It’s been an extremely rocky past year and change. Even with life gradually inching its way back to normality, I still have lots of downtime for worries and fears to surface. So, I was looking to find something distracting and productive, and this is what I’ve landed on. Recording covers of videogame music fills this need – it’s an excuse to break out my guitar after many moons of it hibernating in its case, and a nice gentle way to ease back into playing, since during the recording process I get to correct my many mistakes. It’s also been a real learning experience on the editing side of things. Most of my audio experience comes from recording and editing the podcasts on this here Very Very Website, but music is not something I’ve spent any great time with.

Most of all, I love the music. Even when using crummy samples, old FM synths and generally dated tech, great videogame music still sounds great to my ears and I listen to it all the time. I don’t claim to be able to fully replicate, let alone improve on the beauty of the original tunes, but I hope my interpretations are at least interesting to listen to.

Without further ado, I’m excited to share the songs here. I’ve done six eight so far.

I’ve put them in a playlist from the most recently recorded to the earliest recorded. I’ll keep adding to this playlist over time, but as of today (updated 9th June ’21) the playlist contains:

1. So Much for Today from the Ys series
2. Domina (hometown) from Legend of Mana
3. Frontier Village ~ Dali from Final Fantasy IX
4. Overworld from Super Mario Land (plus the game over music from Super Mario Bros at the end)
5. Call at a Port from Terranigma
6. Castle Damcyan from Final Fantasy IV
7. Boundless Ocean from Final Fantasy III
8. Places of Soul from Legend of Mana

I haven’t uploaded it, but to get started I did a test run, a recording of one of my fave VGM pieces, Crysta from Terranigma. It’s a lovely song but I accidentally recorded a lot of background noise and I wasn’t happy with how it turned out in the end. Even so, it proved really addictive to work on, so here we are now.

For anyone wondering how I do each of these, it turns out there is a fantastic community and repository of guitar music over at gametabs.net, highly recommend it. They’ve done the heavy lifting for me in terms of transcribing these songs and thousands more. It’s thanks to this site that recording each of these tunes only takes a few hours rather than several days!

I hope you’ll enjoy listening! The songs I’ve covered so far all have a relaxed feel, and I plan to keep that going forward. This is the kind of music I put on in the background while working or studying. You can find my YouTube channel here – if you like what I’ve done so far, you may like to subscribe to keep up with any new recordings.