Awesome Music

Back in the 1980s, there were few bands to achieve the popularity of Depeche Mode. Despite their success, their melancholy alt-rock was at times quite formulaic. Musician Desmond Doom breaks down the basics so you can create your own Personal Jesus in under a minute.

Guitar strings are usually made from nylon or metal wire. Musician Bernth wanted to hear what an acoustic guitar might sound like when its strings are replaced with rubber bands. The low-frequencies sound more like a bass than a guitar, but they worked well enough that he recorded a song called Elasticity with them.

Richard Rey aka Office Drummer, has a unique skill. He accepts song requests, then live streams an improvised drum beat regardless of whether or not he’s played it before. His performances include Beastie Boys’ Intergalactic, Outkast’s Hey Ya!, Green Day’s Brain Stew/Jaded, and MGMT’s Electric Feel.

Look Mum No Computer is known for building some crazy electronic music makers. He’s also a master of wiring and programming modular synthesizers. He put together this fantastic arrangement of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons that’s every bit as good as Wendy Carlos’ analog synth classic Switched-On Bach.

Musician Todd Barriage specializes in pop-punk and emo remakes of popular songs. Among his covers is this version of Ricky Martin’s mega-hit Livin La Vida Loca as if it was also the Sum 41 track Still Waiting. He nailed the sound, but Todd’s look is more “Weird Al” Yankovic than Deryck Whibley.

We recently went down the rabbit hole, creating a playlist of original versions of hit songs. SecondHandSongs helped us find lots of obscure originals and also revealed tons of unique covers we never knew existed. Like, did you know that this guy recorded Girls Just Wanna Have Fun four years before Cindy Lauper did?

Musician David Bennett performs accurate recreations of classic songs. After impressing us with his version of A Day in the Life, he teamed up with vocalist Guy Bangham to produce a spot-on version of The Doors’ Riders on the Storm. The Rhodes V8 virtual keyboard helped recreate the sound of Ray Manzarek’s keyboard.

Time and space travel is a common theme between Doctor Who and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, so it makes sense that the Time Lords might know the song Time Warp. Doctor Who Sings edited together footage which makes it look like the Doctors and other characters were singing along with Riff-Raff, Magenta, and Columbia.

Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was beloved for his incredible vocal talents and songwriting skills. Now Andre Antunes has taken part of his performance of Akhiyan Udeek Diyan and blessed it with a heavy metal companion track. The result is a sublime mix of two very different cultures. Turn on captions for the translated lyrics.

Good morning! It’s time for your wake-up call, and there’s no better sound to get you up and going than the screaming vocals of metalhead Leo Moracchioli. This time, he sharpened the edge of the Simple Minds track Don’t You (Forget About Me</a>. Rain keeps falling, down, down, down works really well as a metal lyric.

As part of his “Should I/Can I Cover It?” series, musician Thomas Benjamin Wild Esq. performs a track that clearly wasn’t designed to be played on a tiny 4-string ukulele. But the old-fashioned musician gave it the old college try regardless. If Thomas looks familiar, it’s because he has No More F**ks to Give.

If you think that a guitar is just meant for making music, you’re wrong. Musician Cameron Cooper shows us how to get some crazy and unusual sounds out of an electric guitar, including a horse’s whinny, a church bell, police sirens, and some creepy evil clown sounds.

The Melodicka Bros. are really good at reinventing popular songs. This time out, they took the high-energy Blur track Song 2 and reworked it with a 3/4 time signature. The result is a very different, yet equally entertaining track, alternatively known as “Song 3.”

There’s no question that David Bowie had a distinctive singing voice. Musician Joshua Woo has perfected his impression of the Thin White Duke, as he demonstrates in this Bowie-esque performance of Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence. His version of Stayin’ Alive by Oasis is spot-on too.

Steven Blake of the band Animal Sun has figured out that if you listen closely to some popular songs, the vocals sound like they were sung by another famous person. By showing a photo of the person, your brain will be totally convinced that it’s true. Find more examples on their Instagram reels page.

NEBO’s brightest Davinci flashlight yet kicks out an astounding 18,000 lumens in turbo mode, lighting your way up to a distance of 830 feet. It’ll run for up to two hours in 10,000-lumen mode and 12 hours in 800-lumen mode and has an adjustable 2x zoom lens. It’s IP67-rated waterproof and has an intuitive magnetic control dial.