The Piano Guys

The Piano Guys, Jon Schmidt and Steven Sharp Nelson, have gone viral on YouTube this past week with their Cello Wars video. Their story is impressive, a chance meeting of a pianist and a video producer in small town Utah turns into an inspired collaboration of 5 musicians and videographers and a worldwide audience. The videos tend toward tongue-in-cheek kitsch and are enormously successful at drawing people into their musical world.

Jon and Steven are crowdsourcing their projects from The Piano Guys Founder’s page. They also have a YouTube channel about the making of some of the more elaborate videos, The Piano Guys Behind the Scenes.

via The Collaborative Pianist

Walking The Muse

Walking the Muse is a collection of short interviews with UK musicians and composers about their early musical inspirations. As a collection, they describe many routes to a life in music.

Two of my favorite Scottish musicians are included. Karine Polwart, who is as eloquent in prose as in lyrics, discusses her first adventures in singing. Harpist Corrina Hewat describes a rebellious start, not surprising considering her trailblazing career that includes a wonderfully unique collaboration with her jazz pianist husband, David Milligan.

Audio for Games Meetup

I finally made it to a meeting of the audio for games group here in Copenhagen. Their official title is Audio SIG for the IGDA (International Game Developers Association). Unofficially, they are the sub-culture of people working on the audio side of the games industry here. It’s an open and friendly group, a mix of engineers and musicians, that gets together to share problems and experiences over a few beers.

There was a talk by Dynascore, an early stage startup developing middleware for manipulating audio clips for interactive applications. I think the real problem is in tools to help composers produce music in short clips in the first place. If Dynascore can move in this direction then they’ll have something useful.

Kudos to Nevin Eronde for organizing the group and the meetings. To keep up to date on the IGDA Bar meetings sign up to the IGDA.dk Facebook page.