Now that every kid with a guitar has a video of himself on YouTube covering the "Super Mario Bros." theme, the video game music cover has become mainstream. There is still one group of musicians, however, that stands a cut above the rest. The OneUps, based out of Fayetteville, AR, exclusively play video game music in a variety of styles. The sound of the primarily Fusion/Funk/Jazz five-piece group has been described as what you might get "if George Clinton [Parliament-Funkadelic] banged a Nintendo." (Earnest Cavalli, Destructoid.com)
Having performed for over 20,000 people in the past 7 years, the band has sold over 10,000 CDs featuring their music. Their most popular tracks include The Legend of Zelda arrangement "Bossa De Link," and "Super Mario's Sleigh Ride" - a pastiche of the "Super Mario World" soundtrack and the traditional Christmas song "Sleigh Ride." The group has been featured in numerous video game magazines (EGM, GameInformer) and popular online publications (MSNBC.com, Kotaku.com).
Born in the year 2000 out of the desire to hear video game music realized with real instruments in various musical genres, the band's continually-growing world-wide fan base can be attributed to its fun but mature sound, which comes from the diversity and level of education of its musicians, who hold degrees ranging from BA to Ph.D. The OneUps have performed their video game music renditions for people all over the United States - from Philadelphia to Dallas to San Francisco. The group is currently working on their upcoming digital-only release consisting of arrangements of the "Super Mario Kart" soundtrack.
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