The Musical Gaming Styles of Smooth McGroove
Music has always been a large part of video games, as has been discussed in the past. It represents the de facto soundtrack for the millions of people who grew up on gaming — from the early days of Pong, Pac-Man and Nintendo, to the modern days of Mass Effect, Until Dawn and Halo, their music makes up gamers’ memories just as much, if not more so, than the game, itself.
So, leave it to one clever YouTuber to put a new spin on video game music — bringing it to life in a singularly unique way.
Meet YouTube artist Max Gleason — better known as “Smooth McGroove” — who has been on the website since late 2012, filming music videos of an entirely particular variety. Case in point:
He specializes in a cappella compositions of classic video game themes, from Super Mario Bros 3, to Sonic the Hedgehog, to Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, to Street Fighter II. Gleason admittedly grew up, almost religiously, on both music and video games. However, the road to a collision between the two was kind of a long one.
His father in Oklahoma was a music shop owner, and both of his parents played in a garage band. He grew his love for music by listening to his father’s old records, from AC/DC to the Beatles. From the age of 11, he gained an expertise in music by learning the drums — he had a large bout of stage fright, and the drummer was stationed behind the entire band — and would eventually find himself teaching the drums as a private tutor.
As for his love for gaming, it also started for Gleason at an early age. Like many from the generation of Atari, Nintendo, and Sega, he had been playing video games since he was four years old. When his father traded the family’s Atari for a Sega Master System, playing games like Phantasy Star and Miracle Warriors got him hooked — to both the hobby, and the music that came along with it.
But it wasn’t until late 2012 where the two worlds collided — seemingly on a creative whim. It was then when he realized he wasn’t going to have a career in professional music, and he wasn’t interested in making a career out of teaching. So, he spent his time creating music based on his own sense of intuitive inspiration. From there, he began posting his projects to BandCamp and YouTube, under the pseudonym “Smooth McGroove” — a name that simply made him laugh.
His first foray into video game a cappella was essentially a side project from making his own music. Upon showing the project to his mother, one day, he was encouraged to continue making video game music projects. Then came a video game cover of “Song of Storms” from “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time”, a video he posted to the Legend of Zelda’s Reddit page:
Eventually, Nintendo took notice, and posted the cover to their official Legend of Zelda Facebook page. It was then, when Smooth McGroove came into popular internet consciousness.
He records himself in-studio, singing each individual part of the composition, using nothing but mouth noises. In the videos’ final edits, each part is given its own “box” surrounding the screen, while gameplay of the video game is at its center. It’s a wonder to behold, for anyone who can understand the effort in editing a video.
Even more amazingly, his compositions are self-made. While classic video game music of the 1980s and 1990s were limited by the 8- to 16-bit technology it was rendered under, the compositions, themselves, were still multi-layered, and have been shown to be used as full orchestral pieces. Gleason essentially broke down these video game musics by ear into individual parts, and sung them all himself. By his own admission, Gleason started out spending an average of 30 hours on each individual composition — an aspect of his projects that forced him to end his career as a private music tutor.
Perhaps, this is part of the reason why his channel currently has over 1.6 million subscribers and has garnered over 247 million views, despite a number of hiatuses — the latest as recently as the end of last year. Not only are his projects thoroughly enjoyable to listen to, whether or not you are a video game fan, but a wide variety of people can appreciate the giant scope of his videos — including YouTube creators, music aficionados, and music professionals, alike.
It also speaks to the nostalgia of video games, and the ones who played them growing up — Gleason’s compositions hit at the very heart of an entire generation of gamers. In all, it is the beautiful collision of music’s emotional power and the realm of video games that has given Smooth McGroove the success he has experienced over the past three years, and, hopefully, lasting success in the future.
