Music video for an imaginary song

June 13, 2006 7:18 AM

Crumbs is a music video to a song built from splicing together instructional tapes for drums, bass & jazz guitar, using loops & selective editing to build a song out of the three distinct elements. Link goes to embedded quicktime.
posted by jonson (31 comments total)

This is really cool. If a bit on the long side. Very well executed.
posted by slimepuppy at 8:05 AM on June 13, 2006

That's quite well done.
posted by arcticwoman at 8:05 AM on June 13, 2006

Nice. A great concept well executed.
posted by joedan at 8:16 AM on June 13, 2006

[coralized]
posted by SteelyDuran at 8:28 AM on June 13, 2006

This was great! I don't think I've seen something quite like that before. Really cool little video.
posted by JackarypQQ at 8:32 AM on June 13, 2006

Just brilliant. This really made my day.
posted by wheat at 8:43 AM on June 13, 2006

Nice!
posted by TwoWordReview at 8:46 AM on June 13, 2006

That was really excellent.
posted by Bugbread at 8:50 AM on June 13, 2006

I haven't seen a high quality mullet like that in a long time. Rock on, Jonson.
posted by mullingitover at 9:05 AM on June 13, 2006

All I could think about was what hell that must have been to edit.
With an insane render time.
Cool, though.
posted by chococat at 9:09 AM on June 13, 2006

I had no idea the Mr. Spock was such a good drum player, or that he had a gig moonlighting as The Bizzaro Buddy Rich.
posted by humboldt32 at 9:16 AM on June 13, 2006

The mullet bassist has a website.
posted by smackfu at 10:07 AM on June 13, 2006

The drumist had a really good voice for mood of the piece, but I would have liked to some more mullet man quotes and flavor.
posted by bigmusic at 10:15 AM on June 13, 2006

Really well done. Any guesses how it was made? IE, do you mix the sound first, then edit the video to it - that sounds really hard to do this precisely, though digital audio mix tools might export timestamps for all your cuts, which would help I guess. Or is there video editing software flexible enough to edit it all together?

The drummer is pretty famous, but I'm pretty sure I'd remember the name Beaver Felton (the bassist) if I'd heard it before. To see the headband clan united with the mullet clan in one illustrious personage brought me joy. Plus he reminded me of the Ask A Ninja guy.
posted by freebird at 10:15 AM on June 13, 2006

reminds me of this video from Dosh of Anticon...
posted by fake at 10:24 AM on June 13, 2006 [1 favorite]

This is basic plucking, or, the Staunton Lick. Hold down the chord of C, pluck a fretted bass string with the thumb of the right hand. Then pluck the third, second and first strings altogether with the first, second and third fingers of the right hand.
posted by kcds at 10:56 AM on June 13, 2006

Neat video. I would asume all the editting was done at the same time. In other words, if you import video into an editting program, the audio and video are linked (naturally) and thus can simply be cut and pasted to create the loops and and rhythms. Add some transitions etc. and you have a nice looking video.

I don't know when this video was done, but DJ Shadow did a very, very similar thing live at the Roseland Ballroom in New York during his tour for The Private Press in, I think, 2003. I believe he did it by attaching video samples to the triggers on an Akai MPC. It was truly effing amazing.
posted by RobertFrost at 11:13 AM on June 13, 2006

That was pretty damn neat. Thanks!
posted by LeeJay at 11:45 AM on June 13, 2006

A sort of visual Dj Shadow track.
posted by shoepal at 11:48 AM on June 13, 2006

Coldcut has been doing this kind of stuff for years now, and it never fails to delight! Their live show is still full of it, here's a video from 1998
posted by aubilenon at 12:01 PM on June 13, 2006

Gee, that didn't work at all. Lemme try that again:

Here is a 1998 video of theirs that is the same trick with different samples.
posted by aubilenon at 12:02 PM on June 13, 2006

crap, this time I did the wrong video. TIMBER is the video I was talking about.

:( Sorry about the mess guys!
posted by aubilenon at 12:03 PM on June 13, 2006 [1 favorite]

neat. thanks for this.
posted by shmegegge at 2:04 PM on June 13, 2006

oh, and thanks for that dosh video. hot damn. I love the anticon guys, but I'd never seen that video before. hot shit.
posted by shmegegge at 2:08 PM on June 13, 2006

Aubilenon,

Thanks. Never realized the sounds in that song were timber related.
posted by Bugbread at 2:15 PM on June 13, 2006

Coldcut doing their crazy vinyl/video thing.
posted by influx at 2:26 PM on June 13, 2006

The Avalanches did kind of the same thing with reenactments of the samples' production in the video for Frontier Psychiatry.
posted by moift at 2:41 PM on June 13, 2006

So did Funki Procini
posted by ori at 6:31 PM on June 13, 2006

I'm surprised no one mentioned the amazing jazz players on that video:

Louie Bellson [Luigi Paulino Alfredo Francesco Antonion Balassoni]

Emily Remler

Both of which have passed on, but their recordings are well worth listening to.
posted by milnak at 10:55 PM on June 13, 2006

All of Hexstatic's tracks are made this way. In fact, they did Timber with Coldcut.

Their Ninja Tune is a marvel, largely because of the unbelievably bad z-movie ninja clips. I've never been able to get over the "Ninja" written prominently on the Ninja master's headbands...
posted by Jon Mitchell at 2:17 AM on June 14, 2006

I noticed Bellson, Milnak, and mentioned it in passing. But not with a cool link to his full (and AWESOME) name, and had no idea who Emily Remler was - thank you so much!
posted by freebird at 9:50 AM on June 14, 2006