What Makes Minecraft’s Music So Great

As many of you may already know the minecraft soundtrack was written by a german musician named daniel rosenfeld otherwise known as c418 now 2021 later this year is actually the 10th anniversary of the release of the original minecraft game but i just wanted to look at a couple of the most

Popular for me some of the most recognizable tunes from the soundtrack and talk a little bit about their makeup and how their simplicity and subjectivity makes them so usable in in the soundtrack and maybe that’s not the right word i i basically just mean like they don’t seem to get

Old you can kind of listen to them for a very extended period of time now a lot of that certainly maybe comes down to the instrumentation choice but some of it certainly comes down to the actual composition so let’s talk a little bit about that now i know a bunch of you are

Going to point out all of your favorite minecraft tunes please do that in the comments below because we’re not going to talk about very many of them but if you want me to cover more of the songs from minecraft feel free to let me know

Which ones you want to hear about in the comments down below now the first song that we’re going to talk about from the soundtrack is simply minecraft the the minecraft song it’s actually listed as minecraft on the soundtrack you all certainly know it it’s the iconic digital piano sound just

Playing a few simple chords and that sounds like this So the first thing that’s unique to me about this is that we’re pretty obviously in the key of g flat But we don’t ever actually use g-flat as our root or our base note we spend the entirety of this piece on either the the minor six chord or the one chord over the five and what i mean by that is it is g flat it is the g flat chord however

The bottom note that we keep returning to is not g flat it’s actually d flat which of course in the key of g four flat it’s the fifth so we are constantly coming back to this one chord but we’re playing that chord over the five i find that really interesting because

It gives you this feeling of like well we’re settled but we’re never fully home what that allows it to do is it can go on and on and on and on and we never hit a point where we feel like the whole song has resolved that is particularly

Relevant for its usage because obviously you want things that are able to flow into one another or perhaps loop when we talked about the wii music a few weeks ago we talked about that exact phenomenon where the music was written specifically so that it would loop back

Around to the beginning without much of really an indication of being fully finished this is what you might call a vamp a vamp is simply a small phrase that gets played over and over and over and over again and then other things either over top of it or surrounding it

Are happening all the time vamps are incredibly useful we use them a ton in jazz in fact one of the most popular jazz vamps ever is at the beginning or the end of all the things you are but oftentimes beginning in the end we play this little vamp that goes like this

So that’s basically what a vamp is it’s just a small repeated phrase that we use to sit underneath other things happening that’s in many ways how i think this is sort of used once we start hearing the rest of the instruments we sort of realize what the chord structure of this

Actually is to me it kind of seems like it starts on an e flat minor sound if you just look at the electric piano sound it’s still playing for that first phrase once other instruments in the strings start to come in it’s it’s pretty clear that we’re we’re sort of using this sound And the actual chord progression or the vamp if you will in its entirety is really just going back and forth between that e flat to g flat but remember we’re only using we’re using that uh the fifth of g flat which is d-flat or that’s what we’re

Using the bass so this vamp provides us with it with a very open-ended sound basis which we can work off of and that’s exactly what the strings do with some of the melodies that come in it’s really just a a very calming very minimal sound with

Two chords now for a more sort of in-depth look at how this relates to the gameplay there’s actually a really fantastic video by a creator named meraki that i will link to down below and and he talks about all of the ways that’s that the vibe of the music

Directly relates to the particular type of gameplay that we might be experiencing in that moment the ambience created by the strings give a sense of loneliness and the piano feels almost like footsteps wandering through that vast emptiness and if you think about it that perfectly embodies what playing

Minecraft alone is like so rather than me kind of going into some of those details i’m just gonna point you in the direction of that video because it was so well made one interesting thing to point out about this is i would say that although we are in the key center overall of

G flat major we actually don’t really use the g flat major scale in any way shape or form and the whole thing really just sits on the g flat pentatonic scale Five notes now it may seem like there is more going on within the song but a lot of that is just because of some of the different layering of the instruments and some of the movements within those instruments because i want you to hear something very very interesting here i’m

Gonna play a little bit of this and as i go along i’m gonna start to put in other notes from the g flat major overall sound so we might be talking about some f naturals or b naturals you’re very quickly going to realize why i’m saying that this is

All in g flat pentatonic because even though technically if you’re talking about e flat minor if we were to extend e flat minor out we get all kinds of interesting color tones on top of that including F works really well in there c works really well in there over this e flat minor sound one might assume reasonably that okay well if we want to expand on this and include lots of different color tones maybe that f and maybe that c might work really well but watch this We might be able to make that sound really beautiful but it doesn’t really fit in the original soundtrack it just doesn’t work when we listen to the original recording now certainly i can sit here and i can play a rendition of it and use all kinds of different things

And and it and make it sound fine but it was never really intended to have those sounds it’s pretty much purely just a g-flat major pentatonic sound so theoretically you could play and do whatever you want on just all of the black notes on the piano And it’s going to sound pretty nice so if you ever want to mess around with that particular song that’s a very easy way to do it so go try that the other tune i want to talk about is sweden which again is one of the most popular ever in the minecraft soundtrack

Really just a gorgeous sequence of chords so simple yet every note is just really correctly chosen i i feel really quickly let’s just go over what the chord progression is so this is in the key of d major and the first thing we’re gonna do is we actually start on the minor two We climb up this is just don’t consider this a chord i would consider this more of a passing note meaning we’re not on it for long enough to bother defining exactly what it is we’re just using it as a note to get us from one bass note to the next

Now this chord this is a g major seven chord but it’s constructed with the ninth in the chord and then five and major seven now what’s really interesting about chords like this is they are so simple yet they’re so formulaic that you can come up with ways

To think about them so that you can pull these chords out and use them in any different context here’s a very simple way to look at this one yes this is a g major seven with the nine it you might call i don’t know would you call it g

Major seven add nine i guess that would be is that correct something like that but here’s the simpler way to put it play a d major chord so this technically would be d first inversion second inversion so d second inversion with the g in the bass That’s it now would that work if it wasn’t second inversion of course It’ll work with any of the inversions right so how do we broaden that to make it applicable to any key no matter what well d is what of g because if the chord is g all right let’s see one two three four five okay so we are taking the chord built on the

Fifth of g so five over 1 that’s the chord now let’s apply that to a different key how about give a well what’s 5 in the key of a it’s e so let’s play an e chord Now what are we gonna do it’s five over one we’re just gonna put the one in the base look at that it’s beautiful now technically what is that well that’s an a major seven add nine but we don’t even need to necessarily always think about that we can come up with these little

Formulas to help us play chords just off the cuff how about in the key of c well the fifth of c is g so we’re going to play a g over c beautiful e flat a flat b When you come up with these different little formulas to play chords it makes them so much easier at least in my experience and maybe you feel differently maybe you’re more used to just reading the entire chord symbol all on your own but in terms of having quick voicings that you’ve practiced that you

Can pull out and play very quickly i just i find that very helpful so back to sweden we started on the minor two there’s our iv chord which our voicing is five over one another passing tone now this one’s really interesting because we’re getting to a point where

There’s an a in the bass but this isn’t i don’t this is not an a chord to me this is an f sharp minor chord just with an a in the base And now we have another passing tone in the base before we finally land on the one Two Four three Resolve to the one and again this functions as a vamp and like the minecraft title track we hear it used other instruments come in and start playing some other things and eventually we even shift the instrumentation entirely and use a pizzicato string section to play the same figure but vamp

I think is i think is a fair way to to classify it now this is really interesting because when i was listening to this and i was thinking about you know what does this remind me of what does this sound like check this out So for those of you who may not have recognized it that is a tune written by the great jazz pianist bill evans and it’s called peace peace and you can see why but as i was listening to sweden i was struck by the similarity in the application and in

In the actual just just what it sounds like even they both use a vamp they both allow other things to kind of float over the top of that vamp they both have almost the exact same tempo almost the exact same sort of feel it’s really just an example of like the

Effectiveness of of using these very minimal low energy peaceful vamps there’s so much more to go over in the minecraft soundtrack but it’s just i i feel it is very unique and so well written especially given its restraint i mean it very easily could have gone a whole different direction

And filled up the sound with orchestral sounds or even just like you know more notes more that and it just didn’t daniel rosenfeld did an incredible job writing these tracks and it’s no surprise that they are so iconic and that they are loved so widely and it

Just goes to show that you don’t need tons of notes and chords and and all kinds of different musical complexities in fact sometimes the more simple something is the more memorable we find it anyways that’s just a brief look inside of a couple of the minecraft tunes and if

You’d like to see more please let me know in the comments below which tunes you would like me to break down or which ones you’d like me to to play a little bit of and i’d be happy to take a look at what you guys are interested in all

Right that’s it that’s going to do it and so once again let me know what other things you’d like me to cover and from the minecraft soundtrack in the comments down below maybe we’ll do some on on the youtube channel maybe we’ll do some over on nebula and regardless thank you so

Much for your time thanks for watching and we’ll see you in the next video You