Carlos Eiene counts the instruments around him, and a loud crash resounds through the phone. He pauses, comes back — the sleigh bells have fallen to the ground. The final count is 20, including a few saxophones, flute, clarinet, upright bass, guitar, keyboard, and an array of percussion instruments. “I still need more, but I don’t have the space for it,” he says, a smile in his voice.
With live events banned and in-person rehearsals inadvisable while the COVID-19 pandemic grinds on, the rhythms of life for many musicians have been disrupted. But it’s less of a predicament for Eiene, 21, whose fans know him as “insaneintherainmusic.” In his small apartment near Kenmore Square, he’s doing what he knows best — cranking out sophisticated jazz arrangements of music from video games, which he arranges, records, and produces on his own with the help of that arsenal of instruments. And then he posts them to YouTube for his almost 300,000 subscribers to enjoy.
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Eiene, who graduated in early May from Berklee College of Music, has been managing his YouTube channel for nearly eight years. He started it within a few days of entering high school in Bellevue, Wash. Even without live gigs, he now makes a living wage from the channel and everything related to it, including his 450-plus subscribers on Patreon (a crowdfunding site where fans can fund creators).
In the channel’s earliest days, he posted a smattering of piano covers, but quickly tacked toward jazz, his affinities shaped by hours spent playing the saxophone in jazz band and playing “Pokémon Diamond Version” on his Nintendo DS.
“That game, perhaps not consciously, was one of the strongest factors as to why I ended up liking jazz music so much,” Eiene says. “The soundtrack in that game [by Go Ichinose] had a lot of interesting harmony, and really good melodies that I hadn’t heard before — and a lot of things that I would now say sound like jazz.”
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But the game that gave Eiene his biggest break was definitely “Undertale,” the 2015 runaway indie hit by Northeastern University graduate Toby Fox. With a soundtrack that runs on a combination of memorable leitmotifs, a wide swath of moods and styles, and harmonic elegance — all created by Fox using free sound fonts and synthesizers that evoked games from two or three decades ago — Eiene was captivated.
Especially memorable was the track “Ghost Fight,” near the beginning of the game. “I was like ‘Oh, God, it’s time. I have to make a cover of this,’” Eiene says. (That cover now has more than 2 million views. Even years later, half of the top videos on Eiene’s channel are Undertale-related.)
In the final months of high school, Eiene released 2016′s “Live at Grillby’s,” an officially sanctioned full-length album of “Undertale” arrangements, for which he performed or programmed all the instruments himself save for one track featuring Australian video game rock band The Consouls, in a collaboration that took shape entirely online.
“Carlos charted the whole arrangement, let us know what he wanted in terms of a feel, but there was still plenty of wiggle room for us to do our thing,” explained Consouls bassist Jonathan Gamra in an e-mail. “It’s crazy to think he wasn’t even out of high school when that album came together, but it’s not surprising he’s still trucking along now.”
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Eiene had always met other gamer-musicians online, far-flung around the world as they were, so he was well prepared for the physical distancing restrictions of COVID-19. Even at Berklee, he rarely reached out to the players around him for game music projects. “Honestly, I think it took me a while to realize that that’s something I should do,” he says.
But when a friend offered him a block of hours in Berklee’s biggest recording studio, he jumped at the chance, arranging a three-movement medley for large ensemble, which wove in game cues including the swaggering grooves of Nintendo franchises like Mario and Donkey Kong, the orchestral delicacies of Japanese RPGs like the “Final Fantasy” series, and — of course — “Undertale.” Eiene conducted, which he hadn’t done since his drum major days in high-school marching band.
Following that, he pulled in smaller handfuls of live musicians for his most ambitious project yet, the “Year of Sinnoh,” an elaborate series of arrangements from his old favorite “Pokémon Diamond and Pearl.” Originally, he planned to exclusively focus on that for the year between September 2019 and 2020. But he hit some burnout in late February when preparing for live shows and hit pause for a few months.
The medley and the “Year of Sinnoh” taught him a few lessons, he says. Recording with other musicians in person was more fun, but (unsurprisingly) takes much more effort and money to put together. “The true challenge of making music isn’t the music itself, it’s finding the musicians and making sure they show up!” he says with a laugh.
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With that in mind, he says his own multi-track recordings will likely be his main focus even after social distancing lifts, even though he’d like to work more with groups. Composing original music for games may also be in his future, but it’s not a priority — he’s most interested in furthering the arranging work he’s already done and creating more educational content for his fans, especially the school-age contingent.
The hardest part it is ultimately choosing what to play, he says. Cover artists like Eiene occupy a unique position, where hard-core fans will watch no matter what he puts out, but most people will click because they want to hear a track from a game they know they love.
“The channel is a business, in a way. Do I pick things that people will want to see? Or do I pick things that satisfy my own self creatively?” he says. “I’ve struggled with that balance over the years. Now I’m doing OK with it, and I’m sure I’ll mess it up in the future, knowing me. It’s a learning process.”
But with his outside engagements canceled and his coursework done, he’s suddenly found an abundance of time to put out new material. Five days after first hearing the laid-back 5 p.m. background music from the highly anticipated Nintendo Switch blockbuster “Animal Crossing: New Horizons,” Eiene had a cover posted, which included a guest appearance by his in-game avatar. The two coordinated their shirts for the occasion.
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Zoë Madonna can be reached at zoe.madonna@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @knitandlisten. Madonna’s work is supported by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/05/27/arts/youtube-powerhouse-cranks-out-more-video-game-covers/
2020-05-27 18:08:28Z
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