Unrefined "Musician" Gains a Global Audience

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "An unskilled musician performed a catchy pop instrumental for more than one million YouTube users even though he can't play a lick of drums or piano. The 22-year-old Norwegian's tool was stop-motion video, WSJ.com reports. From the article: 'To make "Amateur," Mr. Gjertsen recorded each analog beat and note one by one on video. He transferred the sounds from each video clip into audio files, which he could rearrange with the Fruity Loops sound-editing program — the same software he's used to create his all-digital music in the past. After organizing the sound files into the right order, Mr. Gjertsen reconstructed the pattern with the original video files. In the final product, he insists, nothing about his performance was digitally enhanced. "You have the original sounds from the video," he says.'"

Retro!

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

This reminds me of the tracker modules that saw a lot of use on the Amiga.

Youtube's impact on the music scene

[thebigo195]

Another example of a great piece of music (or something like it) that only works when accompanied by video. We'll be seeing more and more developments in this direction thanks to Youtube! See Chuck Klostermann's recent article in Esquire for a full dissection.

Re:Let me be the first to say...

[ezzthetic]

By the way, it isn't "Fruity Loops" anymore - it's "FL Studio", and has been for a number of years. Sanitarium objected to the original name.

The software designers thought it was unlikely that anyone would confuse their sequencing software with a breakfast cereal, but apparently Sanitarium had in mind a situation in which they might want to give away CDs with cereal.

Also, they discovered that IT executives tended to fall about laughing when they told them the name of the software.

Re:Moo

[Cybersonic]

Use the Video Downloader firefox plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2390/ [mozilla.org]

Then use VLC http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ [videolan.org] to play the resulting file.

Re:Retro!

[mushadv]

The modern incarnation of the tracker concept would be Renoise [renoise.com]. It has VST support and other things that electronic musicians would expect from a studio application, with the efficient interface only a tracker provides. It's also only $60, which is trivial compared to FL Studio, which is something like $300 for the fully functional version. [/ad]

Re:umm

[illuminatedwax]

I'm just making fun of the ridiculous gimmick, as if splicing sampled notes together to create music is anything new.

The real success of the video is, like you said, the work that went into it, the actual composition. There are thousands of people making MODs and MIDI files; this guy just added the video. So: premise stupid, execution excellent. Kind of the opposite of modern art.

Another of his videos

[strider44]

He has plenty of good videos - another of his, Hyperactive [youtube.com] uses the same technique to a similar effect.

Re:Moo

[dch24]

Never mind, it's on Google video [google.com].

Free software for making music

[tepples]

The modern incarnation of the tracker concept would be Renoise. It has VST support and other things that electronic musicians would expect from a studio application, with the efficient interface only a tracker provides. It's also only $60, which is trivial compared to FL Studio, which is something like $300 for the fully functional version. [/ad]

The open-source incarnation of the tracker concept would be Modplug Tracker combined with Audacity. It has VST support and other things that electronic musicians would expect from a studio application, with the efficient interface only a tracker provides. It's also only $0 and under a free software license, which is trivial compared to Renoise, which is something like $60 for the fully functional version. [/ad]

Re:"Unskilled"?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't know much about Trent, do you? He plays piano just fine. He plays guitar just fine. I've never seen him play drums, but rumor has it he plays drums too. His piano versions of songs are even available at your local Best Buy, I'd bet.

Re:Back in the day, we had .mod files

[tepples]

Holy crap, I remember [mod/s3m/xm/it]! Anyone have something that'll still play them?

Try OpenMPT (MODPlug Tracker), which is now free software. I used it to arrange the Russian music for LOCKJAW [pineight.com].

Re:Let me be the first to say...

[Anonymous Coward]

So he sampled sounds, put them in a "sequencer" and created a pattern appealing to the ear.

Ahh, what a question. In my day we would have put it this way:
But is it art?

After all, the same could be said of Beethoven:

All he did was imagine sounds, write them in the right sequence on paper and create a pattern appealing to the ear.

...just another kraut doing this 200 years ago!

And, yes, you are missing something!

Re:Redundant

[Anonymous Coward]

O thank you, your comment is one of the funniest i have read on slashdot in quite some time, i needed a good laugh.

Re:Back in the day, we had .mod files

[Dan East]

Holy crap, I remember those! Anyone have something that'll still play them?

Of course. The format is still in widespread use, although typically more than 4 channels are employed these days (and they aren't hard-coded to left and right channels, as with the Amiga). There are many Pocket PC, Gameboy and Cellphone games that use tracker style playback (most completely MOD compatible) to save storage space.

MikMod [raphnet.net], fmod [fmod.org] and Hekkus [shlzero.com] are three different libraries currently used by game developers for mod playback. However since flash storage has increased dramatically over the last couple years, more and more developers are using mp3 format. So that may finally put an end to the use of MODs.

Dan East

F00bar2K

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't specify an OS, but for Windows Foobar 2000 [foobar2000.org] plays MODs and SIDs and a lot more.