Brinstar — Red Soil Wetland Area

Property of Nintendo

Hot Take: Super Metroid was the best game released on the SNES. My favorite JRPG was on that system, yet still, when I look at the polish, completeness, game play, and presentation of Super Metroid — wow, just wow.

But what about the music? Super Metroid is a game where the music at all times supports the game. This seems different from the prolific scores of Final Fantasy games. Those games were slower and their music often breathed life and imagination into what could have otherwise been a stagnant boring experience. The music often -was- the content.

Super Metroid is a game that’s already alive in so many ways. The game play and imagery already evoke your imagination. Kenji Yamamoto’s soundtrack masterfully captures those moods and amplifies them.

When I look back, I don’t see a beloved soundtrack for a game that hasn’t aged well. I see a profoundly coherent experience — one I’m not sure has been accomplished since. The music is an important yet understated component of this masterpiece.

I chose Brinstar specifically since the melody is so incredibly iconic. For such an evocative song, I was surprised by how simple the transcription ended up being.

The Key

Figuring out the key was interesting. It quickly became apparent that the transcription strategy for this song could be described as “just play all the black piano keys”. When you play only the white keys on the piano, it’s generally the key of d. For playing only the black keys, I listed out the notes and then tried to fit them to the block structure.

Black Piano Key Notes
b, e, g, j, l

After starting the block structure with each of those notes, I ended up on the key of e.

Block Structure
  (Key of e)
O: e
P: g
Q: i
R: j
S: l
T: b
U: d

The Models were both Easy and Difficult

The structure of this song is simple, but I still went back and forth on it many times. I like to do my transcriptions only with the piano instrument, but the sounds just clashed horribly — even when I was sure I had the individual notes right. (more on that later)

I eventually stuck to my guns and recorded the song as using two models:

PST, P+PSO

The second model sounds quite dissonant, since the P+ and P clash really hard. The song is supposed to have tension and dissonance, but what I had just sounded outright wrong.

The model names are cut off due to the zoom, but they’re PST, P+PSO repeating the whole song.

Dissonance Softening

I eventually realized that my model was correct, but the timbre of stacking that many pianos amplified the dissonance past what the original artist intended.

After changing most of the pianos to more appropriate instruments, the same notes started sounding correct. That P+ is played low on the bass, but the P’s are played higher in other instruments.

The instrumentation alone is used as a dial to choose how dissonant a dissonant model will actually sound to the listener. Using this technique, we can build tension without the song just sounding wrong or messy. I will definitely remember this one for later.

And..

So far, I’m learning something every song. I think I’ll stick to simpler seeming songs until I stop learning from them…. that could be a while. Thank you for reading~

Notes: These are disorganized and inaccurate, but will be shown here to document my process for anyone interested~