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Inside The Score – Super Mario All-Stars – Ground Theme / Overworld (SMB)

Dawn of the real instruments (sorta)

The main theme of the series is a piece that we have already covered. You can read the relevant articles here:

Super Mario 64

For details about the composer, the history of Mario and his theme song.

This one is a comparison between the original NES version made with just the five channels available and the arrangement made by Soyo Oka where the calypso track has fully blossomed.

Musical Analysis

We covered the original tack as part of the Super Smash Bros. series but still it was not a perfect recreation of the NES original. You see, the arranger, free from the 8-bit restrictions, sneakily cheated by using three pulse tones to form some of the chords of the chordal melody, the original had to drift the bass player to perform low chord voice duty from time to time, which accounts for the leaps in the triangle wave here; remember the bass sometimes is part of the chord and it is only in the B Section where it becomes a proper bass line; sometimes the bass line even goes higher than the square waves.

The composer of the original Mario Kart has some idiosyncrasies of her own. Beyond the obvious instrument upgrades and the fact that the intended steel pans can now play the melody, she makes the piece with even more Latin flavour, allowing you to dance as opposed to bounce like in the NES version. For starters, while the original only had a swing feel for the percussion, this one brings also the bass line into the groove. Other instruments perform some licks whenever they find space within the main melody.

Some slight modifications to the original melody also take place like the endings of the phrases in the A Section where one note is displaced by an eight to create even more syncopation than in the original. The steel pan melodies also add ornamentations of their own. The triangle wave is retained and just plays one lick during Section C reminiscent of the boss battle intro cue from Super Mario Bros. 3.

The most changed aspect is the new bass line which adds notes of its own and even more decorations than the humble triangle wave. The SNES version also has a higher tempo and a dramatic use of orchestral hits to mark transitions. What other differences can you perceive between these two tracks?

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