Minecraft – Volume Alpha

Minecraft – Volume Alpha

Album by	C418
Released	March 4, 2011
Genre	Ambient
Length	58:50
Available as	LP, CD, digital download
Discogs	801496
Link	C418’s Website Bandcamp Amazon Music Apple Music Deezer Ghostly Records Spotify YouTube YouTube Music

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Minecraft – Volume Alpha is the first Minecraft soundtrack album by C418, first released on Bandcamp on March 4, 2011. It features all 14 of the tracks that have been in the game since Alpha, plus 10 bonus tracks, for a total of 24 tracks and a length of nearly an hour. The second soundtrack album, Minecraft – Volume Beta, was released on November 9, 2013.

Official description

The OFFICIAL soundtrack of the critically acclaimed multi award winning indie block game!

Features 15 additional soundtrack exclusive minutes of music you haven't heard before!

Features Cat! In STEREO!

Features CD quality music! No more extremely low bitrate youtube videos of the soundtrack!

Features a high quality image of the album cover!

Track listing

No.	Title	Filename in Minecraft	Length	Track preview	Description
1.	"Key"	key.ogg‌ nuance1.ogg‌	1:05		This song plays in badlands, deserts, dripstone caves, flower forests, frozen peaks, groves, jagged peaks, jungles, and in most overworld biomes.
2.	"Door"	—	1:51		Serves as a continuation to "Key" and only available on the album.
3.	"Subwoofer Lullaby"	subwoofer_lullaby.ogg‌ hal1.ogg‌	3:28		This song plays in badlands, deserts, dripstone caves, flower forests, frozen peaks, groves, jagged peaks, jungles, meadows, snowy slopes, stony peaks, and in most overworld biomes.
4.	"Death"	—	0:41		Only available on the album.
5.	"Living Mice"	living_mice.ogg‌ hal2.ogg‌	2:57		This song plays in badlands, deserts, flower forests, jagged peaks, jungles, meadows, snowy slopes, stony peaks, and in most overworld biomes.
6.	"Moog City"	—	2:40		Only available on the album.
7.	"Haggstrom"	haggstrom.ogg‌ hal3.ogg‌	3:24		This song plays in badlands, deserts, flower forests, frozen peaks, jungles, meadows, snowy slopes, stony peaks, and in most overworld biomes.
8.	"Minecraft"	minecraft.ogg‌ calm1.ogg‌	4:14		This song plays in cherry groves, groves, lush caves, and in most overworld biomes.
9.	"Oxygène"	oxygene.ogg‌ nuance2.ogg‌	1:05		This song plays in badlands, deserts, dripstone caves, flower forests, groves, jagged peaks, jungles, and in most overworld biomes.
10.	"Équinoxe"	—	1:54		Serves as a continuation to "Oxygène" and only available on the album.
11.	"Mice on Venus"	mice_on_venus.ogg‌ piano3.ogg‌	4:41		This song plays in badlands, frozen peaks, groves, jagged peaks, jungles, lush caves, stony peaks, and in most overworld biomes.
12.	"Dry Hands"	dry_hands.ogg‌ piano1.ogg‌	1:08		This song plays in badlands, frozen peaks, jagged peaks, jungles, stony peaks, and in most overworld biomes.
13.	"Wet Hands"	wet_hands.ogg‌ piano2.ogg‌	1:30
14.	"Clark"	clark.ogg‌ calm2.ogg‌	3:11		This song plays in cherry groves, groves, lush caves, and in most overworld biomes.
15.	"Chris"	—	1:27		Serves as a continuation to "Clark" and only available on the album.
16.	"Thirteen"	13.ogg	2:56		Included as a music disc which can be found in dungeon, mansion, and ancient city chests, as well as being able to drop from creepers killed by skeletons.
17.	"Excuse"	—	2:04		Only available on the album.
18.	"Sweden"	sweden.ogg‌ calm3.ogg‌	3:35		This song plays in cherry groves, groves, lush caves, and in most overworld biomes.
19.	"Cat"	cat.ogg	3:06		Included as a music disc which can be found in dungeon, mansion, and ancient city chests, as well as being able to drop from creepers killed by skeletons.
20.	"Dog"	—	2:25		Serves as a continuation to "Cat" and included in Legacy Console Edition as an extension to that music disc.
21.	"Danny"	danny.ogg‌ hal4.ogg‌	4:14		This song plays in badlands, deserts, dripstone caves, flower forests, frozen peaks, jungles, meadows, snowy slopes, stony peaks, and in most overworld biomes.
22.	"Beginning"	—	1:42		Only available on the album.
23.	"Droopy likes ricochet"	—	1:36
24.	"Droopy likes your face"	—	1:56

Trivia

• The game’s soundtrack subtly uses repeated motifs.
  • For example, part of “Key” (at 0:08) appears to share a melody – in particular, a phrase that varies between 5 and 6 notes – with “Subwoofer Lullaby” (at 0:28 and 0:31), “Living Mice” (the 5-note pattern that repeats throughout the track, starting at the beginning, as well as the main melody of the track), “Danny” (at 0:03, 2:30 and 2:41, and 3:15), and most subtly, “Dry Hands” (It appears between 0:10 to 0:17, and it is really subtle, but those few notes are there, and they’re also at 0:28, 0:37, and 0:45).
  • At 0:26 of “Oxygène”, a distant piano plays four notes, which can also be heard near the end of “Haggstrom” (during the part with the echoing reverse chimes, at about 2:21).
  • The bouncing, descending melody being played by the chime instrument in the second half of “Mice on Venus” (at about 2:49) is also in the ending of “Haggstrom” (during the part with the echoing reverse chimes, at about 2:18).
  • At 0:55 of “Dry Hands”, there is a 5-note phrase that “Mice on Venus” also has (first appearing at 1:06).
  • At 1:46 of “Cat”, what sounds like an interpolation of part of the melody from the track “Minecraft” plays. The main melody throughout “Cat” also sounds like “Key”.
  • These are only a few examples of the likely many uses of motifs throughout Minecraft’s soundtrack.
  • The use of reoccurring musical ideas is a very common concept in musical composition. As with any soundtrack that uses reoccurring musical ideas, it’s unknown how many of these apparent instances of motifs are intentional, because some of them are so subtle that they can’t be discerned from coincidental uses of the same notes.
  • Tracks from Minecraft – Volume Beta also use musical ideas from this album.
• The versions of the game’s background music tracks that are on this album are actually slightly different from the original, in-game versions.
  • Multiple tracks have been given transitions between them, such as the one between “Living Mice” and “Moog City”, and the one between “Clark” and “Chris”.
    • The first three tracks are connected together, and so are tracks 5 and 6, 9 and 10, 14 through 18, and 19 through 21.
  • All of the in-game tracks were apparently remastered for this album, as certain instruments and sounds are louder or quieter or different in timbre than they were before and the overall sound has a lot more clarity.
    • The music disc tracks are in stereo, as opposed to their in-game versions, which are in mono. It is likely that the in-game versions are in mono so as to make it seem as if the sound is coming from one single source (a jukebox) instead of from all around the listener.
      • It is equally possible that either the stereo versions or the mono versions of the music disc tracks were created first. The soundtrack versions are either the original tracks from before they were mixed down to mono for the game, or remasters of the original mono tracks that intended to provide a more “complete” listening experience outside of the game. Which version came first could also vary from track to track.
  • “Key” has an added note at the end that wasn’t in the original as a way to transition into Door (the original version simply looped the last few notes as it faded out).
  • “Subwoofer Lullaby” has less reverb, resulting in a noticeably more staccato sound, and a glitchy ambient noise in the background at 1:03 is much louder in the album version.
  • “Dry Hands” begins the same way as the original and then fades into a new version that uses a noticeably different, much less reverbed piano sound.
  • “Haggstrom” is missing an ambient background sound that it originally had at 2:03, and it also has a slightly longer fade-out.
  • “Oxygène” has an added echoing, whistling sound at 0:26 that wasn’t there before.
• Some of the songs in C418’s album 148 are remixes of songs found in this album.
• This album was nominated for Top Dance/Electronic Album in the 2022 Billboard Music Awards.
• This album was inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress.

Gallery

• 

  Cover for Minecraft – Volume Alpha

See also

• The C418 Wiki’s article on Minecraft – Volume Alpha
• The Wikipedia article on Minecraft – Volume Alpha