Today, I have a very special treat for you. It is literally my personal favorite music video of all time.
I don't want to give away too many spoilers. So, let's begin!
Do you think cars are musical?
After all, they do make lots of different noises sounds.
And did you know that there are actual sound engineers involved in car development?
"Why?", you might ask. Well, their job is literally to make sure that every sound which a car makes, is audibly pleasing to the human ear. The sound design is not limited to the noises which the engine or the exhaust system make. Pretty much every sound a car makes is carefully designed. One example is the sound the car doors make when they are being closed. Another example is the sound that the indicators make to signal to the driver that they are activated.
So maybe a car could be used as a musical instrument, right?
-- Right. But that is for next time. Today, I have got something for you that is even crazier:
How about using a car to play a musical instrument?
That sounds crazy, right?
-- Right.
You cannot imagine what that would look like?
-- Neither could I -- before I watched this video:
After watching this video, you probably think:
Some poor video editor must have had to do a lot of video editing and CGI (computer generated imagery) to make this video look like someone built a giant track. A giant track with hundreds of musical instruments. A track big enough to race a car within. Nobody is that crazy to actually build something like that in real life, right?
Oh boy, how wrong you would be -- if you thought that.
Everything you saw in this video -- was real!
Let me say that again:
Everything you saw
was real.
Everything you heard -- was actually recorded by the microphones which you saw in the video.
That's even crazier. The car literally played a giant instrument and recorded itself doing that.
I can completely understand if you feel the desire to watch the video again. Ok, go ahead. Watch it again. I will wait here for your return.
I have to admit that I probably watched the video more than 100 times myself. And the video never fails to amaze me. There is so much to discover...
The band actually published
an entire mini-series of making-of-videos
for this specific music video. I can only imagine how much time the band and their helpers spent on filming, but especially on preparing.
Sometimes it feels like the band OK Go only writes songs as an excuse to produce insanely elaborate music videos.
If you are interested in watching the making-of mini-series, I have added all three videos -- one after the other -- so that you don't have to go hunting for them. Each video is about two minutes long, so the time commitment to watching all of them is a stomachable six minutes. If you have only two minutes, I recommend watchimg the first one only. It covers the most important information.
In the first making-of-video, the singer explains that the band was looking for all kinds of material that could be used for generating sounds. All these items were to be arranged in a race track. The track can be regarded as a musical instrument -- that can be played by a car.
In addition to building the track, the car had to be modified so that the band was able to control the sound creation.
And the singer had to take stunt driving lessons. Quite a big commitment for less than 4 minutes of video material.
The second video explains that identifying material which could be used for self-made instruments took a long time. Subsequently, the planning of how the instruments needed to be arranged took a long time, as well:
The third video reveals that the song existed before the idea to build a giant track and race a car in it to create the sound. What?! That is even crazier to take an existing song and build the track to match the song -- rather than doing it the other way around.
Each instrument had to be tuned to the correct note and had to be positioned at the right location taking into account the speed of the car, so that the right note is played at the right time.
It is interesting to know that all strings of each guitar and all keys of each piano were tuned to the exact same note -- so that it doesn't matter which key or which string the car hits while driving by. That makes sense as one musical instrument corresponds to one note in the song -- and therefore, is only played once.
The teaser video for the actual music video contains some interesting information as well. The track required
288 guitars
55 pianos
1157 self-made music instruments
Wow!
To summarize:
I promised you absolute craziness in this article. I hope that you agree that I delivered on my promise. And I hope that you stay tuned for the next installment of my Internet Gold series.
Did you like the song? Did you like the video?
There is actually a studio version which was recorded with regular musical instruments rather than with a car. Which version do you prefer?
Let me know the answers to any or all of these questions in the comments!
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