Video game music is one of the most requested and least available categories of piano repertoire there is. A generation grew up with these themes as the soundtrack to hundreds of hours of their own attention, which is a stronger attachment than most pop songs manage, and almost none of it is in the apps or the shops. Learning video game music on piano is therefore mostly a problem of getting accurate notes, and only then a problem of practicing.
It is also more varied in difficulty than most repertoire, because none of it was written for piano in the first place. A chiptune track and an orchestral cue present completely different problems, and knowing which one you are holding changes how you approach it.
Below is why this material is missing everywhere, the four ways to get the notes and what each one costs you, what makes game music awkward under the hands, and an order of operations that works.
Disclosure: we make Songscription, and our team also makes Anything Piano. Both come up in the section on getting notes, alongside the options that have nothing to do with us.
Why Game Music Is Missing Everywhere
Two reasons compound, and neither of them is that publishers think nobody wants it.
The first is scale. A single game can ship sixty or eighty cues, and there are tens of thousands of games. The catalog of recorded game music is enormous and, more importantly, spread thin: demand for any individual track is small even when demand for the category is large. An arranging team choosing what to make next will always find a pop single with more search volume than a dungeon theme.
The second is that there is often no canonical version to work from. A theme might exist as a chiptune original, an orchestral remake, a piano version from a concert tour, and a dozen fan arrangements, all recognizably the same tune and none of them the definitive text. Even a publisher putting out an official book has to decide which one its piano version is based on. The practical result is the familiar one: every catalog app, Simply Piano, flowkey, Skoove, Yousician, has essentially none of this material, and requesting it does not work.
Four Ways to Get the Notes
Official piano collections
The best option when it exists. Several major franchises have published piano books, often arranged properly for two hands with sensible fingering, and a handful have official piano-arrangement albums that the books follow. If your theme is from a franchise big enough to have one, buy it and stop reading this section: an edited, engraved arrangement beats anything you can assemble yourself.
The limit is coverage. Official books cluster around the same dozen franchises, and even within those they carry the famous themes rather than the cue you have in your head.
Community arrangements and MIDI rips
Game music has an unusually dedicated arranging community, and some of what it has produced is excellent. The difficulty is sorting it. Quality varies enormously, arrangements are often written to be impressive rather than playable, and MIDI files ripped from a game are frequently unplayable as written, because a sound chip could hold six independent voices and your hands cannot. A rip will also carry percussion and sound effects on channels you do not want.
If you go this route, expect to edit. Our guide to cleaning up MIDI covers the usual work, and turning MIDI into sheet music covers getting it onto a readable page.
YouTube tutorials
Coverage here is genuinely good, because the same enthusiasm that produced the arranging community produced the tutorial channels. The cost is the format: you are scrubbing a video timeline, pausing, rewinding, and guessing at the left hand, and a real share of your practice time goes into operating a video player rather than playing. There is also no feedback, so a note you learned wrong stays wrong.
Transcribe from the recording
The option that works for everything, including the cue nobody has ever arranged. Doing it by ear is the best thing for your musicianship and by far the slowest, and it is worth choosing deliberately rather than by default; our guide to transcribing music by ear covers the method.
If the notes are a means rather than an end, a transcription model will do it in minutes. Anything Piano takes an audio file or a YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram link, writes the piano part from the recording, and turns it into falling notes you can slow down and play along to while the app listens through your microphone or over Bluetooth or USB MIDI. Anything Piano builds piano roll tutorials only and does not produce sheet music, which is why the notation route below is a separate tool rather than a setting. For game music specifically this is the most direct fit of anything in this article: the material is defined by not being in any catalog, and the app does not use one. It works from whichever version you point it at, so the orchestral remake and the chiptune original are two separate practice targets rather than an argument about which is canonical.
If you would rather read it than watch it fall, piano transcription turns the same recording into sheet music, MIDI, and MusicXML you can print, edit, and write fingerings onto. Our companion piece on transcribing video game music goes deeper on the notation side, including what to do with chip-era arpeggios that transcribe literally and read terribly.
What Makes Game Music Awkward
- It was written for a sound chip or an orchestra, not for ten fingers. Nothing guarantees a passage is physically reachable, which is the service a human arranger performs and the main thing you give up by working from a recording.
- Chiptune arpeggios. Old sound chips could not play a chord on one voice, so composers faked harmony with very fast broken chords. Transcribed literally, a simple C major becomes a stream of sixteenth notes that is harder than the harmony it represents. Usually the right move is to play the implied chord and keep the tune.
- Loops instead of endings. Game cues are built to repeat forever, so many have no final cadence at all. You will need to invent an ending, which is a small piece of arranging rather than a transcription problem.
- Layered mixes with no piano in them. An orchestral or synth-led cue has to be reduced to two hands, and deciding what to keep is a judgment call. Our guide to piano reductions covers the principles.
- Ambient textures that do not reduce. Some cues are pads, reverb, and atmosphere with barely any notes. These sound thin on a piano no matter what you do, and the honest answer is to pick a different track.
What to Expect by Era
| Era | Sound | Main difficulty | Transcribes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chip era | Few clean voices, no reverb | Fast fake-chord arpeggios | Very well |
| Early CD era | Sampled instruments, small ensembles | Reducing an ensemble to two hands | Well |
| Orchestral era | Live orchestra, dense mixes | Choosing what to keep | Moderately, expect editing |
| Indie and piano-led | Often solo piano already | Usually none, it fits the hands | Excellent |
| Ambient and atmospheric | Pads, drones, texture | Too few notes to carry | Poorly, pick another cue |
Two rows are worth acting on. Indie and piano-led cues are the easiest entry point in all of game music and also some of the most loved, so if you are starting here, start there. And chip-era music transcribes almost perfectly, because the recording is a handful of clean monophonic voices with no reverb, which is close to ideal input for a transcription model. The catch is that a literal transcription of a chip track is harder to play than the music actually is, so plan on simplifying the arpeggios.
An Order of Operations
- Pick the version, not just the track. The orchestral remake, the chiptune original, and the concert piano arrangement are three different pieces. Choose the one you actually want to hear yourself play.
- Get accurate notes before practicing anything. An hour spent on a bad transcription costs more than the hour, because you then have to unlearn it.
- Cut the loop down to one statement of the theme. Sixteen or thirty-two bars is a piece you can finish this month. The full looping cue is not.
- Simplify before you struggle. Thin the chip arpeggios, drop an inner voice from the orchestral texture, move an out-of-range bass note up an octave. Our guide to making a piece easier to play covers doing this without losing the tune.
- Work eight bars at half tempo until they are boring. Boring is the signal it is learned. See learning a song section by section.
- Write your own ending. Hold the final chord, or resolve to the tonic. It takes five minutes and it turns a loop into a performance.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I learn video game music on piano?
Start by getting accurate notes, which is the step that stalls most people, because official piano books exist for only a small number of franchises. The most reliable route for everything else is to work from the recording itself: Anything Piano turns a game track into a playable piano roll you can slow down, and Songscription turns the same audio into printable sheet music. Then practice one section at a time at half tempo rather than running the whole cue.
Why is video game music not in piano apps?
Because game soundtracks are enormous and fragmented across thousands of titles, so the arranging cost per song is high and the audience for any single cue is small. Catalog apps arrange each song by hand, so they concentrate on pop and classical. Anything Piano avoids the problem by generating a playable piano roll from the recording rather than needing a catalog entry.
Is video game music hard to play on piano?
It varies more than most repertoire because it was not written for piano. Chiptune tracks are often easy in pitch and awkward in rhythm, since the fast arpeggios that stood in for chords on old sound chips are harder than the harmony they imply. Orchestral cues need reducing to two hands. The most playable material is usually the quiet piano-led theme, which is also the reason many people want to learn it.
Where can I get video game piano sheet music?
Official piano collections exist for the largest franchises and are worth buying when they cover what you want. Beyond those, community arrangements vary a great deal in quality, and MIDI rips are often unplayable without editing. For anything outside the official books, transcribing from the recording is the dependable option, and a transcription tool will do it in minutes rather than an evening.
Final Thoughts
Game music has an odd status in the piano world. By any reasonable measure of attachment it is major repertoire for people currently in their twenties, thirties, and forties, and by the measure of what is actually available to learn it barely exists. That gap is not an aesthetic judgment by publishers. It is an artifact of how arrangements get made, which means it says nothing about whether the music is worth playing and everything about which repertoire an arranging team reaches first.
Which is why this is the category where working from the recording stops being a workaround and becomes the normal method. Buy the official book when one exists, because an edited arrangement is better than a generated one. For everything else, point a transcription tool at the version you love and get on with practicing: Anything Piano will build the part and let you slow it down, and Songscription will give you the same thing on paper if you would rather read. Then cut the loop to one chorus, simplify the arpeggios, and write yourself an ending. The cue was never going to end on its own.
