Documentary series about Japanese VGM, Diggin' in the Carts

[Tex]

http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/magazine/diggin-in-the-carts

Diggin' In The Carts is a new series from Red Bull Music Academy about the untold story behind the most influential music to come out of Japan. Check back each Thursday, from September 4th to October 9th, for new episodes, mixes, and bonus interview footage.

[Eino Keskitalo]

Caught that when OCR retweeted about it, thought it was a really cool watch.

[Mr. Bottle Rocket]

cool watch indeed, that was enlightening, can't wait for the other episodes.

[Moguta]

Awesome! Was neat to learn about early arcade composers like Junko Ozawa.

[Bejack]

That was very interesting. Thanks for sharing this. Really looking forward to the next part in 2 days.

[Mustin]

This is incredible. With the other two documentary films on KickStarter (BEEP & The Player's Score), what a time to be interested in VGM! And freakin' RED BULL of all things is behind this one! I adore this and can't wait for the other episodes. Hearing and seeing Ozawa and Tanaka speak on their experiences, along with excellent camera work and editing - I'm in awe. Thursday can't come soon enough!

[CHz]

Junko Ozawa is a badass, really glad to see this video giving her some credit and spreading the word (with results in this thread, even). Her showing off her waveform book was AMAZING.

I was really pleasantly surprised at the quality of this: the production is great and the info is—well, sadly my bar for this kind of thing is so low that I'd be happy if it's merely mostly accurate, but it's not just accurate but good. Hally was an excellent person to get on board because he knows everything, and man, Hiroshi Okubo wiring up that board to a keyboard just to show off the sounds. Absolutely looking forward to the rest of these.

[CHz]

Episode 2 is out! It features Konami and Sunsoft NES games. Unfortunately they didn't interview any Konami sound staff (ultimate sad face), but they talked with Masashi Kageyama about Gimmick and that's neat.

They don't mention the name of the music label that Nobuhiro Yoshikawa is the producer for; it's Clarice Disc: http://vgmdb.net/org/829. They've released a lot of really cool compilations.

[lazygecko]

It's pretty much Capcom left now. I think they should have covered Capcom first since their NES music is technically much simpler than Konami and Sunsoft counterparts.

Wish I'd get some more insight on how their music was made as well since I've always found it interesting that you can recognize a Capcom or Konami soundtrack straight away even if the composers are completely different across the games. Either they shared internal tools/drivers with some very particular quirks and presets, or it was a separate coder responsible for implementing the music that remained the same across all their titles.

[Tex]

Nice episode with Gimmick's composer. But yeah, it could have more varied info given its length.

Konami certainly had many NES games with good music on them. But this also holds true to arcades from the 80's and 90's. I did some VGM hunt a while ago. Not trying to endorse a company, but my conclusion was that they had more games with good music on arcade systems than any other company during that era, in my humble opinion (though there are still plenty of worthy tracks from Sega and Capcom with their CPS2). Some of their 80's stuff was pretty sophisticated for its time, too.

[about:blank]

Just watched the first episode and thought it was great. I honestly did NOT see this coming from Red Bull. Can't wait to see the rest of the series!

[lazygecko]

Ep 3 is up on the 16-bit era.

[CHz]

Episode 4 is up, dedicated to Sega. Features interviews with Hiroshi Kawaguchi (early arcade works) and Yuzo Koshiro (Streets of Rage).

[Mr. Bottle Rocket]

Love this series

[Garpocalypse]

Episode 4 is up, dedicated to Sega. Features interviews with Hiroshi Kawaguchi (early arcade works) and Yuzo Koshiro (Streets of Rage).

 

Watched the whole thing for Yuzo and was not disappointed. ...even though it meant sitting through several anamanaguchi "interviews".  

 

I liked how they softballed some of the plagiarism allegations that yuzo endured once the youtube era exposed the roots of some of the Streets of Rage grooves. It gave him a chance to say something about it and not look like a bad guy.