Hello everybody on HIVE, and especially the Music Community. My name is Jasper and I'm writing to you from Cape Town in South Africa!
This is my 58th week in a row contributing to "Three Tune Tuesday", an initiative started by @ablaze. It is week 123 overall!
My new pattern for how I will be contributing to TTT is to take the Hive Open Mic challenge Theme of the Week and give suggestions on how I would tackle it!
For those of you who are not familiar, the Hive Open Mic is a weekly challenge on the Hive Open Mic community for anybody who loves to sing. You don’t even need to play an instrument, a backing track or a cappella is also fine as far as I can tell!
Different artists are given the chance to choose a “Theme of the Week” that the posts should be based on. Often it can be difficult for people to think about easy songs that might fit that theme… so let me see if I can be of any assistance to the people who still might not know what to try by the time Tuesday comes around!
All right! Let’s get cracking!
Here is the post inviting everyone to participate in this week’s Hive Open Mic (Week 182):
@hiveopenmic/hive-open-mic-182-worldwide-live-music-event
As you can see, it was the turn of @stefy.music to pick a theme, and this week the theme is “Folk & Symphonic Metal”!
Hold on, “Folk AND Symphonic Metal” rather than “Folk OR Symphonic Metal”?… That’s a pretty challenging theme!
There are so many kinds of metal music… Death Metal, Black Metal, Nu Metal, so what exactly is Symphonic Metal? Well according to the ever trust-worthy source (ahem… Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphonic_metal ), it is roughly what you think it is… Metal music with some symphonic elements to it, like a full orchestra backing up the typical heavy metal instruments.
When I looked at Wikipedia’s list of Symphonic Metal bands (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_symphonic_metal_bands ), it was mostly a case of “Who?”, “who?”, “who?” until I got to the band Evanescence, who went mainstream when I was young with the song “Bring Me Back to Life”. Still, that’s more like Symphonic Metal mixed with rap I suppose… BUT, their other big hit song I still remember clearly is much more like a folky piano ballad. It is called “My Immortal”, and will do great as my first suggestion, especially as the rest of the band and even the orchestra kick in at about the 3 minute mark to add some climax to take the song home!
I then remembered an amazing cover of “Sound of Silence” (originally a 1964 release by the folk duo Simon & Garfunkel that I love so much), but by the Metal band "Disturbed". This is a fascinating concept of a beautiful folk song being covered in a Metal style, and becoming even more emotional?
In fact, there is a wonderful Youtube channel called “Frog Leap Studios” that is devoted to Metal Covers of popular songs across a wide variety of genres that is so much fun to visit, please do! I was considering adding their cover of “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher”, but unfortunately, I only have one song left, and I’ve had another thought…
We’ve just had a Symphonic Metal band doing a more folk-ballad original song, a Symphonic Metal cover of a famous folk song from 1964… isn’t it time I flipped it the other way around and tried to find a folky cover of a famous early Hard Rock / Heavy Metal band? For that, I would like to show you this wonderful video of a cover of “Thunderstuck” by ACDC, but being played on folky traditional instruments by a band called Steve’ n Seagulls (What a name!):
So, a very challenging theme landed up being a lot of fun digging through my vague memories and trying to come up with suggestions that had both elements of folk and metal in them… I hope you enjoyed it!
So that's week 123 done and dusted! I hope that gave some people some ideas on how to tackle the Hive Open Mic Challenge this week? Perhaps I’ve even inspired one or two new people to give it a try? Please let me know! @clairemobey, when are we going to see an entry from you – You’d have fun tackling Evanescence!