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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.'"
This reminds me of the tracker modules that saw a lot of use on the Amiga.
http://outcampaign.org/
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.
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.
You know what they say about opinions. They're all fabulous!
Use the Video Downloader firefox plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2390/
Then use VLC http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ to play the resulting file.
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
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.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
He has plenty of good videos - another of his, Hyperactive uses the same technique to a similar effect.
Try OpenMPT (MODPlug Tracker), which is now free software. I used it to arrange the Russian music for LOCKJAW.