Definitely fun to watch musicians destroy their own egos but we already do that on a daily basis. Build your confidence and awareness with Tonic: tonicmusic.app/join-in 🎵
So would you let Ross (on the show Friends) call himself a musician? Check him playing the bagpipes or his keyboard "composition" (which he describes as "wordless sound poems" - basically using the preset sounds on a Casio keyboard)
@@jamesrawlins735 Of course! A musician is just a term used for someone who's playing music. It doesn't define your level or whether you make a living from it :)
I think the drummer MAY the most talented! Very rare to find someone that good. There is nothing special about anyone else except the girl with the guitar is beautiful. I am a (good) amateur violinist. However I would not even be able to accurately discern all other classical instruments in the orchestra. For example I would recognise a good flute player but not instantly detect a professional one. It’s kind of easier for people to appreciate technically if they actually play the same instrument. I am not a drummer that’s why I qualify my answer with MAY! We all know the real solution is Tonic 😎
It's so insane that the female pianist got ranked 5th by the audience despite being the only one of the group who showed some advanced musicality. The fact that most people in the audience are unable to perceive that is kind of shocking. Then again, looking at the sort of music most people listen to, it's not that surprising.
I watched the reaction video of the female pianist and she mentioned that the instagram poll asked the audience who was their "favorite musician" not who had the most talent or skill.
@@Myztyrio Not really. No difficult high notes, simples runs, no difficult lyrics to introduce melodically at all basically just hummed some runs with easy vowels. She did have decent support but seemed more like raw talent rather than a real demonstration of vocal skill, like she didn't sing an opera piece with rapid whistle notes or anything, not sure what you got out of that.
@@Belial-jv5tq what you listed here is fluff to impress people with. You don’t need anything overly fancy to qualify as good at singing - just plenty of experience, a good ear and creative/emotional evocation
@@MyztyrioI think she’s pretty good but everything she’s doing is not very difficult. That is kind of what musical skill is in a sense, is being able to play difficult things well. Singing is different in that more difficult things do not necessarily sound as good as simple things. What she did just was not extremely impressive, but it did sound good. In terms of actual instruments, she sounds kind of amateurish. It does not take that much effort in comparison to the other people to get to where she is, which is literally the whole point of this video. Musical skill is definitely partly how good it sounds, but in practice it is basically just how good you are at playing extremely difficult things, improvising, and to a much smaller extent understanding your tool. Whether thats learning theory, or just being familiar with your tool. Nobody is denying she sounds great, but in terms of skill she does not stand out as a person that’s in the top 50% of the people in this video.
@@probag8414 I mean... are you that surprised to see TwoSetters comment under Ray Chen's videos ? They probably represent at least 80 % of his audience. 😅
Hey @RayChenViolinist ! Summer-the female pianist from the Jubilee vid-here :) I believe I initially heard about you from TwoSet a while back, but I recently saw a clip of your Playing God cover! I played + co-wrote the piano part on Playing God Acoustic, and was so blown away by your cover, so it’s wild and unexpected to see this pop up. Thanks for your kind words, they mean a lot coming from you!! I’ll try to respond to a few things you brought up in your commentary. First off, I was honestly expecting at least one or two other musicians to be closer to your / Tim Henson / Yuja Wang level, so was initially taken aback by the overall skill level. I’m a studio/touring musician and composer/arranger who was classically trained, so you were spot on with that assessment. I didn’t go to conservatory / didn’t major in music (B.A. Legal Studies), but did grow up taking classical piano lessons for 10 1/2 years and violin for about 6 years too (I was pretty terrible at violin). To explain my ranking of the other musicians, I have to note that in the touring backing musician world, multi-instrumentalists are very sought after, especially by artist management with tighter budgets, so Michael (guitar/backing vocals/pedal steel)’s skill set would rank highly in that sense …but that doesn’t necessarily equate to talent, I realize; I just wasn’t expecting him to have any intonation at all (I was expecting worse tbh, so was surprised. He was not a cellist that I would personally hire as my string contracting standards are high/pro, but he still played cello far better than what I’d expect from a guitarist who picked up a cello). His voice was also pretty solid and better than my own singing voice (I’d never sing lead vocals publicly; I know my strengths and that isn’t one of them lol). For instance, my tour with Kings Elliot, I both played keys and ran triggers; my tour with Chon, I played keys, sang backing vocals, wrote the string arrangements, contracted the string players, and music directed the show, etc. The more you can do at a high level, the more employable you are as a touring backing musician. Another important note: Jubilee had IG rank us all based on who was people’s “favorite musician”-yup, they used a different metric. Why? I don’t know, and imho, comparing rankings by different metrics kinda invalidated the social experiment, but I digress… I also believe that if I’d played something recognizable-like you mentioned-instead of an original composition (my piece “JFN”), I possibly would’ve ranked higher with IG. Another pertinent note, the keyboard that Sèdo an I played on was a Nord Electro HP which has fully weighted keys; it certainly doesn’t feel quite like a Steinway / Bosendorfer / Fazioli / Shigeru Kawai, but any trained pianist could easily play expressively effectively on it because of it’s high-quality fully weighted keys:) That all said, I enjoyed hearing your insight! If you ever want a non-classical pianist to collab with, plz lemme know; I absolutely love working with violinists - and/or I also would love to interview you for my AAPI Musicians blog if you’re down🙏🏽🙌🏽🎵 All the best to you and yours regardless!
Thank you for making clear that the biggest issue with a format like that is that the term „talent“ is not defined properly here. Most people vote following a feeling of „I like the type of music“ or „well, I think I cannot do that“… both are not very meaningful approaches to judge a talent.
@@filoue2583 I can't comment on the technical side of how youtube deals with the different symbols and the standard quotation mark (youtube puts both like this " " for me, but in a german word document they are instead „ “) but quotation marks differ wildly between languages. E.g. German uses „ “, French « », some use » «, etc.
For RU-vid I cannot change the language settings for each comment (and I don’t want to switch everything to English), so the German quotation marks appear automatically when I write. It has never come into my mind that they could cause any trouble. Take it as an exercise in mental flexibility 😊
I used to be Julius, I can relate how he feels, but one day he will grow up and realize how insignificant his 'skill' is and how much more he can improve or correct his past ignorance about music making.
What a thoughtful response. I judged him a lot, but you've made me realize he deserves some kindness - maybe no compliments, but at least some empathy hahaha.
being julius is an important part of being a musician. Hopefully that inspired him to practice and develop a skill set. it's unfortunate to have this revelation made in such a public medium, but it's an important revelation - humility - and so vital to growing as an instrumentalist/songwriter/composer/etc.
As a musician who dabbles in almost every aspect (primarily a drummer), I feel pretty qualified to rank them objectively. First, the way I define talent is the amount of technical skill someone has or rather, how much *time* have they put in (ofc u can be naturally talented too but generally). I would obviously put blue hair last, then the lala land guy (not great technique nor musicality, probably self taught or a few lessons), then the drummer (he was okay, not good, not bad), then the lapsteel/cello/guitar guy (learning multiple instruments is difficult even if he wasn't proficient in all, he was def decent at guitar), then guitar girl (decent guitarist, great voice / control and confidence), and finally piano girl. Piano girl was the most talented because she displayed her musical knowledge (classically trained perhaps). She had dynamics, phrasing, tempo, technique, etc. she knew how to play her instrument and not only that, how to express herself best. Ofc this is my opinion, but I feel it is 90% accurate
I disagree with your definition of talent. I think that talent is the capability or the potential of someone to learn to play an instrument and develop his skill. Sure, the work you put in and the amount of skill you posess can be an indicator of your talent, but it doesn't necessarily has to be.
@@jere3558 I don't think that definition is helpful in this context though. I'm a strong believer that music is something anyone can do. It just takes practice. You can't explicitly measure how easy someone learns compared to how much they HAVE learned, which is why I defined it the way I did.
@@RBDrums I agree that this defonition isn't helpful in this context, but I also believe that the entire premise of the video is flawed. What they are trying to rank themselves by is musical ability, not talent. But all this is wordplay.
a fun note to add is that with jubilee, most of these people actually sign up for these videos months before. they have to go through a questionnaire and acceptance round and all that before filming. so the fact that the blue hair guy said he just learned it a week ago is strange because that would mean he signed up with no experience?
I noticed that a lot of the performances were cut from the final video. At 10:34, you can see blue hair guy singing without piano in the Instagram compilation. I think this means that the final video cut the clips of him singing unaccompanied and just left in his original song. My guess is that he considers himself a "singer" and signed up as thus, even though he only recently learned to accompany himself on the piano.
Hey Ray! I just wanted to say love the content you make and wanted to thank you for introducing me and my 5yr old daughter to Tonic. I was having a tough time to get her to practice her violin even once a week.. Now she just got to a 20 day practice streak!! She's gotten much better and its all thanks to Tonic which helped gamify and open up her practice to perform live (which makes her take it more seriously too!) Thanks and keep up the great content
They did quite a great job of showing unrepresentative moments of the performances. Drummer guy actually played quite complex grooves. From what we see here it is hard to understand how well he played. Also we see it is hard for people to understand what’s good playing and what not if you don’t play yourself. If you play piano you see that the second pianist has not much in terms of trained technique, while the female pianist had those movements you only get with years of practice. But when TwoSet reacted to this video they immediately devaluated her because of the choice of music. They were on the other hand quite impressed by the second pianist starting with the fantaisie impromptu, which was quite slow and he got exactly to the point were every intermediate students stumbles when trying to play it the first time, which is bar 7 (so not at all as impressive). Also the singer does not simply _have a great voice._ It takes a great voice and good technique, training and practice to be able to do that. But the problem here is that it is hard to say what ”talent“ is. For some people this seemed to mean the ability to consequently practice until you get good, and for others this means the ability to quickly take up new things, or to come up with your own stuff (afaik the female pianist played her own composition by the way). I think blue hair guy was quite proud of playing his own song and doing this only with one week of practice. But the others just did not share his concept of talent, and rather evaluated his skill at the piano.
It's interesting seeing egos being destroyed haha I would definitely rank just as Ray did, except first and second places: the classical piano girl would be in first place and mary in second for me. Not that I think singing is easier than playing piano, but actually I got more into the technical stuff - the dynamics she created on that piano are way too hard, also the way she sang to me sounded very flat on dynamics besides the melismas. taking the melismas out what would last? but both of them are amazing!
If you’re a good drummer, it is easy to notice the difference between playing loud because you want to emphasize something and playing loud because you don’t have control
I felt like that guy thought that being able to say "I just picked this instrument up and I'm already this good" was what made him impressive. But . . . he wasn't that good and it wasn't that impressive. 😬
I ALWAYS skip ads but this has the best ad by a RU-vidr for their product I've seen to date. Prolly going to actually get it now. Smart and talented :)
@@budget6309 Ok you got me 😅 I am guilty of plugging Tonic a lot because it’s my app, but to be fair I do want you all to join because I truly believe that it will help you improve your confidence and skill when you play for others, all the while enjoying your practice sessions so much more. Plus it’s free, so might as well give it a try to see how you feel: tonicmusic.app/join-in 👈🏼
Ray asking why guitar cello guy ranked so high: Meanwhile the piece he played on guitar: Casually does travis picking and polyrhythms while singing P.S. For those who don't know "Never going back again" is a song that guitarists love and hate, the techniques used are really hard to perform and usually people say something like "it broke my fingers" I recommend watching paul davids video to see why it's so difficult.
The way how I rate and know someone is a good musician is through 5 categories: 1. Timing 2. How clean can they play, no sloppiness 3. Can they improvise and how good. 4. Can they play more than one instrument and how good. 5. Sound on instrument I give 1 out of 10 in each category then give the average for example 1. 8 2. 8 3. 5 4. 0 5. 5 = decent or good musician musician
Not a pro, but I’m somewhat a jack of all trades when it comes to instruments (piano, guitar, sax, violin) so I could somewhat gauge the difficulty and skill of musicians. I still remember the cringe I got when I watched that Jubilee video. It was pretty clear that Piano girl had a good musical background, piano guy seems to be self taught, drummer was normal for me - could’ve been better if he played jazz but it was obvious that he still lacked experience, cello guy was okay with guitar too but I think the slide guitar was too much for him, singer girl was okay - but her type would’ve been pretty common in the “aspiring musician” community, and blue haired guy was meh. It’s quite obvious that some of them may not have been too exposed to a music community that much - maybe more exposed to a non-musical friends and family environment who told them that they were great. The video would’ve been more interesting if professional musicians ranked them according to talent(?)/skill in the end.
I think the multi instrumentalist guys touch on guitar was definitely overlooked and the drummer’s talent was WAY overblown (no hate, honest well-informed opinion incoming). If you really play drums or any rhythm section instrument professionally you would understand the drummer did the equivalent of playing the intro to Für Elise with poor technique 🥹 In terms of talent I’d say; 1) Summer (or Mary) 2) Mary (or Summer) 3) Multinstrumentalist guy 4) La La Land guy 5) Drummer 6) Blue Hair Homie Sincerely, A professional musician
As a drummer, the drummer was pretty good, but I'd have put him as fourth or fifth. To be fair to all of them, though, it's pretty hard to judge someone's musical talent based on a clip of them playing their instruments for only 30 seconds or so. And in a way, it is all pretty subjective.
Hahaha ya the ranking thing is messed. Talent / skill level left up to vote for non musicians or general public tends to become "which pop songs do I recognize?" And then, if the musician plays something fast, people also become impressed. The Jubilee vid is so cringe for me. For the musicians, the way they ranked each other was also messy and the reasons they gave, LOL
I’ve met a lot of pretty decent musicians, but every person I’ve met that’s insanely talented seems to be so self critical and wouldn’t rate themselves high
As a drummer i thought the drummer was ... weird. He is not bad obviously but he is playing like loud and a lot of notes = better and i think it sounded too much for the people on the show and even for my taste
People rate "talent" by sympathy. It often seems like nobody understands that talent is a potential, that cannot be ranked by just listening to one song or piece.
Can you put a translation in Arabic because I really like watching your videos but I cannot understand them and I like listening to your violin❤ playing?❤
Instrumentalists are clueless about singing. Mary has lovely ability that she was born with, but that has nothing to do with the level of vocal skill displayed. If she put a quarter of the time and effort into singing and ear training that Summer has put into the piano, she'd be a completely different artist.
Ray is talent not generally hard work behind closed doors? people have natural aptitudes but in your career have you seen "talented" people fall well short of their potential without diligence and hard work? and is the opposite true? i would love to get youre insight as from a young age you were clearly seen as a prodigy and very "talented" in the classical sense of the word
Omg could you do a video like the jubilee one and rank yourself among your peers? I have no idea if that's possible because there are certainly hundreds of factors and maybe reviewing performances makes more sense... But still!
The audience rating shows you exactly why the most popular music is that popular. Nothing wrong but difference between skill, and popularity, and even how enjoyable it is.
i love being aware that im trash at the violin cause otherwise it would be so embarassing to have the truth be shed like that especially from other violinists since they dont hold back
I agree with you Ray but just cause someone has a nice voice doesn't equal talent. I feel like it takes way more talent and hard work to play piano like the girl did than for someone to have a nice voice.
i kinda want to share my votes on this being someone who has mixed in different genres and worked with diverse musicians: 1 - Summer 2 - Mary 3 - Daniel 4 - Julius 5 - Michael 6 - Sedo summary, honestly Summer and Mary i would be equal Summer is amazingly talented at piano BUT Mary is an amazing singer/guitarist they would be people i would listen to on a weekend evening. For Julius, i gave him that ranking cause not everyone can songwrite. despite fact his piano skills isn't great and that i didn't find his voice super amazing. However, he was still better from my pov than Michael and Sedo. Michael is just super average on the instruments. I know that being a professional and multi-instrumentalist myself. I had to give Sedo last cause it made me cringe a lot how he played the piano. It doesn't matter whether if it was a keyboard instead of a piano because of how Sedo played and tying in the sound quality. it was just super blended and i couldn't hear the details. @Paolo you deleted your comment but i still got notification. Everyone's taste and preference is just different and no it doesn't mean the others weren't worth my time. I enjoy music and it was a pleasure to hear all of them and their experience and where they are with their music.
This video is interesting because these are pretty much untrained musicians. They’ve never had an audition or a teacher to humble them. On another note, I think it would be cool to do a video series where you go to the other best music school in the world, Berklee, to learn basic improvisation, sit in a couple of their 350+ ensembles, and maybe work with fiddle/violin students or professors trading knowledge/techniques you have in the classical realm with what they do in more contemporary contexts. (As an aside, I hate when conservatory/classical people-not you personally, just in general-use the term “commercial music”, always with in a derogatory tone, when describing a school like Berklee, as if it’s not as important, worthy, challenging, or meaningful music as playing classical music.) I think it would be really cool to see the two worlds collide as wells as how you, as a seasoned pro, handle and approach learning new skills like improvising with a lead sheet and chord progressions. I think it would be cool to see a pro sweat a little 😉. Also, don’t say you “can’t” improvise. You can; you just don’t know how yet.
I wouldn’t discount the male pianist’s technique so much, while he wasn’t very confident, the technique isn’t too different from how Horowitz might’ve played his own piano (which had very light action and shallow keys). When playing any keyboard instrument there’s no one prescriptive technique, the goal is simply to use as little motion as possible (i.e Heavier action, slightly more forearm rotation and curved hand shape).
Im ngl he wrote and picked up piano in a week and composed a song that’s pretty talented. Talent is a very tuff thing to pinpoint cuz what exactly does it mean. U could say summer is more talented than 3 instrument guy but she worked on that for 10 years are talent and hardworking the same??
Just saying as a percussionist, just going crazy isn't a best way to display talent. He may be amazing but its a bit questionable for a talented musician to play like that.
As a composer I gotta say it's pretty tiresome to always see the "classical pianists" getting ranked highest. Sure they can sit and grind sheet music for hours, but they can rarely improvise partimento and contonuo stuff. Today, being a classical player jst means learning sheet music , back in the day classical pianists could actually improvise and understand what they were playing.
I hope this comment gets read by Ray. 2:29 The reason for the flat fingers. This is a technique on piano when you have to play a lot of those black keys. It is really difficult to play that with round fingers. This technique is also implemented in Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata 3rd movement. The pianist has to press many black keys so that is the reason behind those flat fingers. Although I'm not exactly sure if his fingers are sUPPOSED to be thAT flat.
5:34 I'm humbled. Let me defend myself. I do know what dynamics are. Dynamics is the shift in volume throughout a piece. For example, a piece could start at piano with the tonic chord on a major scale. With a hairpin, it could go onto the fifth and then end in forte in the diminished chord or the seventh chord. The dynamic is when it goes from piano to forte. In a casual conversation such as the one those musicians were having, I'd have just been like, "Ah yes, the dynamics, articulation, and all that was phenomenal", without really thinking. I know you can't play dynamics on an electric piano.
"I know you can't play dynamics on an electric piano." The Nord Piano absolutely allows dynamics, as do all but the junkiest digital pianos. And in fact, the Nord offers a hammer action on the keys to simulate the feel of an acoustic piano so you express dynamics similarly.
