...from major to minor

Here's a proposition; video game tunes are the Jazz Standards of the internet.

If you don't know what I mean by jazz standards, I mean the way that a collection of oft-covered songs came to make up the core of the repertoire that jazz players and entire jazz movements went on to cover, re-work, improvise on, and jump off of in new directions. They came from all over, from novelty songs and Tin Pan Alley and the studious compositions of the jazz masters but many of them also came from pop and, even more, from Broadway.

So many great jazz tunes came out of otherwise almost forgotten musicals. Class example being "My Funny Valentine," out of the Mickey Rooney vehicle Babes in Arms.

Anyhow.

There's a whole bunch of people covering game music now. And I think there are some of the same reasons going on. It works better to cover a familiar song. You have the brand attraction, for one. And you enter into a dialog, for another; your cover is compared with other covers, each learning off the other -- and both adding to the weight of familiarity the piece gathers as it moves to being a Standard.

And game music has some of the same attributes of show tunes; it is emotional, and melodic, and memorable. And more. A whole lot of the covers aren't of pieces that were made more recently and with the full resources of the symphonic pallet. No; prime fodder for covers, and source of many standards like "Guiles Theme" or "Vampire Killer," is the 8-bit days.

I think there's a reason why. With only four voices to work from, and rudimentary synthesis to boot, the original composers were forced to be melodically and rhythmically intriguing. And instead of thick orchestral textures, they had to build texture harmonically; these pieces have often surprisingly complex harmonic structures.

These all make them a natural for new orchestrations. The basic parts are so simple and clean they are easily transcribed, and the voicing of the original is so (relatively) undefined you don't have to fight against the idea of "correct" orchestration for it; instead the cover artist is free to interpret within the instruments they want to apply.

But no matter what you do with them, the drive of the original ideas...the melody and harmonic underpinnings...are still there supporting you.




And of course this is the online, social media world. These musicians are having a dialog right out in the open with fans and other musicians, at the various approximations of face to face available in the online world; in videos, comments, chats, pages, etc. (And many of them perform in public as well.)

The first of this crop I ran into were essentially soloists. Often violinists. I wonder if this is how it works today; that the violin (not the piano) is the jumping-off point for certain kinds of musical activity. Anyhow. One has to lead off with Lindsey Sterling, of course. Then there's Taylor Davis, and Taryn Harbridge (who I first encountered doing a multi-track cover of "I Am the Doctor.") And many more.

That's the next step up, in a way. Artists who multi-track (usually) the same instrument to create their compositions. Violinists do this. There's others like Peter Holland who do it a cappella.

Or guitarists -- but no guitarist owns just one guitar. So when a guitarist multi-tracks themselves doing a cover, they tend to play at electric, acoustic, and bass. Or whatever combination you like out of the various guitar-like instruments available. There are some wonderful covers, especially by those who can really play an acoustic, but I can't come up with names at the spur of the moment.

And then there's the multi-instrumentalists. These are people with the daring to try to play as many parts as they can themselves, across a number of different instrument families. Top of the list here has to go to insaneintherain -- Carlos may specialize at sax (although he is a fine keyboard player) but, man....! The jazz arrangement intelligence and the soul and the chops he brings....

I'm continuing to discover these peculiar and daring souls tucked away in the corners of YouTube. Squidphysics (who stands out for me in demonstrating you can get musical results from $100 instruments), PPF, Erutan, String Player Gamer.

And of course there are groups. The Consouls, Tetrimino....but anyhow! That's enough to advance the point.

How strange the change indeed.