Awesome Music

During their 28 years together, Daft Punk used lots of synthesizers and electronic equipment to make their music. But as far as we recall, tesla coils were not in their arsenal. Thankfully, we have Franzoli Electronics, who used his high-voltage noise-makers to play an awesome cover version of Around the World.

The Charlie Daniels Band track The Devil Went Down to Georgia is one of the greatest country rock jams of all time. Guitarist Eric Calderone pays tribute to the 1979 classic with a powerful heavy metal version of the song about a fiddle-playing Satan looking for some souls to steal… minus the fiddle.

As we’ve seen in recent videos, AI technology is getting very good at creating art. SolarProphet has been using the AI tech Midjourney to create images based on song lyrics and posted this great sequence of digital art based on the ELO classic Mr. Blue Sky. Not every image lines up perfectly, but it’s still really well done.

Irish artist Shane Gillen is a talented illustrator with a unique drawing style. But while he was creating an image of Vecna from Stranger Things 4, the creepy villain paid him a visit from the Upside Down. At least he didn’t snap Shane’s bones.

With songs like In Bloom, Polly, and About a Girl to their credit, Nirvana created some of the most memorable and influential music of the 1990s. Vermilion performed dozens of the band’s guitar riffs written by the late Kurt Cobain. They’re not the most complicated musical sequences, but damn they’re still brilliant.

(PG-13: Language) SUAT is known for performing his sets on a chest-mounted portable DJ rig, which lets him take and make music wherever he goes. Recently, he took to the skies for some tandem paragliding over the Austrian Alps. After a shaky start, he cranked out some party jams on his digital turntables.

The guys from Signal Snowboards teamed up with Ernest Packaging to create a custom electric guitar and drum kit made from cardboard. The Cardboard Sessions hands those instruments over to talented musicians to perform in impromptu jam sessions. Though they didn’t manage to make a cardboard brass section.

Over the years, we’ve heard lots of covers of tunes from the Super Mario Bros. games, but vocalist Kohl Kitzmiller went all-in with this multi-track a cappella medley of 40 tracks from throughout Nintendo’s most popular video game franchise. This man has got some serious vocal range.

After entertaining us with her covers of the DuckTales and Knight Rider themes, cellist Samara Ginsberg is back with something a bit more ominous. Her 8-part take on Bernard Herrmann’s Prelude from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho will definitely have you looking over your shoulder the next time you take a shower.

Musician Steve Cruickshank likes to take classic songs and change them up a bit by replacing the original harmonies with their mirror image. The resulting music is at once familiar and pleasant to the ear but also completely different from what we’re used to. Let’s kick the playlist off with his version of The Sound of Silence.

1980s and 1990s music fans will remember MTV’s 120 Minutes as the go-to show for the latest in alternative music. Thanks to fan Chris Reynolds, there’s now a YouTube playlist featuring the more than 2500 music videos that ran on the show between 1986 and 2003. We’re assuming he had a little help from this website.

Some songs lend themselves particularly well to being played on brass instruments. Musician Seb Skelly shows us just that with his wonderful arrangement and performance of the Tears for Fears track Everybody Wants to Rule the World, another track which reminds us just how great a decade the 1980s were for music.

Musician Jacob Collier is known for ending his concerts with singalongs. At the end of his performance at London’s O2 Academy, he turned his entire audience into a choir. He achieved this impressive result by dividing the audience into three sections, assigning them a note, and conducting them to raise and lower their pitch.

There’s no escape; I can’t wait. The exceptional electromechanical Device Orchestra is back to perform another pop music hit. This time, the band of electric toothbrushes, credit card terminals, and typewriters were joined by an Epilator hair remover which added a spinny new sound to the Britney Spears track Toxic.

Musician Demin Vladimir created this electromechanical rig plays an acoustic guitar. It has one set of actuators that hold the frets while others strum the strings. It’s not the most expressive instrument, but neither were vintage player pianos, and we still love those. He’s also built an accordion that plays the notes itself.

Musician Astrophysics takes songs from various genres, and slathers them with a thick layer of 1980s electronic sounds, then complements them with appropriately retro graphics. There’s lots of great stuff to enjoy on their YouTube channel, but this synthwave remix of Outkast’s 2003 hit Hey Ya! is our favorite (so far.)

Musician Luke Million has an awesome collection of vintage synthesizers – and he knows how to get the most out of them. In the first video clip, he performs a series of classic 1980s jams with spot-on sounds, then does the same for movies and TV shows in the second video. His recreation of Running Up That Hill is perfect too.

The Flight of the Bumblebee is one of the most notoriously fast pieces of music you can play. Despite performing just a 1-minute excerpt of the classic, Vinheteiro spent 36 hours editing this video to make it look like his keyboard is doing all of the work, and his finger is standing still.

John Hughes’ movies were a seminal part of 1980s youth culture, and so were their soundtracks. Life Moves Pretty Fast is a compilation of some of their best new wave and new romantic tracks. It’s available as a 74-track 4xCD with a bonus 7-inch and cassette, a 73-track 6xLP red vinyl, and a 25-track 2xLP. Drops 11.11.22.

Actually, the full title of musician Bill Wurtz’s latest tune is “i like to wear soft clothing (cause it makes me feel like i’m rough in comparison.)” The lyrics tell the tale of a man who finds comfort in his clothes, listens to soft music, walks his cat, and gets turned on by the news despite his television being broken.

Bassist Davie504 has played solos on a one-string bass, a 36-string bass, and a 69-string bass, so what’s the obvious next step? To perform a solo that uses every bass guitar in the store, naturally. Though he didn’t quick-swap all of the instruments, instead, he edited all 200 performances into a single track.

You can do all kinds of fun things with magnets, but we never thought of them as musical instruments. The guys from Magnet Tricks and Magnetic Games teamed up to create a series of sounds from magnetic vibrations, sampled them, then turned them into a synthwave track.

There’s no question that Jack White’s music features a heavy blues influence. Musician Justin Johnson took things to their logical conclusion by performing The White Stripes’ anthemic Seven Nation Army on a steel guitar with a slide, giving it that classic Mississippi Delta Blues sound. (Thanks, Jennifer!)