Sunday, May 24, 2009

Indian Sweet Child of Mine

A quick update today.

This is from a commercial for a TV channel. I would love to hear a full rendition of this cover...

Friday, May 15, 2009

Participatory Music

I really had to think hard about the title for this one, but I think "Participatory Music" really captures the essence of this little project.

In Bb 2.0 is a project that explains itself, but here's the idea: Invite people to submit a video of themselves playing music in Bb, but with no set tempo or groove. Provide a backbone idea of what to play, but let the submissions take their own course. The end result is a collection of videos with mostly random notes being played....yet they all strangely fit together nicely. ...But at this point, it's just the "typical" web-produced music thing. Which is itself neat, but this takes it one step further...

The truly amazing part of this is that the listener can choose to begin, stop, skip, change the volume etc. of each video at their own will. But because of the style of music and the type of submissions that have been made, the "listener mix" always works! I've played around with making specific trumpet notes come in at my own will. This type of work is really quite inspiring.

I've seen "listener mix" type of websites before, but those ones are essentially just a collection of on/off button for different instruments in the track. In those websites, the tempo and groove remain the same, so the song is really just the same thing with different volume levels. This project however, really lets you move around the different instruments at will...yet it will always work. Awesome.

To check it out yourself, go to their website here . Unless you have a kickass computer and high-speed internet, I would suggest closing all your windows before though, because you're about to load 12+ youtube videos at once.

Enjoy!

(Thanks to Brian for the link)

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Not Only Is This One Continuous Shot, It's Also A Live Recording!

I've lately been playing a couple music videos over and over again. It's pretty neat that both of these were introduced to me very recently, yet they happen to share a really rare quality/achievement in music videos:

1. It's one continuous shot. From start to finish, the whole thing is done with one camera, one take. Neat stuff. The earliest version of this (as far as I know) is with Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" (but it's actually just a part of a documentary film). Since then, it's been done by U2, Feist, to Miley Cyrus...so it's not as rare as you might think.

However, the 2 videos I've been obsessed with also have this...

2. The actual music is being recorded/performed live as the tape is rolling. Music videos are always lip synced, and the audio itself is previously recorded in a proper studio... which is why when you hear the album version, it sounds exactly like the music video. These two gems however, decided to record the audio live as well! So not only are they performing to the camera in one take, the artists must also perform the music correctly. It really feels "raw" and personalized...and I find the musicianship that is required to pull this off to be extremely impressive.

Anyways! 2 genres, 2 indie artists, 2 videos with one shot, with live audio. Enjoy!