Composer/Musician Reacts to C418 – Minecraft (Minecraft) (REACTION!!!)

Hello and welcome back to another episode of critical reactions with your host brian we’re going to keep moving on with video game soundtrack week we’re going to look at a random selected song from the more popular half of the poll and uh this one kind of surprised me

Being suggested at all and then on top of that also being in the more popular half i did not really think of minecraft as being a game with a soundtrack to begin with but also not a game that would have a popular soundtrack i have some time in minecraft and i

Can’t say i’ve ever heard a single song in it so really curious what’s gonna go on here and also where this uh soundtrack fits in uh the composer here is c418 and the song is minecraft from the minecraft volume alpha soundtrack Do Do Very peaceful and serene You know what’s interesting too is with that specific bell tone It almost has like a child child-like wonder about it as well It’s not just uh peaceful and serene though is it It’s definitely a bit of pensiveness to it it’s very thoughtful music Do All right so yeah this is pretty cool actually um so we have what i would say is kind of the central idea which is going to be the cyclical concept where we have to fade in and fade out the beginning and end are identical just on opposite spectrums

And then on top of that we just have the beautiful serene quiet peaceful thoughtful pensive music that exists in that middle uh two minutes i would say and so on the core just looking at the music as it is it lines up a lot with um

Kind of how i view minecraft i’m not a very big minecraft player i have it i have a daughter i can’t exist without uh knowing about minecraft i don’t think any parent can get away with being oblivious to what this thing is these days um it’s it’s such a cultural phenomenon and is

Huge with especially children but that’s not to downplay how big it is with adults as well but we mostly play it uh in this the creative mode which is no dangers not having to survive and find anything everything is given to you and it’s all in infinite capacity and you

Get to play minecraft like legos i would say like like virtual legos where you have an infinite amount of pieces um and so it is sort of a meditative thing for us as we just build houses and towns and and structures that we like without uh worrying about anything else it’s just a

Very thoughtful peaceful exploration for us so i do kind of like how those themes tie in there though i don’t know how this works against the what i think is the the core mode uh whatever the the standard mode is called uh where you have to go out and and

Chop down trees and and mine and and find your materials and like find food so you don’t run out of you know your hunger meter goes down too low or something like that this song does not give me any of the the stress or tension that that that mode

Implies uh as far as i’m concerned but the peacefulness the serenity it it works for my experience with minecraft which i admit is limited and biased i’ve only played a small portion of it but it just works so well it is a it’s a meditative time that my

Daughter and i sit together and build stuff together it it feels a lot like when i was younger and my parents would play legos with me and we’d dump out all the blocks and you know nobody’s really necessarily making masterpieces here but it’s just that family time

Of doing the same thing at the same time and and kind of building off of each other’s ideas and stuff like that and um it’s just it’s peaceful time just flies you don’t even you know really notice that you’re just having you know you’re finding a lot of joy in this simple

Process of taking stacking blocks and well stacking them and yeah that that peacefulness that thoughtfulness the serenity it really shines through in this in this song and that’s a lot of my experience with minecraft uh there’s also something about the graphics despite their simple blocky voxel nature there’s still something very serene

About it uh as long as it’s not nighttime and and the monsters are coming up but during the day maybe you’re sitting on a mountain and you got your blocky trees around you and then you got the water just going off into infinity uh you know the game is procedurally

Generated whenever you take some steps in a direction it just starts building that portion of the world semi-randomly according to an algorithm and some of that idea of infinity i guess also works within the context of the song because it is cyclical i would say like i said the

Beginning and the ending are the same just in reverse and i’ve mentioned many times before when we have fade ins and fade outs with similar ideas at beginnings and ends of songs to me it always implies a sort of cyclical nature some sort of infinity um and that works within the realm of

Minecraft as well because it is a game of infinity there is no end to it you can never reach the end of the world you can never build the last thing to build the crafting uh you know there is i believe there is like a a quest

Line that can be finished in the core game but there’s still no end to it there’s still the continuation you will still never see the end of the world or or craft everything that you can craft or whatever it is it is a game about infinity about the simplicity of infinity

And speaking of simplicity the game is also fairly simple um well it’s simple for me i don’t have to worry about uh what do they call them uh recipes crafting or memorizing how to build everything i just go into a menu and pick it up so

There’s a lot of simplicity to me like i said it reminds me of my childhood and playing legos and just pop pop pop and just popping blocks together uh until i have something it’s it’s simple it’s meditative it’s pensive you just kind of keep doing it

Um so a lot of that works however going back to this idea of building blocks this is what gave me a smile at the end of the track when this clicked in my mind song is blocky in nature and this might be stretching it a little bit

But minecraft is a game based around voxels and for if we want to break that down we can just call them boxes right there they’re blocks you have a block of dirt and a block of stone and a block of you know wood and the song is based out of store out

Of building blocks you have your baseline block and that is the piano that fades in and fades out it doesn’t change it’s the same from beginning to end then we add in layers in each of the layers start and repeat until they end and eventually we have you know the long

Foundation that is from beginning to end we have this piece that is from we could say you know eight bars from the beginning to eight bars to the end and then this piece and they slowly stacked wrong side they slowly stacked these blocks up until we had a pyramid

And then we tapered them off we removed the blocks in the order that they were in the reverse order that they were presented and it creates a nice little pyramid where we are we’re adding things and then we take them back away and if you look at it in a daw uh

Your your digital workstations you’re going to see these chunks of blocks stacked up like a pyramid um so i don’t know if that was done intention intentionally but i see sort of a blocky uh idea working uh inside of the composition of the music as well

So it’s pretty cool um where does this song come from though like i said i i’ve played a little bit of minecraft and it’s not the main menu music and i don’t think there’s any music in the game i’ve never i can’t i don’t think i’ve ever heard any any background music so

I’m kind of curious where the soundtrack comes from uh but i i do love it it’s it’s really nice and peaceful and i’m curious about the rest of this soundtrack if the whole thing is done by this c418 person and if it is all like this

Where it’s just uh you know really calm calming music because i could definitely put this on in the background uh and and really chill out to it especially on uh saturday evenings are kind of a big evening for me as far as working on the channels concerns i go through all the comments

For the week i know i don’t know if people notice this but i don’t check comments every day i tend to reply in bursts and saturdays are definitive every saturday i will catch up regardless of how much i’ve looked at through the week maybe i’ve

You know i had 10 minutes so i checked into youtube studio and and read some some comments but on saturday i go back to the last time or my last place marker and i catch all the way up to present so i make sure i see every single comment

I add requests to the spreadsheet i reply if i think i have something to add so saturdays are kind of big and then i also plan out the uh the two polls for patreon that show up on sunday mornings uh and i calculate the winners

For the polls so i know what i’m going to be doing for the week and yeah saturday evenings is is my big my big day of doing work on the channel and making sure everything through the week runs smoothly because that is big for me uh since i also do homeschooling during the

Day and then i record after that and making sure everything can go smoothly and have to worry about that is huge so putting something like this on sunday evenings when i’m going through and doing all of this uh behind the scenes work would be phenomenal especially if the whole

Album’s like this i could really do with some stuff that is just very thoughtful and present i think i don’t think i said that word earlier but it is a very present song it is about the here and now and what’s going on in the moment

Um and yeah that kind of ties into minecraft too i mean you can have your your long-term plans of what you need to do but a lot of what gets done is you know what you’re doing right now so yeah really cool stuff overall those are my thoughts though on the

Minecraft song called minecraft from the minecraft soundtrack uh this is where you guys come in hit me up in the comments let me know what you thought of minecraft from minecraft written by c418 you can also check out the description box above that for some links adjacent

To the channel if you’d like to join the discord community or join the patreon campaign or follow me on twitter all that stuff’s in there um i’ll be back tomorrow 5 pm eastern standard time 10 pm utc with a song that did not do so well in the

Polls it will be randomly selected and yeah we’ll get to see something that is not as popular the fact that i do two random selections and then my own personal selection is sort of my way to introduce less of a popularity contest to the channel if anybody’s ever curious about why

Why i randomly pick some stuff run a poll and then only take the top two as definite uh that’s why i i like to have the channel run a bit more with some less popular stuff i don’t i don’t want everything to just be what what everyone’s asking for

Um so i kind of pride myself on the fact that this channel has checked out bands and i see comments like i never thought i’d see the day this band got a reaction i’m like yeah that’s i pride myself on that seriously i mean i don’t know if people

Think that’s stupid or not but it’s not so much about being the first to react to somebody it’s more about you know giving underrepresented bands i guess bands that most people either don’t think about or just don’t have that wide of an audience and showing them to a new group of

People just giving them a new platform to maybe connect with uh one of the things i love here is connecting bands with new fans and i think uh showing and picking some of the less popular stuff is is a good way to do that all right i have rambled on way too long

We’re just going to wrap this one up i’ll be back tomorrow 5 pm eastern center time 10 pm utc with the penultimate episode of video games soundtrack week until next time remember to be critical not cynical of the music you listen to and have a fantastic morning afternoon or evening

Whenever you choose to watch my videos You