Is anyone doing piano/synth videos on TikTok? | Forum

I've been a long-time keyboardist on YouTube, and have recently spent some time exploring TikTok - probably about 20 hours. Or maybe 30.

 

Anyhow, I've been thrilled to find so many wonderful musicians - especially young people (I'm a Boomer) - on TikTok. Singers, guitarists, pianists, drummers, bassists, violinists, oboists - everything. As my own children are grown and long gone, it's just great to see how many young people have embraced musical instruments. Oh, and there are gobs of female musicians on TikTok, and excellent ones as well. There must be 10,000 young women with electric guitars who can shred their way through Van Halen, AC/DC, Guns and Roses, Iron Maiden, etc. Who knew?

 

That's not to say that all of the content creators are young - the musical stuff seems to skew a bit older. There's a guy who must be 90 years old who plays the guitar and sings and must have a million followers.

 

In any case, the TIkTok app makes use of your phone's microphone, and this actually works just fine for many singers, guitarists, drummers, etc. - people who play acoustic instruments, even piano. But if you want to put synth videos on TikTok where the audio is recorded directly into your computer, you've got to use other video recording/editing software on your Mac (or PC) and then import your video into the TikTok app. It's been fun figuring all of this out.

 

On TikTok, what you're served up is based upon what you watch, and the algorithms appear to be very good. If you watch a couple of military videos (cockpit videos in fighter jets) you're going to see a lot more of those until you stop. If you watch some videos of women dancing in yoga pants you're going to see more of the same.

 

The pandemic has obviously helped to fuel this trend. There are tons of musicians who normally play in bands or whatnot, who have been stuck at home, indoors, often alone, with all of their gear. It's easy to see how someone could watch musician videos on TikTok (or anywhere else), look at their phone, and say, "Gee, I can do this." And in five minutes they're on TikTok with a 40 second video of them playing their favorite guitar solo. Or Moog solo.

 

Anyone else messing around with this? It's a real time-suck, at least at the beginning.