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The existence of the internet means everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame a lot more easily. But thanks to the rediscovery a few years back of Mario Paint Composer, the mini-game within the 1992 Super Nintendo game that's now widely available for downloading online and has been producing roughly a zillion pop covers all over YouTube recently, all it takes these days for web fame is a good ear for musical arrangements.
Enter: Adam Shin. He's the guy behind your favorite Mario Paint Composer masterpiece du jour – a cover of Daft Punk's "Get Lucky." While other YouTube users have posted multiple covers using the game (take this guy, for example), few have gathered so much steam – 2.4 million views of the video in a week and counting – so quickly. Not bad for a computer science student in Utah who, until a few months ago, had never even played the game before.
Shin, a pianist since age six who's been arranging and recording himself playing video game themes like those from online RPG MapleStory for the past year, isn't even a huge Daft Punk fan.
"I first heard the song in a random YouTube video, as background music," he told WIRED. "The title was in the comments, and I was like, 'Oh, I've heard of this band.' I liked the rhythms of the song, and how complex it was. So I looked at the music and realized there were way too many instruments for a simple piano cover."
He'd heard of people using Mario Paint as a composition tool, so he downloaded it, and over the next two and a half months, he toyed with the project, using the game and an mp3-toggling program called Capo to slow down the Daft Punk version to get the arrangement just right. The end result is something tons of people have done, but few have done so spot-on.
Thinking about trying it yourself? Shin also shared his secret recipe for the perfect sound palette.
"The mushrooms are the bass drums, the hearts are the bass line; that airplane, I used for the guitar that you hear most in the song," he said. "The ghosts and the coins were some softer guitar and piano sounds; they're a little hard to hear, but they add flavor overall. The Game Boy sound is the actual melody."
Got that? Now, go forth and Paint!
