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Impractical Musical Instrument Skills
- 158 statements
- 29 feature instances
- 13 referencing feature instances
| Impractical Musical Instrument Skills | type |
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| Impractical Musical Instrument Skills | label |
Impractical Musical Instrument Skills | |
| Impractical Musical Instrument Skills | page |
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| Impractical Musical Instrument Skills | comment |
Musicians who want to gain some fame or notoriety for their skills have a few options on how to go about it. Some spend a lifetime perfecting their skills at their preferred instrument, becoming among the best and most respected players in the world. Others take the path of songcraft, writing tunes that capture the hearts of listeners for decades to come...or at least long enough to be the summer's hot fad. Still others obtain fame through unusual circumstances, such as being a very young child prodigy at their chosen instrument. Others, however, take the route of showmanship. They may or may not be supremely skilled musicians or songwriters, but they're a lot of fun to watch. Some become great performers via their charisma and stage presence, others through their ability to connect to the audience, and others through coming up with bizarre, creative, entertaining ways of playing their instruments. The latter category is our focus here. Impractical Musical Instrument Skills describes nonstandard methods of playing an instrument in order to entertain the audience. This generally translates to various Cool, but Inefficient ways of playing, such as holding an instrument in an unusual manner or using it to produce sound in unusual ways. While the sky's the limit with this trope, some of its more common manifestations include playing guitar behind one's head (or with their teeth) and playing piano with body parts other than one's hands. Naturally, Impractical Instrument Playing Skills very rarely constitute a musician's primary method of performing; they're awkward and impractical by nature and actually make the instrument more difficult to play. But that's also the point — this is less about music and more about showmanship. It wouldn't be memorable or particularly entertaining if it was common or easy to do. May overlap with Artistic License – Music if the playing techniques aren't actually possible in real life. See also Everything Is an Instrument for the use of non-musical items in making music. |
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| Impractical Musical Instrument Skills / int_1f72b18d | type |
Impractical Musical Instrument Skills | |
| Impractical Musical Instrument Skills / int_1f72b18d | comment |
In more than one Tom and Jerry short in which Tom played the piano ("Johann Mouse", "The Cat Concerto"), he did it with his toes while using hands to try to catch Jerry. In "The Cat Concerto", Jerry also played the piano by plucking out two of the hammers and playing directly on the strings. | |
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| Impractical Musical Instrument Skills / int_261c8d3f | comment |
In The Simpsons version of Amadeus, Mozart (Bart) plays the harpsichord with his feet and his butt. Not at the same time. | |
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| Impractical Musical Instrument Skills / int_2bbcacd9 | comment |
Looney Tunes: in "Rhapsody Rabbit" Bugs Bunny plays the piano by literally hopping on the keys (as a rabbit, you really don't see him doing that much). He also plays it like a typewriter, complete with a margin bell and hand-returned carriage. Still another scene has him picking up piano keys and then dropping them back into place, producing music all along. In the short "What's Up Doc", a toddler Bugs plays a concert-quality piece on a toy piano; shades of Schroeder. |
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Impractical Musical Instrument Skills | |
| Impractical Musical Instrument Skills / int_30a5ebfd | comment |
Tayuya in Naruto plays her flute to control three giants she invokes (they move according to the position of her fingers). How she can very precisely control these three bodies separately to track her opponent, and still play a coherent melody is a wonder. | |
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| Impractical Musical Instrument Skills / int_3f972c78 | comment |
Rahsaan Roland Kirk played two saxophones at once, as well as practically every other brass or wind instrument individually. Kirk occasionally played a saxophone and a flute simultaneously. He played the sax with his mouth and the flute with his nose. |
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| Impractical Musical Instrument Skills / int_468bebb0 | comment |
Discworld: A line from Nanny Ogg has it that all her family are musical in some way. Including "her Shawn" being able to fart Lancre's national anthem. | |
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| Impractical Musical Instrument Skills / int_47f0eac3 | comment |
In Metalocalypse, Murderface has been known to use his penis to play bass. | |
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Walk Off the Earth became famous by doing this. Their most famous video includes the five members of the band singing and playing Somebody I Used To Know by Gotye - all on a single guitar. This includes one member tapping out percussion on the guitar's body, three playing on the strings, and one plucking and strumming the parts of the string on the guitar's head, between the nut and the tuning pegs. | |
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| Impractical Musical Instrument Skills / int_5d354f8 | comment |
In Red Dwarf, Lister is a terrible guitarist but thinks he's another Jimi Hendrix. Starbug gets stuck in an area inhabited by mind-reading GELFs, and Lister has to go out to make repairs. The crew get two Listers back, and not knowing which is which, test them both on aspects of Lister's life and personality. They give one of the Listers his guitar and tell him to play. He plays brilliantly, and they shoot him. Kryten explains that the GELF played that well because Lister thinks he plays that well. (Incidentally, Phil Manzanera of Roxy Music did the actual guitar playing.) | |
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The genius Perky visits in "The Chamber Of Genius" can play piano with his feet (while wearing shoes!) and simultaneously play violin with his hands. | |
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Impractical Musical Instrument Skills | |
| Impractical Musical Instrument Skills / int_60e46d26 | comment |
At Schmidteinander, Herbert Feuerstein (former chief editor of the German MAD magazine) sometimes played a recorder by putting the mouthpiece against a nostril. | |
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Impractical Musical Instrument Skills | |
| Impractical Musical Instrument Skills / int_64f322ce | comment |
In Great Balls of Fire!, a Jerry Lee Lewis biopic, the singer-pianist is depicted playing chords with his feet for a dramatic effect. | |
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Volga-Volga: A completely random moment has one of Strelka's peasant friends play a few notes on his flute, then stick the end of the flute up his nose and play it like that. | |
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In Phineas and Ferb Perry the Platypus does an Homage, playing Dr. Doof's guitar behind his back. | |
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| Impractical Musical Instrument Skills / int_7f640c58 | comment |
In The Sims 2, Sims with high Creativity can play the guitar while holding it behind their backs. | |
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| Impractical Musical Instrument Skills / int_9e2f90f4 | comment |
Brook from One Piece claims to be proficient at any instrument; so far, we've seen him play Violin, Piano, and Electric Guitar. On the one hand, he has had fifty years by himself on a ship full of instruments to perfect his skills; on the other, you'd think having no flesh on your fingertips (since he's a skeleton) would, at the very least, make it hard to properly fret a guitar without a lot of extraneous noise... | |
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In an episode of Futurama featuring Beastie Boys, because of them being heads in jars, one of them scratches a record with his tongue. | |
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In the Rainbow Magic movie, Izzy/Inky the Indigo Fairy has this. She plays a reed like a guitar. | |
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| Impractical Musical Instrument Skills / int_b2ac2311 | comment |
In Peanuts, Schroeder is able to play symphonies by Beethoven and others on a toy piano with painted-on black keys and only one octave. This is Lampshaded on several occasions. | |
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The French Vaudeville performer Le Pétomane, whose entire act consisted of farting musically onstage. He also played an ocarina. Just not with his mouth. |
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In Black Books, Manny sits at a piano and plays a complex classical piece he heard on the radio seconds before. He can play any piece of music he tries, even when hiding underneath the piano and using spoons to strike the strings. | |
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Background pony Octavia from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic somehow manages to play a cello. She is a non-anthropomorphic pony. How she even holds the bow is one of the great mysteries of the series. As a matter of fact, any earth pony (pegasi might use their wings and unicorns have telekinesis) who plays instruments that expressly need hands fall under this. In "Honest Apple", Pinkie Pie offers a stressed-out Rarity an acoustic guitar (with apparently only two strings) to unwind with. Rarity accepts it and... proceeds to unleash an absolute monster of a rock solo that sounds more like an electric guitar than anything, with flames appearing behind her. And she's only using her hooves. And she's never shown any musical ability or inclination before. Pinkie was appropriately stunned, as were plenty of viewers. |
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Many drummers like Dave Clark of the Dave Clark 5 played standing up; Andy Sturmer of Jellyfish played while standing up, singing lead vocals and fronting the band. Considering the multilayered precision and perfection Jellyfish upheld in their recordings and live performances, the fact that they used no additional musicians or tapes, and the likes of "All Is Forgiven" are in 6/4 time, Andy certainly had a difficult task at hand, especially live. | |
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| Impractical Musical Instrument Skills / int_c720f71e | comment |
Will Ting from YouTube plays Rondo Alla Turca with hands crossed, hands crossed under his leg, upside down, one hand behind his back and the other in front while standing sideways in front of the piano, and backwards. | |
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In Ed, Edd n Eddy, Edd is so good at playing pedal steel guitar that he can play it with his feet. (And shortly after, he pulls out a book to read and still plays it with his feet.) And he detests this instrument! | |
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In the film version of Amadeus, Mozart plays the harpsichord upside down, crossing his arms so his hands can be on the proper side. | |
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Little Richard used to play the piano with one leg up on top of it. | |
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In Lazytown, when Robbie Rotten and his trio of lookalikes perform "We Are Number One", the lookalikes playing the double bass and the drums are at one point shown to be playing both in tandem (each with one hand on one part of the double bass and the other playing one part of the drums). | |
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Likewise, The Piano Guys have released two videos (for a cover of One Direction's That's What Makes You Beautiful and a rendition of Angels We Have Heard On High) with five and four people respectively playing on a single grand piano. One or two people play the keys, others tap or pluck the strings directly, run a cello bow's horsehair through the strings in order to bow them, or rap on various pieces of the piano's body or hardware to produce percussion effects. | |
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