Koji Kondo is my hero! He composed the music for Super Mario Brothers and Zelda, which are two of my all-time favorite NES soundtracks.
I transcribed the "Overworld" and "Underworld" theme music, note for note, from the original Nintendo game. It took hours upon days upon weeks to learn to play on marimba with four mallets. View my transcription here: http://www.aarongrooves.com/sheet-music/SMB-Marimba.pdf
Fun fact: The Nintendo Entertainment System was capable of producing only 4 sounds at a time: 3 tone channels + 1 noise channel (plus an optional sample channel, which was not used in SMB). It’s amazing how much these composers were able to do with only 3 pitches at a time. Due to this limitation, the composers truly had to rely on great melodies and tasteful chord progressions in order to make the music enjoyable. Some of my other favorite NES OSTs are “Megaman 3,” “Castlevania 3,” “Double Dragon,” “Shinobi,” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
For this video, I recorded the audio and video separately to get a good marimba sound.
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