Minecraft - Volume Alpha

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.

Trivia

 * Some of the track titles are references to music artists who inspired C418.
 * The title "Living Mice" is a reference to deadmau5.
 * The title "Mice on Venus" is a reference to Mouse on Mars.
 * The titles "Oxygène" and "Équinoxe" are references to the albums of the same names by Jean-Michel Jarre.
 * 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 "Oxygené", 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 17, 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.
 * Despite its name, "Moog City" wasn't created using a Moog synthesizer, but was inspired by it.
 * The track "Minecraft" was the first track created for the game and was used as the stylistic basis for the rest of the game's soundtrack.
 * "Mice on Venus" was originally a shorter piano solo that ended before the "silly" part.
 * The title "Thirteen" is possibly a reference to the 13 cave ambience sounds that existed when the disc was added. Similar sounds be heard throughout the track.
 * It could also just simply be a reference to the superstition that the number 13 is an "unlucky number", which has been referenced in a lot of media, particularly horror.
 * Because "Thirteen" was created in 2010, it actually uses older sound effects from earlier versions of the game for bow firing, arrow impacts, explosions, and water splashing, which have since been replaced.
 * C418 initially wanted the music disc to be found deep underground in a cave in-game, being played by some device.
 * "Excuse" was originally supposed to play in the Nether, but then C418 decided when he started creating the album that he wanted the album to be "more than just carbon copies of what’s in the game".
 * Exclusively on Legacy Console Edition, the track "Dog" is appended to the "cat" music disc. Once "cat" is done playing and fades out, "dog" begins playing for another two minutes or so, making this version of "cat" the longest music disc in the game.
 * The last two tracks, “Droopy likes ricochet” and “Droopy likes your face”, are from C418's previous album, life changing moments seem minor in pictures.
 * C418 doesn't know what the speech samples in these tracks are actually saying. C418 got the speech samples from a Kontakt sample library and they originate from "a toy you could buy in the 80’s or 90’s which says random phrases about itself". The two track titles may be C418's guesses as to what the sounds are saying.
 * It has since been discovered that these sounds are from the Texas Instrument Magic Wand Reader reading "Droopy the Dragon", as seen here.
 * Some of the songs in C418's album 148 are remixes of songs found in this album.