What in the Wizarding World is this nonsense!?
Because it’s Thanksgiving Break, I have a little more free time than normal. Holiday breaks are the best! While perusing Reddit, like the winner that I am, I came across this video:
It’s YouTube rockstar Lara6683 taking requests to play on her keyboard. What was supposed to be 5 minutes of playing “like 5-10 seconds of all of them” turned into an HOUR AND TWENTY FIVE MINUTES of non-stop request taking/piano playing. She started strong with “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” and hit everything from “Mad World” to “Phantom of the Opera” and everything in between. Even a nice lil’ Rickroll!
Now, I don’t know what sort of Black Magic/Voo Doo crap this chick is into, but it’s not human! There’s no way she actually knew all of those, so her musical talents are just off the charts incredible.
Redditor non_troppo summed it up pretty well:
Nope, this is impressive regardless of which way you look at it. There is subtlety here that most people won’t pick up on, even people that play the piano.
- 1st layer of impressive: she knows all of these melodies and can play them from memory at the drop of a hat
- 2nd layer of impressive: it’s very likely that she’s never explicitly played many/most of these on the piano before, but she Solfeges like a fucking champ and can easily translate a melodic memory to her fingers
- 3rd layer of impressive: she’s able to use harmonic knowledge to come up with chords on the fly, again for the majority of these melodies she’s likely never seen sheet music so she’s taking the arpeggiations present in the melody and just figuring out chords according to harmonic conventions, which own it’s own isn’t terribly impressive buuuuuuut~
- 4th layer of impressive: her left hand isn’t just doing block chords, she’s inverting and arpeggiating chords to make the bits more interesting
- 5th layer of impressive: she is transposing these melodies, on-the-fly, into keys that make them more suitable for the arrangement.
So to summarize – plenty of people can play the Green Hill Zone theme and the Forrest Gump theme on the piano, but can they:
- Perform the melody from solfege memory without necessarily having ever seen those notes on a page
- Harmonize those melodies without never necessarily having seen the chord symbols or sheet music
- Transpose those melodies into keys that compliment one another, so you aren’t flying across the circle of fifths with every transition and creating a very jarring patchwork
- Do it over and over again with dozens of melodies for a continuous 90 minutes
This just absolutely blew my mind. It was a blast listening to each song, I was pretty proud at the fact that I knew the majority of them. I’m guessing the ones I didn’t get were video game related.
Either way, this video totally made my evening. Toss it on with some friends and family, see if you can guess what she’s playing. Obviously hide the screen, unless you’re a bunch of damn cheaters! Adding a little alcohol would make it so extra (is that what the kids are saying these days?). What are the holidays if alcohol isn’t involved?
Have a merry Thanksgiving, y’all! Gobble friggin’ gobble!
