I mean, really awesome.
As awesome as Ted Nugent deflecting bullets with sick-nasty guitar licks?
Darn it, I’m going to be watching these videos all afternoon now.
That was pretty great.
Ahem.
My rebuttal? Old school ragtime.
Tom Brier is a genius. He sight reads simple melody lines and improvises around them. That song in the video? His first time seeing those charts or even hearing that song. Be sure to watch the whole thing as he gives it a second shot and does ridiculous things. I’ve been playing piano for over 20 years and his ability just baffles me.
Even if you don’t like ragtime, spend some time looking up Tom Brier videos. He’s freaking amazing.
Additional viewing material: http://youtu.be/wmd1NiVYjEA
And a classic, with some goofiness: http://youtu.be/9DyHFonnu2E
Ok, and one more from Tom Brier, as it shows a close up of the sheet music.
Any of you who read sheet music know that what he’s playing is being VASTLY improvised on the spot. By sight.
Ridiculous.
That’s partially true. If you keep looking at youtube, a lot of these pieces you can see “people have brought” to him before, he’s got much rougher versions of nearly every song on there. While he’s still immensely skilled at playing and improvising, I doubt he’s sight-reading 100% on any of them. Not that it can’t be done, I just think it’s suspicious that he’s brought the same obscure video game sheet music to sight read every time he’s at a public piano with a video camera present. Mario? Sure. 3 different Mario songs? Maybe, ok. Ghosts n’ Goblins? Unlikely. Still, I’d like to see Root Beer Rag out of him, the only ones on youtube are super sloppy.
I really loved the Animaniacs video. That has got to be one of the best cartoons in the history of cartoons and that theme song on piano was just awesome.
Think what you want, but I happen to know he is 100% sight-reading on them. He’s sight reading plus improvising over them. The Ghosts & Goblins one was the first one I saw from him, actually. Also, in terms of sloppiness, he’s playing on an out of tune piano, sight-reading, in a style in which it’s more important to keep the pace going, rather than worry about if he misses a note here or there, and keep the pace going he does! Look at some of his original works - they’re much cleaner.
The only way you could know that is if you, in person, handed him sheet music that you knew as a fact he’d never seen before, and the only way to be 100% certain on that is if you wrote the music yourself. I understand the desire to see the best in things, and even if it’s not fully sight-read, it’s still damn impressive, but the number of different videos of him “blindly” reading the same songs implies it’s more than a little bit staged.
I also didn’t say he was sloppy, I said all the non-actually-Billy-Joel Root Beer Rags are sloppy, and I’d like to see him do it. For instance:
This is the exact opposite of awesome: Lou Reed & Metallica’s “The View”