The Masterminds Behind the Madness: Who Created “Rush E”?

If you have spent any time online over the last several years, chances are you have crossed paths with “Rush E.” Whether it was heard blasting in a chaotic TikTok edit, watched as an impossibly fast piano-tutorial video with notes cascading like a digital waterfall, or attempted by brave pianists on YouTube, “Rush E” has cemented itself as a modern internet pop-culture monolith.

But behind the wall of impossible notes, flying fingers, and meme culture lies a real question: Who actually created “Rush E”?

Meet Sheet Music Boss

“Rush E” wasn’t written by a classical 19th-century composer, nor was it accidentally generated by a runaway computer program. It was crafted by Sheet Music Boss, a musical YouTube duo and publishing company consisting of Andrew Wrangell (composer) and Samuel Dickenson (technical and visual director).

Launched as a channel dedicated to fun, accessible, and creative piano tutorials and MIDI visualizations, Sheet Music Boss built a massive following by turning pop culture, video game soundtracks, and internet memes into catchy piano arrangements.

However, they struck internet gold when they decided to lean heavily into meme culture and absurd difficulty scaling.

The Origins: From “Rush B” to “Rush E”

To understand how “Rush E” came to be, you have to look at its predecessor, “Rush B.”

Earlier in their run, Sheet Music Boss capitalized on a popular gaming meme. In multiplayer games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, players often communication-chatted the phrase “Rush B”—a frantic tactical callout urging teammates to charge blindly toward a specific objective. Drawing on this, the duo created “Rush B,” a Russian-folk-inspired piano piece heavily centered around the musical note B.

When looking for a follow-up, internet culture provided the next logical step. At the time, the deep-fried “E” meme—a distorted, surreal mashup featuring Lord Farquaad’s face from Shrek and Markiplier—was everywhere.

Wrangell and Dickenson decided to combine the fast-paced, finger-breaking conceptual style of “Rush B” with the absurd internet gravity of the letter “E”. Andrew Wrangell sat down to compose a piece where the note E would play a punishing, central role, building an escalating structure of musical madness.

From a YouTube Video to a Global Phenomenon

When “Rush E” was uploaded to YouTube in 2018, it was designed to be entertaining, slightly humorous, and impossibly difficult to play in its final, exaggerated iterations. The visual MIDI format showed cascading notes that required far more than ten fingers, two hands, or even human anatomy to execute.

This sparked a massive viral wave:

• The “Unplayable” Challenge: Pianists and content creators across the globe began making parody videos pretending to play “Rush E” using ridiculous methods—such as using cats, noses, spatulas, or sheer CGI wizardry.
• Real Pianists Step Up: Eventually, skilled real-world pianists took it as a badge of honor to actually arrange and master subsets of “Rush E” by hand, translating the chaotic MIDI file into physical sheet music.
• Mainstream Crossover: Millions of kids and teenagers discovered the piano through the song, turning it into a rite of passage in the modern digital age.

Legacy of Sheet Music Boss

While Andrew Wrangell and Samuel Dickenson have produced hundreds of other videos and original pieces, “Rush E” remains their crown jewel—an accidental lightning-in-a-bottle moment where classical piano formatting met peak internet absurdity.

So, the next time you hear those iconic, relentless notes accelerating toward an impossible crescendo, you’ll know exactly who to thank: two guys behind Sheet Music Boss who decided to see what would happen if a meme was translated into 88 keys.