Minecraft Soundtrack Exposed – Uncover the Volksgeist

This video is brought to you by curiosity stream by signing up for curiosity stream you also get access to nebula the creator own streaming service on which my new exclusive nebula original a brief history of synthesizers is streaming now god damn it how the do you make a farm is this

Watched video game contract of the 2010 what are you talking about oh I’m you kidding Oh what do you use your mouse poop and you’re talking about come on dude you know I made a tribute to Minecraft I can’t be my round thing what disc is that what disc is that it’s

Far it’s far well you better walk far away from here buddy you piece of go yourself well yourself just am I doing this am i doing this farm right Minecraft vol alpha was the soundtrack to my childhood I listen to other stuff too but there’s absolutely nothing I listen to as much as that soundtrack between 2011 and 2014 and I wasn’t even doing it intentionally I just played Minecraft a lot and that’s why I thought

It would be interesting to look at just how c418 composed and produced one of the greatest video game soundtracks of all time because it’s not just a video game soundtrack for a lot of people it’s an iconic part of their childhood looking back at the soundtrack for this

Video I learned a lot about myself and it ended up being a way more personal experience than I expected but before I get all sappy on you let’s talk music minecraft soundtrack was composed by Daniel Rosenfeld a German producer and sound engineer he met notch the creator

Of Minecraft on TIG source a forum for indie video game developers while Daniel had only scored one small game so far the games circle in 2008 he had self released a number of albums on Bandcamp and most of his music before minecraft was pretty basic experimental stuff that

Obviously wasn’t meant for a large audience rather it was Daniel finding his own sound in real time here’s a sample from his album bushes and marshmallows which came out two years before the Minecraft soundtrack armed with inspiration Daniel set out to produce minecraft soundtrack and sound

Effects but it turned out to be more of a technical challenge than an artistic one the Minecraft sound engine was extremely primitive it couldn’t handle more than one looping sound at a time without crashing and it only had 20 sound channels in total the game was also unable to assign audio related

Properties to objects within the world for example if there’s a wall between the player and a zombie notch and Daniel had originally intended for the wall to block the sound of the zombie making the game’s sound design more nuanced this feature ultimately had to be left out

Due to the intense processing power it would have required to communicate those relationships between blocks and sound similarly Daniel also had to abandon his idea for echoes in the music and players footsteps while walking underground the game simply wasn’t complex enough to communicate to the sound engine when the

Player was or wasn’t walking underground additionally due to the nature of minecraft gameplay Daniel was forced to throw away tons of ideas he had for sound design early on he had wanted to include different ambient music based around whatever biome the player was in at the time Kandra Savannah woodland but he had

Found that when actually playing the game players moved through biomes much too quickly for the ambient music to be anything but jarring he had also composed music for fighting mobs but since mob fights and minecraft only lasts a few seconds it didn’t make much sense to include epic fighting music for

Such a short period of time it would have been jarring to say the least while at first Daniel and notch were both concerned that minecraft would sound too empty these sound related technical limitations ended up working in the game’s favor they created a calm relaxing atmosphere open to interpretation

And speaking of calming relaxation it’s time to talk about how daniel made the music itself minecraft was Daniels big break and he made that happen by doing something completely different from what most people expected he wrote beautiful acoustic ambient music for a game where you probably expect its soundtrack to be full of

8-bit chip tunes during an interview with Vice Daniel talked about how he really liked game soundtracks that take you by surprise one of his inspirations was Dwarf Fortress a game famous for its ugly graphics that also features a beautiful flamenco guitar piece as its main theme He took inspiration from a game called blueberry garden as well blueberry Gardens soundtrack was a simple looping piano piece produced with a Lofa style in addition to these games Daniels biggest inspiration was the music of effects twin his appreciation of her effects twins mix of electronic and acoustic ambient sounds without a doubt

Shaped the sound of Minecraft more than anything else the minecraft soundtrack according to Daniel ended up being 80% electronic and 20% acoustic the entire thing was recorded and produced in Ableton Live a piece of software Daniel described as so simple even an idiot could use it which is

Pretty crazy because I prefer FL within Ableton he used various plugins like software since by native instruments or mixing tools by fabfilter he even had a few hardware cents attached to his computer a Moog Voyager Dave Smith profit oh eight and a virus ti he used these instruments to put sound to the

Loneliness of Minecraft a game that was at the time in its alpha stage it was an extremely basic looking video game that lacked the vast majority of what makes it fun to play today there was no fancy lighting no multiplayer no hunger bar no geometric shapes just the player exploring a

Mysterious world by themselves knowing the game he was composing for just makes the calming piano chords feel all the more solitary and poignant of course it’s still a lonely game today but back then you can really see why Daniel chose to focus so much on atmosphere and repetition that’s all the

Game was in terms of music theory the Minecraft soundtrack is pretty simple I sat down to talk with my friend Apache made about the music theory behind wet hands and learn more about how c418 was able to use a major key to create a sentimental melancholic sound

Patchy mate is an awesome artist who released his debut record primary last year looks like one of those pets from from Club Penguin yeah no I have no idea what you’re talking about that’s well you know the the really puffy ones I didn’t play you know I played webkinz oh

Yeah you’re really really lame so anyway I’m here with my boy patchy mate and how’s it going he’s gonna talk about wet hands and also he’s gonna change his cool fingernails okay cool so now that we’ve gotten that out of the way yeah wet hands what do you have to say about

Wet hands from the mic wet hands is actually my my second favorite piece from minecraft volume alpha I think it’s perfect in just about every way and the reason it works so well as a minecraft soundtrack is fundamentally because of this concept of harmonic ambu harmonic ambiguity is this idea that like it

Doesn’t say stay in a centralized key or key center it kind of floats ambiguously through different harmonic places if you look at the sheet music you can actually see this well yeah I think what hands is just one of those were like you listen to it and you feel whatever you feel in

That moment amplified it can be bliss it can be sadness it can be can be fear it could be anything it’s just so perfect in the way that and looking at the music theory of it I guess the arpeggios the pattern and the predictability of that leaves it for like okay there’s this

Sort of certainty in the piano rhythm that it’s going to do up and down and up and down right so the flat seven is the seventh scale degree of a flattened so the seventh scale degree is G sharp flattened it’s G and you have that major

Flat major 7 and that chord is really powerful in conveying somberness and and melancholy but it’s major at the same time so it still feels like a lift but in a way it’s kind of like a soft Revisiting the minecraft soundtrack dissecting it as a piece of music learning more and more about c418 s production and even just playing the game for the first time in a few years brought me to one simple conclusion we took the minecraft soundtrack for granted because for me working on this

Video ended up being a look at my own past more than it was a look at gaming our music history turning on Spotify searching for c418 and just playing the soundtrack from start to finish was something I’ve done probably a dozen times since starting to write this video

At first I was doing it to get a better feeling for the production and the composition but as time passed my listens became less focused I started to remember what minecraft used to mean to me in the person that I was back then the hopes and dreams that filled my mind

Around seventh and eighth grade flooded back and I’ve been filled with emotion ever since emotions I haven’t felt in almost a decade I got minecraft on the 12th of December 2011 I had just turned 12 a month and a half earlier and I was finally starting

To make friends in school after being a pretty solitary kid ever since I can remember it wasn’t that I didn’t understand social cues but before I reached middle school I just didn’t really care so here I am little twelve-year-old Volks Geist suddenly forming complex bonds with other people on minecraft before long I

Found servers to play on and I made friends from all over the world it was a completely new experience for me introducing me to so many different people and ideas minecraft expanded my mind I was able to imagine so many new things even outside of the game I

Started thinking about what I wanted to do for a living and all of the places I wanted to visit when I could eventually afford to go especially going through a period of instability in my family I leaned pretty heavily on Minecraft and the friends I had made through the game

I remember exploring mod packs and making shitty let’s play videos that no one ever watched years later I still keep up with some of those friends I made online one of them is a lawyer in Australia another one got on the news for walking 4,000 miles to

Visit his online friends one of them a kid from Maryland just texted me while I was writing this video we talked about college and life and family what I’m trying to say is we’re all making our way in the world finding our place and doing our thing hell I’m a youtuber now

So many kids wanted to be youtubers in 2012 it was a joke but Here I am I’m doing it it doesn’t look how I thought it would look and it certainly didn’t happen on purpose for most of high school I wanted to be a professor or a

Writer but I’m doing this and I love it I guess the point I’m trying to make is that we took minecraft for granted we had so much mental freedom back then we were allowed to spend our time and energy on almost anything we wanted as

Long as we got all of our homework done on time of course we weren’t old enough to drive or have jobs or actually do anything for ourselves but we didn’t care how can you miss something you haven’t experienced yet it was truly a time of innocence today I have a

Different kind of freedom and make decent money I have a nice car and a good amount of popularity online I can go anywhere I do go anywhere two months ago I moved from my home state of Connecticut to Texas on a whim I love it here it’s warm sunny quiet and beautiful

I know I can’t stay forever maybe I won’t even be here much longer at all but moving across the country is a decision I never could have made until now but freedom is accompanied by responsibility I’m growing up I have to take care of myself worry about my

Future and my present pay bills and plan ahead it’s worth it and I wouldn’t want life any other way but some things just don’t appeal to me anymore even minecraft struggles to hold my attention while playing these last couple of weeks I found myself cheating to take

Shortcuts I never would have done before that sense of mental freedom or it could hope for anything and dream of anywhere is gone I am Who I am and I am Who I’m going to be now there are so many things asking for my attention in life I often feel trapped by

And responsibility I’m not the kid I once was I’m an adult now I don’t wonder about the what-ifs in life what if I wrote an amazing book what if I traveled to Italy those imaginative thoughts are gone now I wonder about the whys why am I

Depressed why want J shall I call me back but there’s one thing that can bring me back home to myself the second I hear that signature minecraft melody I feel innocent again suddenly I feel less cynical I don’t feel trapped I can put on minecraft volume alpha and think about

My problems more clearly YouTube ad money going down maybe I’ll go back to school next year miss my family I’ll call them tomorrow miss J flat if there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that everything changes I’ve moved six times since I bought minecraft first from house to house then to a different

Neighborhood now I live away from my family 2,000 miles from where I was born since I started working on this video I felt more alive than I have in a long time the simple act of listening to the Minecraft soundtrack reminded me of who

I once was and who I wanted to be it reminded me to never stop learning and thinking about new ideas if I want to feel young again all I have to do is watch more documentaries and read more books go hiking take time off to do nothing but look at the sky and

Appreciate the gift of being alive I read more now and I’m studying subjects that interest me just because they interest me I want to feel like life is beautiful just because it is not because I’m getting something out of it in the end were all just lucky to be

Here and that should be good enough even if I never play Minecraft again I’m going to listen to the soundtrack forever for the rest of my life c418 s music will be a symbol of my youth it’ll guide me by reminding me what I should truly hang on to and what I

Should let go because while life is long it’s also short there’s no time to waste on negativity and stress in the words of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi I suppose in the end the whole of life becomes an act of let it go but what always hurts the most is not

Taking a moment to say goodbye but this video wasn’t a goodbye to minecraft minecraft isn’t going anywhere it was a goodbye to childhood which despite only haven’t ended a few years ago will never return it lives on forever in memory alone this has been Volks Geist thank you for watching Hey viewers and welcome to minecraft letsplay survival episode 1 i’m mr. Griffin and this is gonna be a lot of fun so basically this is gonna be a survival let’s play but I’m gonna take it like no one actually knows what minecraft is so basically minecraft is an endless open-world game with blocks

And you survive thank you for tuning into my video about the minecraft soundtrack if you’re interested in documentaries or educational content at all I highly recommend checking out this video sponsor curiosity stream right now you can get a year’s subscription for just 1199 or a month-long free trial

With the code Volks Geist not only that but if you click the link in the description you’ll also get access to nebula the streaming service owned by creators like myself polyphonic Adam Neely middle eight and more I just released my first Nebula original a brief history of synthesizers it’s a

Documentary about the history of since in terms of technology and cultural impact from the 1890s all the way to Tyler the Creator and Travis Scott nebula is a great way to find out more about the world around you with original content from dozens of youtubers and it’s also a great way to support

Creators who are looking for freedom from the constraints of YouTube in terms of programming I recommend on curiosity stream capturing Woodstock is a great documentary about the Woodstock Music Festival the popularity of music festivals is a fairly recent development for Americans and the Western world in general in 1952 the Newport Jazz

Festival introduced the idea of music festivals to Americans and just 17 years later the popularity of the Woodstock Festival in New York ensured that American festivals weren’t going away anytime soon in fact Woodstock spawned a massive commercial industry that continues to this day curiosity stream is the best place to

Find documentary content online with thousands of documentaries on a whole host of topics if you’re already using nebula I also want to give you an extra big shout out nebula is growing quickly and it means a lot to us creators that our audiences are willing to support us

So strongly so if you want a year’s access to you curiosity stream and nebula for just $11.99 you can go to curiosity stream calm / and Fulks Geist you can also get a month free trial at the link in the description below you