On the second episode of CGQ Mixtape, let’s head to the other side of the tracks to check out the music of the Super Nintendo in it’s first calendar year on the market. Konami was a major presence on the console with both Super Castlevania IV (which has some of my favorite SNES music) and Gradius III, and is joined by Capcom’s Super Ghouls ‘N Ghosts, Nintendo’s own Super Mario World, F-Zero, Pilotwings, and SimCity, and of course the Yuzo Koshiro scored Actraiser.
The above video features audio recorded straight off of a Denon DRW-650 cassette deck. Most of the VGM audio files are FLAC rips, and each side of the tape was put together in my editing software so that I could normalize the audio levels. The audio was recorded onto a 1987 Memorex dBS.
Make Your Own Mixtape
To make your own copy of this mixtape, you’ll need a cassette deck that can record to tape and has a line-in, a blank 60 minute cassette, and (ideally) a color printer. Clink the link below the image to download the PDF of the J-card (which is just a fancy term for the cassette insert), print it full-size (8.5 x 11) and cut it along the guide lines. The J-card looks best printed on semi-gloss photo paper on an inkjet or color laser printer:
Two sound files, in MP3 format, are linked below. Each audio file already contains 7 seconds of silence at the beginning to account for the leader in the cassette, so start playing the audio file at the same time you hit the “record” button on your tape deck. The file also contains several minutes of silence at the end, so that you can let each side of the tape record until it stops. Simply (and obviously) record one sound file to each side of the tape.
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