Prelude (Final Fantasy) — The Sound of the Machines

Transcript

Nobuo Uematsu · 1987

In 1987, Nobuo Uematsu was finishing the soundtrack for Final Fantasy when his boss, Hironobu Sakaguchi, walked into the room and told him to write one more…

The Famicom's 2A03 sound chip gave Uematsu four channels to work with — two square waves, one triangle wave, and one noise channel. The Prelude uses almost…

There was a mistake in the original version. Due to a programming error by Nasir Gebelli, the main coder who did not fully understand musical notation, one…

The piece is based on a short work by Johann Sebastian Bach — an arpeggiated prelude in C major from The Well-Tempered Clavier. Uematsu has acknowledged the…

Why does a piece written in ten minutes — with a wrong note left in — still sound like the beginning of every journey?