Awesome Music

“Generally, Daft Punk likes to have A-Major good time.” Do you want to make music just like the robots? Then watch Imaginary Ambition’s lighthearted video tutorial, and if you work harder, better, faster, stronger, and you’re doing it right, you might just get lucky!

Musician Marcos Kaiser likes to arrange versions of classic movie, cartoon, and video game theme songs to play using fingerstyle guitar technique. The Spongebob theme is awesome, but we also enjoyed his Terminator, Star Trek, and Flintstones themes too.

WIRED introduces us to Sean Lomax, International Grand Champion whistler. With years of practice honing his unique skill, Sean has delighted audiences around the world. Along the way, he provides some tricks and techniques to improve your own whistling abilities. One of his secrets? Eat a peach before you pucker up and blow.

As one commenter on YouTube put it, The Floppotron is “the most consistently good performer I’ve ever heard.” We suppose there’s something to be said for a band that’s controlled by computer. So sit back and enjoy their pristine electro-noise version of the ABBA classic Mamma Mia.

Ukraine accordion duo Vasyl and Viktor Kravchuk turn in an impressive cover of John Williams’ Imperial March from the Star Wars saga. We can imagine Darth Vader making a typically grand entrance to the music, while an army of stormtroopers dance the polka.

YouTube has some pretty strict rules about including copyrighted music in videos, but if the snippets are short enough, you can get away with it. To see what he could get away with, remix artist Eclectic Method decided to make a whole new song entirely out of tiny bits of Jimi Hendrix tracks.

Director Dimitri Basil’s music video for the Joywave track Obsession is both a tribute to and a loving parody of vintage movie title sequences, featuring an array of convincing, but fake opening credits for spaghetti westerns, exploitation flicks, B-movies, and much more. Quentin Tarantino would be proud.

The hurdy gurdy is already an unusual instrument, with its keyboard, strings, and cranked bow-wheel that rotates across them from underneath. But for the track Break Your Crank on his album Visions, musician Guilhem Desq took his hurdy gurdy to the next level, adding electronic distortion, and giving it a rock edge.

YouTube channel EveryOtherBeat has a single gimmick – removing every other beat from popular songs. Sometimes it works, and other times it’s downright strange. But in the case of Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal, the result is simply magical.

Vibes discreetly slip into your ears and lower the volume at a concert or event, while also enhancing sound clarity. You won’t look like a dork while they’re in, but you will be protecting your hearing from all of those decibels. Grab a 2-pack today in The Awesomer Shop.

Do you think you could recognize familiar video game theme songs played backwards? Musician Stemage’s digital album Retrogression: Vol 1, features rock versions of classic themes, played in reverse. Songs like Sorb Oriam Repus (Super Mario Bros), and Sirtet (Tetris) sound surprisingly good, and vaguely familiar.

The fantastically talented Luca Stricagnoli performs a beautifully multilayered fingerstyle cover of Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise, offering up a proper nod to Stevie Wonder’s original Pastime Paradise. The percussive accessory Luca is wearing on his thumb is the Guitar Ring.

Tenacious D documents their off-stage antics on tour in Bogota, Colombia, as they attempt to stowaway on a plane; challenge Foo Fighters and Weezer in anexplosive game of Tejo, Colombia’s national drunken sport; and the heavy heavy-metalheads demonstrate the workout that keeps them “obese instead of morbidly obese.”

The 8-Bit Big Band offers up another phenomenal cover of a classic video game tune. This time, they take on block-stacking fun of Tetris, adding a bit of swing and a cinematic flair to the Soviet-era sounds of the theme song.

Caio Rossi of R3DUX Studios cut together this great mashup of clips from The Simpsons, set to Pink Floyd’s 1979 classic Comfortably Numb. The Portuguese subtitles somehow make it feel even more like a depressing foreign film. His Simpsons x Futurama version of the band’s Time is also worth a watch.

Every frame’s a painting in director Elí’s music video for Icelandic band Vök. This beautiful work of animated art is the perfect complement to the smooth mix of powerful lyrics, danceable beats, and an infectious chorus. Kudos to the entire animation team for this one.

Digital musician Paweł Zadrożniak continues to step up his stepper motor game, this time turning his Floppotron orchestra loose on Michael Jackson’s 1982 mega-hit Beat It. We love how he used the hard drive heads to do those clicky rhythms at the beginning.

Filmmaker and musician Tyler Russo presents a depressing reminder of the more mundane and repetitive nature of life in this vocoder saturated video clip he created for Adult Swim. If nothing else, it’ll provide some motivation for you to change things up. Listen to the full song here.

It’s been a while since we checked in with dancer Marquese Scott, and it’s good to know that he’s still got all the moves. In this clip for Ed “Gusto” Greene & Scott Trent’s modern disco track, his crisp and clean choreography is further accentuated with the addition of colorful moving lines. Download the track here.

Go back to the 80s with musician Mario Mathy, aka Belgium’s “King of Synths,” as he jams out on his ridiculous rack of keyboards which would require Doc Ock’s tentacles to play at the same time. From his white outfit, to his pink headband, to his Keytar, the video is a joy to watch.

Another week, another awesome retro remix, courtesy of The Hood Internet. As we move into 1983, the hair bands are on the rise, hip hop takes hold, and pop is on a roll with Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Billy Joel, and Journey all blowing up the charts.

We can feel it all over. One of the funkiest songs ever written has got to be Stevie Wonder’s Sir Duke. Recently, the members of the the artist collective known as Apartment Sessions turned in a rousing, appropriately brass-heavy performance of the track on NYC’s J Train, lead off by the soulful lead vocals of Aneesa Folds.

(PG-13: Language) Keep together, stay sharp, and follow me. The undead and Halloween go together like peanut butter and chocolate. So to celebrate the holiday, Eclectic Method did up a little mix of sounds from the Edgar Wright zombie comedy classic.