a cappella on youtube

I was trolling through YouTube, and found a few fun videos.

Here’s one of the Gas House Gang and a women’s quartet doing the 8-part barbershop arrangement of Lida Rose. The video quality isn’t so good, and it isn’t a perfect performance, but it’s fun to hear it as a 2x4x arrangement. (Ah. Here’s a higher-quality version with the women’s quartet Showtime.)

In the realm of barbershop comedy is 50 champs to get Osama. You have to know a fair bit about the barbershop community to find this funny.

The Acoustix was a trend-setting quartet; I believe two of the four were classically trained and sang with the Dallas opera (although that’s based on old memory cells). Tonight, Tonight is a marvelous arrangement, with the melody passing through all four voices, and the tag (or ending) is one of the more mind-bending chord progressions I’ve encountered in a tag. An interesting video is this one of the Acoustix jamming in an airport tram-car…

I also wandered through some videos of Rockapella… for example, their jam on Under the Boardwalk with True Image is fun, and Zombie Jamboree in concert is also cute. I think this came from a concert somewhere in Pennsylvania… their rendition of Tempted by Squeeze. (And, for comparison, the original.)

Which might as well drag me all the way back to collegiate a cappella. Here’s the UNC Achordants doing Wayward Son, which they’ve really done a nice job with. They also do a nice job with MacPhearson’s Rant, if that’s what the song is actually called…

Well. Firefox crashed. Who knew.

So, no, we don’t have TV. And I don’t usually spend an evening poking around YouTube. But it’s fun being able to wander around the world of a cappella music with no particular direction in mind, and enjoy the music found along the way.