YouTube user St. Sanders (real name Santeri Ojala), as many of you guitarists may already know as the creator of the hilarious “Shreds” series of overdub clips, has had his account suspended from the video site. What a shame, because I considered his work to be hands-down the funniest media posted on the internet in 2007.
For anyone who hadn’t seen St. Sanders’ videos, here’s a brief description: he would take concert footage of a famous guitarist (Steve Vai, Carlos Santana, and Eddie Van Halen were some of his victims) and overdub his own intentionally poor playing. The beauty of it was that he was able to make each sloppy note, sour string bend, and every befuddled rhythm would appear to snych up what the real guitarist was technically playing in the video, giving them the appearance of being a six-string newbie. What St. Sanders did to put these over the top was to perfectly dub in occasional bursts of lousy drumming, bass, and keyboards as those band members would appear on screen, as well as punching in audience noise complete with random “golf claps” of approval whenever the guitarists would “play” a bad part as if it were good. Words don’t do this justice; it was pure piss-in-your-pants, sides-aching, head-turned-beet-red, laugh-’till-you-got-a-coughing-fit funny.
Update – 2/13/2008 – I was informed that Wired had also reported on this story a few days after I had posted mine and had uploaded most of St. Sanders’ hilarious parody videos here. Kudos goes to Wired for having the balls to do this!