Ayers Rock (Top Gear 2, SNES) 🎹 Keyboard Cover

Ayers Rock (also known as Destructive Comment on the Amiga) from Top Gear 2
Transcribed by ear (one audio channel at a time). Played on a CASIO WK-6600 keyboard. Best enjoyed with headphones.

This is my favorite track from this game. It was hard to transcribe due to the echo notes in the melody, but very much worth the effort.

Time spent making this video: 22h54m (spreadsheet: https://shorturl.at/ruxLS)

DISCLAIMERS:

The footage is finger-synced.
The audio that you hear doesn't come from the performance that you see. I had pre-recorded the song into the keyboard by playing it at a slower tempo (for better accuracy), then I let it play back while I filmed.

Some of the footage may be sped up.
I often film difficult parts at a slower tempo and I speed up the footage when editing. When I use this trick, a message of the form "Filmed at X% speed" appears right before the affected part begins.

Note dynamics were adjusted post-recording.
When filming, I mostly focus on pressing the right notes at the right times, but not necessarily on expression. To achieve the correct dynamics, I adjust all individual note volumes manually on the keyboard's song sequencer after recording.

None of the above tricks is meant to fool you.
I'm aware that my playing technique is flawed, and I'm not trying to pass for a virtuoso. I just want to have fun playing some cool game tunes in whatever way is doable for me, and I hope you enjoy the results!

Q&A:

How the heck did you make this?
To learn the song, I transcribed it by carefully listening to its isolated channels and re-building them in MIDI format one note at a time. The animated falling notes were automatically generated from my MIDI using a utility that I coded for this purpose. The audio comes straight from the keyboard: I first played each part separately, recording them one by one into its memory, then I used an audio interface to capture the playback of all parts together. Next I filmed myself playing each part again, loaded everything into a video editor and synced it all manually. For more details: https://shorturl.at/lqAL5

Where can I get materials to learn video-game music?
NinSheetMusic.org and VGMusic.com, for example. Use MuseScore to convert MIDI to sheet music, or Synthesia/SeeMusic to be able to visualize MIDI in piano-roll format.

Wait, did you just write "video game" with a hyphen?
I did! Since a noun ("music") appears after the compound noun "video game" in the above question, the hyphen is required. The phrase "video game music" without a hyphen would mean music that is somehow both "game music" and "video music." But you digress.

Do you take requests?
Requests for 8– or 16-bit-era game music are always welcome in the comments, but I don't promise I'll ever work on them. I will only cover those that enough people have asked for.

How come you sometimes have more than N parts appearing together on screen, if [game console] only has N audio channels?
The parts appearing in my videos don't correspond one-to-one to the contents of the original song's audio channels. They simply show the song split into its instrument parts in a way that would be natural for someone to play them on the keyboard. To clarify: My covers contain exactly the same notes as the source material; I just split these notes into instrument parts in a different way compared to how they were programmed in the game.

Why is there sometimes a vertical line on top of a piano dividing it in two?
If a passage is too hard for me, I split it into its "left notes" and "right notes," film each side separately and add a vertical line separating the two pieces of footage on the final video. This is also why you may sometimes see three or more hands, all mine, playing together on the same piano.

Are you aware that a real [instrument] can't reach the [low/high] notes you played?
Honestly, no, I'm probably not aware in most such cases. But that's OK. You know that I don't use real instruments in my covers — I use the keyboard voices that most closely match the timbre from the original song, even if the melody takes me out of what would be that instrument's playing range.

Pronouns?
He/him.

Do you listen to music other than game music?
Not intentionally.

How many keyboards/hands do you have? lol
More than the average person.

The [part] is wrong and your cover sucks.
That wasn't a question.

Do you have perfect pitch?
No. But you don't need that to be able to transcribe music.

Where do you see this channel going in 5 years' time?
Most likely still under 100K subs. This content is too niche to go viral, and it would get taken down by copyright strikes if it did. I also think there will be a point when AI becomes advanced enough that you'll be able to generate this type of videos with no more effort than a simple text prompt. When that day comes, I'll abandon the channel for good. Until then, I appreciate you being here :)