Blackmore's Night - Memmingen

This article is part 34 of 52 in the 2022 music project series.

I first learned about Blackmore's Night by watching a YouTube video of some sweet gameplay of the pivotal tower defense game Desktop Tower Defense. Some dude was playing through the game with The Storm as background music. I was mesmerized. Kind of.1

It's pretty much exclusively Renaissance Faire music, with old-timey lutes and stuff, but Blackmore can't escape his Smoke on the Water phase and he plays some mean licks on occasion.

Anyway, Memmingen isn't one of those. It's just a short, classical-inspired2 acoustic guitar solo with some fake strings in the background. I'm assuming it's named after the German town Memmingen. Blackmore spent a lot of time in Germany at one point in his life according to Wikipedia.

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Memmingen score via Japanese eBay

Recording

Capo on II. Unlike every other guitar recording I've made, I actually recorded this one live. As usual, I half-assed the mixing so the bass is just kind of overblown, but I don't have the patience to twiddle those knobs.

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Cover of Ritchie Blackmore's Memmingen from Blackmore's Night's debut album Shadow of the Moon.
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Screenshot of my Ardour setup
  1. I tried to find this video on YouTube, and even though I found multiple 15-year-old Desktop TD gameplay videos I didn't find the one with The Storm. It was probably taken down for copyright violations. I remember the days when a man could just upload copyrighted material to the Internet and it wouldn't get taken down. Alas.
  2. You know it's classical-inspired because it ends on the world's most obvious Picardy 3rd.
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