More Mega Man Music

My favorite piece to transcribe and play for Hideo was the Mega Man Medley.

So, I thought I’d transcribe a couple more from this awesome game series and share the results with all of you. Below you’ll find some info about these pieces, along with both sheet music and a video of me performing these pieces (more or less).

I’ve got two pieces, Elec Man from the original Mega Man, and the Mega Man 3 intro.

In terms of transcription, it’s very helpful that both of these pieces are originally for the NES, which means that there are at most four simultaneous voices going on at once: one bass line, two leads, and a drum (noise) track. This means less transcription work, and usually amounts to something that is relatively easy to play on the piano (leaving out the drums).

In the case of Elec Man, it was really easy to transcribe in a very short amount of time and is fairly easy to play on the piano as is. It’s possible that the composer was a pianist and was thinking it in terms of the piano.

Elec Man Sheet Music

In the case of the Mega Man 3 intro, it was a little bit more difficult since it is a more involved composition, and not particularly easy to play on the piano. It was slightly harder to transcribe as the voices often overlap very closely.

As far as playing it on the piano, the bass voice has some rapidly repeated notes which are more idiomatic on an actual bass than on a piano. Some of the fast runs on the lead voices are also extremely difficult to play on the piano. So, I came up with two versions: one is an exact transcription of the two lead voices and the bass, the other is a slight simplification for piano. In the piano arrangement, I wanted to emphasize accuracy and staying true to the spirit of the original. For the exact transcription, I believe I have a perfectly accurate transcription, so please let me know if you think I made a mistake 🙂

Mega Man 3 Theme Exact Sheet Music
Mega Man 3 Theme Piano Sheet Music