Blaster Master (NES) - Area 1 Theme (All Instrument Cover)

Here's the memorable theme for Area 1 from Blaster Master on the NES! Blaster Master is one of several punishing Sunsoft games that were released on the NES in the late 80s that all feature pretty tremendous soundtracks (including Batman, Fester's Quest, and Gremlins 2).


This song features a rather sophisticated counter point melody over a disco type octave bass line, except the bassline doubles up each note and is played as constant 16th notes. This song, like the rest of the tunes on this game, also features many more bars of music than other typical NES games from the same time period. Memorable Mega Man or Castlevania songs loop around maybe every thirty seconds or 16 bars of music, whereas this track is roughly double in length with a non-repeating header intro.


For tracking, all guitars were double tracked and straight into Reaper. I feel like the guitar sounds I dialed in are rougher than the past few, with a buzz saw like quality. Let me know if you like or dislike them in the comments. The drum part was more or less improvised with the goal of sound like the original song, but filling in with real drumkit elements that aren't present on NES soundtracks. The bass part was the most difficult part to lay down, I tried to double thump the low notes, but at tempo, the upstroke thumb really lost its definition. The tapped guitar part (which is actually a bass part on the actual game soundtrack), was also quite difficult to execute, culminating with a broken two octave F# arpeggio. This was definitely the most challenging song of tackled amongst the last few videos I've done on this channel.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this take of this classic NES song, if you liked what you heard, comment below and subscribe to the channel!

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