Wing Commander Theme Remixed With Flair Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Update ID

Adam Monroe has put together a great keyboard cover of the original Wing Commander theme. It looks like he's playing a piano in the video below, but it's actually much more. He started with a live recording of himself playing the notes and then he took this input to digitally enhanced it with orchestral tie-ins. A better technical explanation is below, or you can just listen to the wonderful result here. It may not have been intentional, but he actually finished and posted this work on September 26 - Wing Commander's 25th birthday!
This is a cover of the main theme music fanfare for the 1990 computer game Wing Commander, composed by Dave Govett and George Sanger. You can download a piano transcription here.

Although I am playing a keyboard, a piano is not the sound you hear, so allow me to explain my process for this cover. The whole thing took 3 days - 1 day to learn and transcribe the theme music, and 2 days to record and "orchestrate" it. I recorded the performance data live like you see in the video, I then went into my DAW and changed what the midi notes trigger to match orchestral samples. I tried not to add too much to the performance that wasn't already there, hence there aren't many "extra notes," just adjustments to midi lengths and some octave shifting. I think it's amazing how much of an orchestral sound you can capture with a piano performance. I'm mostly using Spitfire BML Mural. I could have done a better orchestration, but for the most part I wasn't doing much midi automation or adding extra rhythms, just orchestrating a performance.

The music to the Wing Commander games is all pretty good, I especially like some of the Wing Commander: Privateer stuff. These are great games, check them out if you haven't already! Of course George "The Fatman" Sanger is a legend in the video game music biz!


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