Saturday, November 12, 2005

Norfair and Title Themes

Originally composed by Hirokazu Tanaka from Metroid for the Nintendo Entertainment System.


Game music, for all its variety and breadth of styles, is more often than not re-arranged by fans for guitar because, I imagine, that’s simply the instrument of choice as it has been the most commonly used instrument in popular music for over fifty years now. And of the children who played Metroid when it was new and have now grown into music-creating adults, many of them naturally do so with their guitars.

By virtue of not being a guitarist, any cover coming from me was surely going to be approached very differently. Rock and metal have become the most common styles used for video game covers, and one could do no better than Stemage’s amazing examples of this at Metroid Metal. However, as wonderfully as metal and game music apparently fit together, I’ve personally never thought of Metroid as being very “metal” at all and wanted to use some of the eerie, sci-fi elements of the game and its positively dense atmosphere to influence the sound of my mix and thus ended up taking it in a direction closer to what I thought that would sound like.