Awesome Music

Luca Stricagnoli is a master of acoustic guitar. His cover of the Arctic Monkeys’ track Do I Wanna Know? doesn’t involve as many guitar necks as some of his other arrangements, but it’s every bit as entertaining. Luca’s fingerstyle technique and guitar drumming add so much depth to his performance.

Musician Navzad Dabu provided late-night commuters in NYC’s Metropolitan Avenue / Grand Street subway station with a phenomenal private performance. His graveyard shift concert included back-to-back covers of a dozen Radiohead tracks. We would have stood there for the whole show and missed our train.

Musician Bob Strachan has the uncanny ability to sound just like Johnny Cash. But he doesn’t just use his talents to cover Johnny’s songs. In this case, he took Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise and turned it into a moody country song along the lines of Folsom Prison Blues.

DJ Fred again… is known for his energetic performances at dance clubs and arenas. In the more intimate setting of NPR’s offices, he demonstrates his true talents with a captivating and enveloping one-person concert that incorporates marimbas, a piano, looping, sequencing, sampled recordings, and his own live vocals.

Are you the next Diplo or Deadmau5? Learn to make electronic music and perform digital DJ sets with this expansive library of online training. Courses include electronic music theory, music production, and live performance. Another great deal from The Awesomer Shop.

Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik was written for a string ensemble. But violinist Roman Kim is an overachiever. His solo arrangement has him performing multiple parts on a single violin. He’s also done the same with Beethoven’s 5th. He says those prismatic glasses help him focus, but he can clearly play without them.

“Girls with blue whiskers tied up with noodles… These are a few of my favorite things.” Sound collage artists Negativland’s deranged edit of My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music dates back a decade but was too hilarious to pass up. Their take on There’s No Business Like Show Business is similarly bonkers.

The Internet: You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave. And with fantastic videos from the other side of the globe like this, why would you want to? Musician Moyun once again flexes her finger muscles with an awesome performance of the Eagles’ Hotel California on guzheng and conga drums.

Klangphonics previously showed us how it’s possible to make techno-sounding music without using a computer sequencer. We recently came across a few more of their creative live performances, including one that incorporates a pressure washer and another with a rubber duckie and an electric toothbrush.

Musician and actor Baikaju Nakamura is seriously talented. Not only is he a masterful bass player, but he also slaps his strings in style. In this short clip, he demonstrates his skills while buttoned up in the suit and tie of a salaryman. That’s not the only suit he owns, though.

Stressed out? Put on your headphones, press play on this video, and expand it to full screen. Project JDM created this digital music box that plays notes as its dots bounce back and forth along rainbow-colored arcs. As the hypnotic visual patterns evolve, so do the soothing sounds, panning from ear to ear.

Player pianos have been around since the 1890s. Modern models use electronics and servos, but vintage ones use a pedal-powered pneumatic system that forces air through holes in the music roll, actuating pushrods that move its hammers. Chris Plaola shows off an example of this Victorian-era engineering genius.

The electric bass guitar is one instrument that almost certainly wasn’t in Ludwig van Beethoven’s mind when he composed his music. Bassist Charles Berthoud proves that the composer’s melodies are so solid they work on any instrument. So click play and enjoy this funky bass arrangement of Bagatelle in A Minor, WoO 59, “Fur Elise.”

DJ Cummerbund is at it again, making musical remixes that should make no sense yet work brilliantly. This time, he took Paul Simon’s Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard and replaced Julio with Coolio. Funny enough, Simon’s original music video starts with a rap by Big Daddy Kane and Biz Markie.

Musician Hainbach got his hands on a 1930s recording device called a Kosmograph. This vintage dictation machine translates spoken vibrations through a tube directly onto a spinning celluloid disc. Its scratchy, low-fidelity recordings add an ethereal texture to music.

The One Hacker Band is a robotic musical group that plays electromechanically-controlled instruments. They recently added a new member – a head that can sing. Here’s the latest line-up of the band performing the Tears for Fears hit Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Need more? Enjoy a little Radiohead.

Get your day started right with this warm and enveloping arrangement of Fleetwood Mac’s 1987 hit track Everywhere performed by the always entertaining Seb Skelly on five brass instruments. Need more brass to wake up? Try a dose of Killer Queen.

There is a house in this beautywood; they call the rising sun. There I Ruined It proves that there’s no ruining Mr. Rogers with this wonderful, but woefully short mashup of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? with The Animals classic House of the Rising Sun. We wonder what he could do with It’s Such a Good Feeling.

Daft Punk is re-releasing its final album, Random Access Memories to celebrate its 10th anniversary. The new edition includes 35 minutes of previously unreleased recordings, including this 8-minute segment that takes us inside the creative process of the song Fragments of Time with vocalist and co-producer Todd Edwards.

Multitalented composer, singer, and songwriter Danny Elfman stopped by Hollywood’s famed Amoeba Music for their What’s In My Bag? interview series. While there, he picked out some of the albums and artists that most influenced him. You can really hear the connections between his selections and his music.

Inspired by that commercial where the guy plays drums on his Pringles cans, Eric and Tony G from EMCproductions made their own set of drums out of potato crisp (and Gatorade) cans. They replaced the plastic lids with balloons as drum heads and used their metal bottoms as “cymbals.”

Musician T-Pain isn’t the first person you’d think could pull off a Black Sabbath cover. But he proves us wrong with his incredibly compelling version of War Pigs that showcases his vocal abilities and emotional power. It’s one of eight songs on his 2023 album On Top of the Covers.

We’ve heard Radiohead’s In Rainbows played with the sounds of Super Mario 64. Now enjoy another classic alternative album played in Nintendo style. Something is Real put together this epic remake of Nirvana’s Nevermind using the 64-bit game console’s sounds. The chiptune version of In Bloom is something special.