KingGordo: Year 3 Full Playlist
6Every year I mark the anniversary of this YouTube channel with a playlist of all the past year's projects, and while Year 3 had significantly less uploads than the previous years I still wanted to mark this milestone!
From June through October of 2020 I basically went inactive here on YouTube due to extenuating circumstances, and by the time I was in a position to start working on music projects again the Mario 35th Anniversary was in full swing with the release of the Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection. So I decided that, even if I couldn't keep a consistent uploading schedule, the least I could do was keep a consistent theme! So I made it a goal that from then until the official end of the anniversary season (March 31) I would focus my efforts on making quality projects all themed around Mario's adventures in 3D! Eventually I decided that this theme would carry on past March and into the end of KingGordo's 3rd year (mostly because I was late with getting the last planned Noki Bay project out and didn't have many ideas beyond that).
As previously mentioned, this year there were significantly less projects completed than I had anticipated. Among many other factors, I think this was a result of me focusing on (relatively) more highly-produced remix projects as opposed to simpler piano covers. For comparison, if you take a look at Year 1's playlist, 16 of the 25 listed projects (64%) were piano songs, many of which were very simplistic since I was just starting off with recording covers. Year 2 had a similar ratio of 8 to 13 (~61%). This year, however, I had only 3 out of my 7 projects (~43%) follow my usual piano cover format, the rest being multi-instrument remixes. Thus I can in good conscience say that I followed through with at least one of my goals from the end of Year 2, which was to work on incorporating new instruments into more in-depth arrangements. This year saw me experimenting with the accordion, flugelhorn, recorder, vocals, and a lot of French Horn...I'm very happy overall with how I was able to break out of my comfort zone this year, which also includes me changing DAWs from GarageBand to FL Studio this year. You can tell with the first chronological project, the Piranha Plant Lullaby cover, that I didn't really know what I was doing with the Horn audio, but I feel like over the next few projects I sorta got the hang of mixing audio recordings and stuff (I'm still not the best at it but I'll keep trying)!
I'm also very happy to report that we've overtaken the previous two years' rate of new subscribers! Both Years 1 and 2 saw an increase of about 100, but this years we increased that to about 125 new subs! The main video I believe we have to thank for this is the World Bowser Remix, which has already reached 1K views! I kinda viewed that project as an honorary sequel to the Big Bad Bowser Medley that first helped my music reach a lot of people over on MuseScore, so I'm very happy to see it so well received here on YouTube as well!
Over this past year I was able to sort of narrow down what my overall goal for KingGordo Productions is: to bring recognition to amazing yet obscure VGM musical themes from familiar places. Two of my personal favorite projects I worked on for Year 3 were the two Mario Sunshine themes: Mario in Jail and Noki Depths (aka "Deep Sea of Mare"). Both of these are incredibly obscure tracks despite being from a relatively well-recognized Mario game, and it was just really fun getting to breathe new life into those hidden musical gems! "The List" of my ideas for future projects (that I alluded to in last year's summary) has since been updated with VGM tracks in a similar situation...I already have a couple of songs in the works from a series featuring a certain speedy mammal that's also celebrating a milestone anniversary! Thank you all for your support, and I hope that I can continue to contribute what I can to highlighting the unrecognized fun and beauty of Video Game Music!
0:00 World Bowser
3:00 Gateway Galaxy
6:30 World 3
11:03 Piranha Plant Lullaby
15:04 Choco Mountain
17:04 Noki Depths
21:23 Mario in Jail