There is a very specific kind of dizziness you get when a video game theme sounds strangely familiar, wrong, and correct all at once — and no, it is not the third coffee. That is the Tears of the Kingdom main theme doing its quiet little magic trick on your ears, and I could not stop poking at it on the fretboard until I figured out why.
So this clip is 48 seconds of me playing the Tears of the Kingdom theme on guitar both forward and backward, because the melody is the sort of gremlin that arguably makes more sense when you run it in reverse. Spoiler for the nerds: that is not an accident.
How the Tears of the Kingdom retrograde works
The trick is a compositional device called retrograde: you take a melody and play it back-to-front, last note first. Nintendo's composers built the TotK theme by taking the beloved classic Zelda overworld theme and essentially running it in reverse, so when you flip my forward line around, that familiar heroic tune quietly reassembles itself. That is why your ear keeps insisting it has heard this before — it has, just walking the other way.
The useful takeaway: retrograde is a free songwriting tool you already own. Take any lick you like, write out its notes, then play them in the opposite order — same pitches, brand-new contour. It is a fantastic way to generate fresh ideas and train your ear at the same time, and it pairs beautifully with learning to figure out a melody by ear or building your own licks from scratch.
Of course, I then spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of time playing everything I know backwards, which is how you end up at 2am wondering whether your entire personality is just a retrograde. Want the Guitar Pro file and the tab so you can bend your own ears? It is all on my Patreon.