Week 29: Percussion music arr. by Scott Director

Unlike the band music from two weeks ago, this arrangement of "Pac-Man Fever" is strictly a "percussion feature" for bells, xylophone, snare drum, timp-toms, bass drums, and cymbals. There's also 3 measures of agogo bells and tambourine.

I am sadly not aware of any recordings of this arrangement. as best I can tell, it consists of a brief percussion intro, the Pac-Man intro music, a single verse and chorus, then the Pac-Man intro again (played twice back-to-back), then a percussion ending.

The copy I have is the only one I've ever seen show up on eBay and it's obviously never been used. If anyone wants to take a crack at recording it, let me know. 

Week 27: Band music by Jenson Publications

You got a Billboard top 10 hit in winter? We gotta have a marching band arrangement for the fall! And thus Paul Jennings arranged one. They also sold a Pac-Man sound effects tape that could be played during portions of the performance.

Week 26: Pac-Man Fever song book

This book contains the words and music for all the songs on the album. Only the basic melodies and bass parts, though. As it says on the cover, it also includes a coloring page for each song. Most of these were art from the arcade companies.

Original cost of the book was $7.95. It's ISBN is 0-89898-148-4, but the only result that will get you is the Memorabilia page on my Pac-Man Fever Forever site.

Credits

Book design & illustration: Frank Milone
Editor: Audrey L. Kleiner
Production: Frank J. Hackinson
Printer: Central Litho (Miami)

Week 21: Two-part vocal sheet music

I thought I'd seen all the vintage Pac-Man Fever things, but no! This popped up on eBay this week. It weighs in at 10 pages and was arranged by Dave Riley and Dana Wilson. Unfortunately, the seller only included the first page where the singers are told to open by ad libbing "computer-like sounds". It'd be interesting if there were any old videos of this being performed, but I didn't find any.

Week 19: Sheet music

Any time you have a hit song, people are going to want to play it themselves. To do that, they need sheet music. And music publishers are usually happy to oblige, for a modest fee. Hence, we have the official "Pac-Man Fever" sheet music! (My copy is rather heavily used, I'm afraid.)

And what do you get for your $2.50? Well, first you get a reprint of the album cover with additional text underneath. Next, on the inside, you get some pretty simple piano music in B-flat major with the singing part and guitar chords. And I mean simple piano music. There's not a single triad to be found! The best you get are some dyads (two-note intervals) in the bass clef during the chorus. You do, however, get the opening music from the video game, if you ever wondered how it would go on the piano. (Interestingly, there is no separate credit or copyright notice for that bit, which technically should belong to Namco or Midway.)

I will give it credit for a dal segno segno (D.S.S.) notation, however. That's not something I usually see a lot.

What I really would have liked, however, was the music for the guitar solo. Sadly, that's not to be. Instead, it just says to ad lib for a verse.