Awesome Piano

Musician Scott Bradlee has proven that just about anything can be a Ragtime song with the proper arrangement. His 1920s cover version of Radiohead’s 1997 classic Paranoid Android sounds fantastic, and we can totally imagine it being played in the speakeasy in Westworld’s Golden Age.

Pianos have been an important part of the musical landscape for hundreds of years. To celebrate this popular instrument, musician David Bennett put together this excellent 17-minute chronological medley of some of the most melodic piano intros ever. See how many you can name with your eyes closed. No peeking.

Musician Peter Bence has wowed us before with his masterful melding of piano playing and digital looping. Here, he shows how it’s possible to play a complicated piece of music that would normally require four hands, but his high-tech Steinway player piano takes over half of the keyboard once he gets going.

Pianist Gamazda is back with another ear-pleasing performance. This time, she took on House of the Rising Sun, adding an abundance of flourishes to the 1964 Animals classic. Her elaborate arrangement brings new drama and depth to the track.

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.

The 1974 Lynyrd Skynrd track Sweet Home Alabama is a southern rock classic. Pianist Alexandra Kuznetsova aka Gamazda may hail from halfway around the globe, but her energetic piano cover of the track and down-home setting seems like she could be performing in a Birmingham backyard.

Whenever we go to a mall, the music they’re playing is some kind of canned garbage designed to make you spend more money. But these shoppers were treated to something way better – pianist Glaucio Cristelo, who played an epic cover of Foo Fighters’ Everlong. His channel is filled with many more great performances.

Musician Woody Williams aka Funky Geezer shows us how he warms up his stiff fingers on the piano before a performance by stretching them out and letting them fly across the keyboard. Be sure to poke around his TikTok channel for gems like Ain’t No Sunshine and Because I Got High, and the always popular Oh No!

Pianist Vinheteiro demonstrates just how important it is to play music on period-correct instruments. Listen, and you’ll be transported to an old-timey saloon with this medley of Scott Joplin ragtime tunes, performed on a Barthol & Berlin upright piano that dates back to 1915.

Musician Lorenzo Vaccaro is very good at playing the piano. In this TikTok clip he shows just how fast he can make his fingers fly across the keyboard with an insane 152 BPM performance of the supposedly impossible MIDI track Rush E. His Maple Leaf Rag is equally impressive.

Mary Had a Little Lamb is one of the easiest songs to play on the piano. But can you play it while lying in bed with your keyboard on the other side of the room? Korean YouTuber 이름미정 has figured out a method that involves taping lengths of string to the keys, then yanking downward on them from across their bedroom.

It used to be if you wanted to play piano, you needed an actual piano. But with modern synthesizers, software, and controllers, you can play pretty much any instrument without having one. Composerily proves that point with a performance of Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca on an MIDI Fighter 64 8×8 controller.

While they might not use all seven octaves, piano arrangements are generally designed for an 88-key piano. Musician Nahre Sol wanted to see what would happen if she condensed famous songs down to a single octave and played them on a toy piano. She then proceeded to rank them based on quality and effectiveness.

Musician Nahre Sol performs a unique classical piano arrangement of The 12 Days of Christmas in which each verse gets progressively more and more modern. The performance starts out with the early 18th-century sounds of J.S. Bach and ends with an abstract 21st-century MIDI composition.

Obey your master and crank your speakers up to 11 for Gamazda’s latest performance, an absolutely killer grand piano arrangement of Metallica’s Master of Puppets. We never thought we’d bang our heads to a piano concert, but we’re making an exception here.

When is a bass guitar not a bass guitar? When it’s a piano, of course. Musician Charles Berthoud demonstrates what that sounds like with a fingerstyle bass rendition of Scott Joplin’s ragtime classic The Entertainer, incorporating some insane flourishes.

The 1980s were a good decade for music, giving us bands like Tears for Fears, The Human League, and Soft Cell along the way. To celebrate his love for the new wave, pop, and rock music from the decade of big hair and Rubik’s Cubes, stone-faced pianist Vinheteiro offers up a 5-minute concert of some of the era’s best tracks.

Eshan Denipitiya celebrates his love for the music of Queen with a virtuosic medley of tunes performed on a Yamaha grand piano. Watch and listen as his fingers fly across the ivories with classical arrangements of We Will Rock You, Bohemian Rhapsody, and We Are the Champions.

Vocalist and bassist Casey Abrams teamed up with pianist and arranger Scott Bradlee for a great jazz-swing cover version of Lionel Ritchie’s 1983 ballad Hello. We imagine that the blind woman in the original music video might have had a hard time sculpting Casey’s impressive beard.

Wicked Lasers shows off a neat use for its LaserCube programmable laser projector and LaserOS software. By syncing up the laser’s beams with MIDI keypresses they’re able to project colorful lights onto the keys of a synthesizer, synced perfectly with the music being performed.

A few years back a video made the rounds of a window air conditioner that produced a sort of funky jazz rhythm. Musician Sam Ross thought the clip could use some accompaniment, so he created the perfect piano melody to go along with the clickity-clack sounds of the malfunctioning unit.

Ever since The Wellerman collaboration blew up on TikTok, we’ve heard a number of covers of the folk sea shanty. Pianist and arranger Scott Bradlee put his spin on the tune by turning it into an old-timey ragtime song. Bonus points for sliding in the Gorillaz and Darude references.

We always get chills when we hear the The Flaming Lips track Do You Realize?? Musician Viktoriya “Vika” Yermolyeva performs her original piano arrangement of the song that manages to capture the emotion and weight of the original, an impressive feat without Wayne Coyne’s lyrics and vocals.