Oliver Sacker's Theme Tune Recreations

I don't know if anyone has stumbled across this YouTube channel of Oliver Sacker's theme tune recreations.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-VcM7WE3YkTIbMxUmsnepg

He has painstakingly dissected each layer of audio by ear alone and then lovingly recreated the theme from scratch.

Even better, he has recreated some that have proved very hard to find in good quality (the originals at least)

Grange Hill - 90s theme
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXaHKLLUmC0

Casualty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l-39BKE4rw

Treasure Hunt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L5NyRDYzNk

The Bill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V9SSF_Olo8

And, in my opinion, the piece de resistance, the full Challenge Anneka theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oldYRsGP8A

There are more recreations on his channel but the above are themes I've seen requested in Requests before.

EDIT: Embeds changed to links.

Might as well change those embeds to plain links - embeds are disabled on all of them

Wow, he went in! Those are very good recreations, you can tell he made a massive effort.

Great find Have tremendous respect for people who can do things like this by ear, takes considerable patience and practice

Wow, that Challenge Anneka theme is flawless! It brings back such good memories of BBC1 on Saturday nights - this, The Generation Game with Bruce Forsyth and Big Break with Jim Davidson. Happy times!

Even the sound effects on the Challenge Anneka theme were recreated from scratch. I agree, very impressive.

Decent recreations but they sound even cheesier than the originals and some of them weren't even cheesy in the first place.

Define cheesy.

To my ear, yes they are in that grey area between original quality and the kind of knock-offs you get on 99p CDs at service stations, but they are at the high end of that grey area. The guitar on London's Burning for example is spot on. His Blockbusters sounds like it could have used a little more work, the EastEnders is two steps from MIDI, but the Brookside is spookily accurate. Nitpicking such excellent reproductions is just that... nitpicking.

My impression of these recreations is that they are at the higher quality end of the scale, and nowhere near the K-Tel level.

Might be worth taking into consideration that some of them, like Grange Hill, were made in 2009 and others were made as recently as a couple of months ago. So there probably will be a considerable jump of quality in the more recent arrangements.

I look forward to hearing them on your radio show soon then.

Yeah, not so much. Putting something up on YouTube is not the same as a commercial release under performing rights rules. Radio has certain rules placed on it by PRS/PPL/MCPS, and as much as I'd like to, it's not as simple as 'just playing'.