Here on the Mixlr blog we love to introduce our listeners to great new live shows.
Well for the last few weeks, we’ve been unable to ignore the fantastic Score VG live show. In fact, we’ve rarely heard a more interesting selection of music on a show on Mixlr: Score is a podcast dedicated solely to music from video games.
Hailing from Mexico, Score VG has quickly become one of the most popular shows on Mixlr, with its blend of Spanish-language round table discussion and great music attracting thousands of listeners every week.
We chatted to Score main man Mauricio Pastrana and quizzed him about his show, its background and how Mixlr plays a crucial role in its success.
What is the Score VG podcast about?
Videogame music. We’re home to the melodies you have probably heard the longest in any consecutive period and yet never realized you did.
It’s funny how this genre is consistently neglected and has never landed in mainstream music when there’s an industry perhaps as large as the film industry today behind it. In fact, the music that comes with videogames is scored by A+ name composers and just very recently broke into Grammy territory.
What we do is we break down these songs into it’s composers, era and technologies (older videogame songs actually shared processor time with the game itself) and then mix it with our own nostalgia to deliver a 2-3 hour show focused solely on games. Once weekly.
How long has the Score VG podcast been going?
Score Podcast is brand new. We jump to episode 10 just this week, but bear in mind the nerds behind the show have been at it for more than 20 years. One of our resident experts actually brings in ROM dumps from the older arcade systems to extract the sound files and we all write and produce Atomix, the largest videogame community in spanish (and also the creators of Atomix Mag, a fine iPad videogame publication).
What does a typical show involve?
ScoreVG is a round table show. We spend a full week going through our own nostalgia and older consoles and when we can, add as much research as we can throw onto a standing crowd of 20 nerds to iron out a 12-20 song playlist which we schedule to run as a show in song, song-analysis, song loops. 5-10 microphones, 2 macs, mixlr, a couple of beers and some pizza and we’re good to go basically.
How does Mixlr help?
Score Podcast and the ScoreVG Live show could not exist without Mixlr. Both for recording and streaming purposes it is by far the easiest way to transmit in what amounts to a matter of minutes setting up. Oh, and did I say it’s HD streaming? can’t have audiophiles tuning in to listen to monoaural songs. Also, our show is exclusively audio to focus on what matters (the music), but what keeps everyone in is how accessible it is because of Mixlr (as it runs on almost any mobile platform and on web). Oh and one more thing, Mixlr has an amazing set of integration tools to publish everywhere from one single mp3 file, a must if you’re a startup show. Our show is consistently up in record time.
—