the attention of some in the industry -- he performed at the 2005 Game Developers Conference and will also be playing live at E3 this year. His web site offers some amazing performance videos (many with him playing blindfolded), downloadable albums, live internet concerts, sheet music, and other goodies, all for free. His albums and videos include several selections from the Mario, Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Final Fantasy series. Fans of his work can also donate to support his music."

6 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. Argh by rbarreira · · Score: 2, Interesting

    His tempo sucks in the Mario song video. Quite cool though :)

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    The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
  2. Legal? by tepples · · Score: 5, Interesting

    He's distributing recordings of copyrighted video game tunes and asking for donations. Isn't that an infringement? Or is he paying 8 cents per downloaded song to the copyright owners?

  3. Wow memories! by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The Amiga was the first place I heard decent quality music (I missed out on c64...).

    The quality of some tunes easily outstripped modern "pop" groups.

    Heres a nice rundown of the main history of game music.

    I just had to go hunt down the Project-X mod files.

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    liqbase :: faster than paper
  4. Ninentdo Themes Choir by Xeo+024 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I thought this one was rather well done (it's a .WMV).

  5. Re:So that's what happened... by DarkHelmet · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Heh, how funny. I noticed the same thing happening too. Anyway, here's a script I wrote specifically for the purpose of updating songs from these guys

    By the way, I'm using a mysql database for this. The table looks like so:

    CREATE TABLE `Remix` (
    `Id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
    `FileName` char(100) default NULL,
    `Downloaded` tinyint(4) NOT NULL default '0',
    PRIMARY KEY (`Id`)
    ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

    Oh yeah, there's a query class that I regularly use for something like this. But then again, if you can't figure out at least the SQL query code to see what it's doing, you suck, and shouldn't be using this period.

    Consider it an Exercise for the Reader to rewrite this using Pear:DB

    Finally, I recommend inserting a row into the table, representing the highest file ID of what you have, so that you don't end up going and redownloading all their music, one by one.

    Thanks OCremix guys for making your pages into RSS feeds! It makes stuff like this a lot easier to do!

    http://seventhcycle.net/ocremix/download.phps

    I would have posted it here, but Slashdot's junk filter sucks. CENSORSHIP! :D

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    /^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
  6. Pretty cool, but... by arodland · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Not excessively creative. On the FF front, his Kefka is almost identical to the Piano Collections version, and for Balamb Garden and To Zanarkand, I might as well just put on the games themselves; I'll hear the exact same thing, only with much better recording quality. The Mario-related work is of a similar quality level, only the track labeled as SMB3 "Overworld Theme" isn't. On the other hand, "Calm [er, Silence, whatever ] Before the Storm" has some promise. It's one of my favorite tracks from the rather mediocre FF X soundtrack, and it translates rather nicely to a real piano. Even here, though, the interpretation is entirely literal. If this guy had submitted to VGMix I think he'd be told to go back to WIP :)