Music video: Metric's "Synthetica" - iPad Video Cover by Nguyen-Anh Le

Happy New Year!  I went back to the iPad to make this latest video.  "Synthetica" is the title track off Metric's latest album (2013).  It's a great song with powerful lyrics, rocking guitars, and cool synth sounds.  Click here or on the pic above to view on YouTube.

I had planned to work on a different song by a different band.  But some interesting things happened last month (November).  Through a friend of the band, Metric discovered my A Capella cover of "Gold Guns Girls."   They shared my video via Twitter and Facebook, and in two days, 8000 viewers had seen it.  It went almost viral!  Well not that viral - maybe "bacterial" haha.  Metric also invited me to meet them backstage at their show in Chicago (see above).  I had never met a band backstage before.  They were so nice and fun to talk to.  I felt a little flattered having this awesome band ask little ole me about my home video.  It was a bit ironic since it was their song in the first place haha.  So.... I thought I would pay tribute to Metric by doing another cover of their songs (my 3rd Metric cover), one off their new album.  And voila - Synthetica!

I've done several videos on the iPad already.  In fact, music was the primary reason for buying an iPad originally.  So what's different about this one?  The big thing is that "Synthetica" is a guitar rock song.  My previous videos were almost entirely synths.  It is pretty cool using the guitar and bass instruments on GarageBand.  GarageBand put a lot of effort into making lots of guitar effects and amps, so you can choose how clean or dirty, reverb, delay, wah wah, flanger, etc.  The acoustic guitar sounds are pretty nice too.  The iPad interface allows you to just tap to play chords, or you can play notes like on a real fingerboard.  One limitation, however, is that you can't play frets up the fingerboard - I think only the first 7-8 frets are accessible, while most electric guitars have at least 22.

After the bridge of the song, I switched to a real instrument - an electric guitar!  My buddy Chris wanted to trim his lineup of guitars.  So I acquired his Ephiphone Les Paul Standard, which he had some nice custom work done on, including fancy Seymour Duncan pickups.  It's a beautiful guitar, and it plays very well.  I thought I'd show off the guitar with my own guitar solo on Synthetica - hopefully it was somewhat worthy of Metric's Jimmy Shaw! :)

Enjoy!  Happy New Year!