Explaining Super Mario Bros.' Underground Theme 

Nice

I was thinking the original sounded more like 3/2 than 6/4.

@@mrrandomperson3106 Kondo himself said it’s in 3/4, and then alternates into 4/4. Even the official piano sheet music that Nintendo released with Alfred respects Kondo’s original intention.

I was hoping someone else would say something

"I'm a 6/4 purist" haha

So it's four bars of 3/4 + two bars of 4/4, right? BUT: doesn't the repeat come a _tiny_ bit later though? Or is there something wrong with my inner pulse?

I always thought of the same thing xD

It adds adrealine but reduce confusion. I too prefer the SMB3 version if I have to pick but honestly I'd like a version with both.

I like the DS version.

Fun fact: The concept of adding a drum track to the SMB1 underground theme originated in SMB2 dev process. There's a beta of Mario 2 (USA) with a track like the SMB3 version but with even heavier drums and a sped up section. It's very interesting

@@MaxOakland You're right. I can see why it got cut (the drums are kinda muddy, really does sound like Kondo's first stab at the PCM channel. It definitely got refined in SMB3. But the main melody has this sort of clavinet vibe, which would sound pretty good if you leaned into the funk arrangement like SMB3 has.

@@MaxOakland that theme showed that the NES can beatbox well

It's just a small handful of notes, so it wouldn't surprise me if multiple people independently invented it.

I came here to leave the same comment. Davis' track was released in 74 but may have been recorded sometime between 70 - 74. The record is called Get Up With It and is great if you're into long-form abstract jazz.

yeah! Electric Miles is quite cool.

Don't forget about the Mario Paint music tool. It was quite versatile for its time.

@@notsyzagts7967 What does that have to do with what I was talking about

Yeah that melody reminds me of Bowser specifically

I think this was addressing music that he himself wrote. Many have come to him saying that some of his music sounds similar, even when they’re unrelated, and he usually has to force himself to change it. The Super Mario Bros. 3 Water Land theme and Zelda’s Great Fairy/File Select music, for example, is an example often cited. The interviewer even brought this one up and Kondo seemed to be unaware of the similarities until this was brought up.

That's because that part is in 4/4, as another comment pointed out, Kondo once said in an interview that the original Mario 1 version starts in 3/4 for the repeated phrases, then switches to 4/4 for that chromatic sequence, and then switches back to two measures of 3/4 for the pause afterward before the loop, or something like that.

It’s not in 3/2 time. It’s in 3/4 and alternates between that and 4/4. Koji Kondo himself said this.

​@PianistTanooki yeah but is Kondo's 3/4 notated using 8th or 16th notes? (If 16ths, then it's identical to 3/2 with 8ths. If 8th, not a huge distinction between 3/4 vs 6/4...can't hear if that rest is as strong as the first notes or not, yeah?) 😉 All that said, I'm going to have to replay the game now and fire up my metronome app... I've "Mandela effected" myself into thinking the C in the 6th bar was a pickup and the following triplets started on the G-flat and B-flat. 😵‍💫

Issues of rhythmic 'feel' and the composer's original intentions aside, what's important to note is that in the video, bar 6 is notated incorrectly for the time signature of 6/4, as beat 4 (the second dotted minim beat) occurs in the middle of a triplet. Here, it is notated as if it was in 3/2 (i.e. in 3 groups of minim length).

I was going to suggest the same thing. All of the edit versions of themes in SMM are really neat with what they do, but there's just something about this track in particular.

I’ve always seen the Mario Maker edit themes as sort of musical “frames” surrounding the original composition. I don’t know if Kondo himself was involved in the edit themes, but the fact they decided to build a jazz “frame” if you will around the Underground Theme really seems to make the idea of inspiration from Let’s Not Talk About It highly possible:

bro it's a chromatic mediant they've been doing that for centuries

@@thesparkspectre1237 Yeah, that goes all the way back to Mozart and probably even before, the use of chromatic mediants. Like Mozart using C major for a brief moment in between an A major theme and an E major theme in a string quartet, or Beethoven using the chromatic mediant E major in place of the dominant in his C major Waldstein Sonata. And it became all the rage with composers like Chopin, Liszt, and later Debussy to use chromatic mediants.

That’s so funny, playing it both ways it really doesn’t change the effect of the line!

well i'm sure you know that many Led Zeppelin songs are about that "original" themselves, not to speak of the amazing performances of the band members themselves

I'm up

👁️🫦👁️

Are people so dumb they really wake up someone else for stupid things like watching a video?

and a banger at that

"I keep telling you I have no idea what he's talking about."

This is random, but Gruntilda's Lair from Banjo Kazooie sounds a lot like the theme for the Harry Potter movies which is interesting since Gruntilda is a witch.

@@lovestarlightgiver2402 It's the melodic halftones.