Quick Look: “Final Fantasy – Medley” by Super Guitar Bros.


Garnering over 3,000 subscribers and 359,800 video views in under a year with only six videos , the Super Guitar Bros. have been making headway with their amazing video game covers. Little is known about their background in music except formal training in classical guitar, but all we really care about is that both Steven Poissant and Sam Griffin take their sessions seriously and really know how to put on a captivating show.

The “Final Fantasy – Medley” video  by Super Guitar Bros. is definitely a great example of how the pair work to complement each other in an almost ethereal manner, carefully arranging iconic songs such as “Chocobo Theme” and “The Prelude” to include a heavy air of nostalgia that is surely not to be missed. Armed with steel and nylon string guitars, these bros (and no, they’re not related) will make you think twice about all those bad YouTube covers you thought you listened through already.

Quick Look: Popular YouTube Vocalist Takes A Stab at VGM Music

We just got our hands on London-based Sabrina Valenzuela’s  adorable cover of Utada Hikaru’s “Simple and Clean” with a wonderful accompaniment from YouTube pianist, Alex Peniera. As a self-declared video game fan, Sabrina’s skill as a vocalist shines through, carefully integrating sentimental emotion and passion into one of Square Enix’s most popular theme songs.  Valenzuela has explicitly utilized her YouTube channel as a means of working to “become a better singer and songwriter”. However, we definitely have to applaud this lovely twenty-one year old YouTube songstress on her absolutely gorgeous voice and continued journey as a soloist.

Peep Sabrina Valenzuela’s latest video on top. While her VGM-related songs mostly involve Final Fantasy content, check out her YouTube channel here for more cute video game covers.

P.S. We’ve been thinking about implementing a ‘Quick Look’ series with videos and featured songs to ThaSauce to introduce emerging artists and musical twists within the VGM scene. While we’re also on this topic, I want to know what readers would like to see more of. What do you guys think? Shoot me an e-mail at [email protected]t and let me know!

How to Optimize Your YouTube Profile

So by now you should know why you, as a musician especially, should have a YouTube Profile, you know how to optimize your videos and music for YouTube, but there’s one more thing missing: How to optimize your profile itself. There’s not TOO much you can do with your YouTube profile as far as optimization goes, but it’s a good opportunity to talk a little bit about yourself, get some links out there, and direct users to other outlets such as Facebook, twitter, your personal website, etc. The absolute best example I can give for this is OverClocked ReMix’s YouTube Profile.

Some important things to remember are:

  • Use your whole description, and every field you have that’s relevant. If you get X amount of characters, use as many of them as you can. Drop as many links in there as are relevant, and make sure you list them in the order of importance. Every bit of information about you in there is more information that someone will read.
  • Make your background image relevant. Have the address to your mainsite, twitter, Facebook, etc. You can even include a small description of yourself and your music as well. Remember information in the background displays above the fold (aka “near the top part of the page, before the user has to scroll down”). This is some of the first information they’ll see. Some users won’t scroll down at all, make sure you make your information very accessible. Try not to go over board with how “busy” your background was. Don’t let your information get distracting, and make sure the information that you want to put forefront is visible and obvious.

That’s really all I have. As I said, there’s not too much you can do, but there are steps you can take. I can’t emphasize enough that you should text every stop possible. Every little bit helps. As always, any questions or suggestions, just leave a comment, and I’ll catch you next week.

Why YouTube is especially important for Musicians

Update: This week we’re going to talk about YouTube, however there have been some important changes in Facebook since the last 2 weeks and I wanted to fill everyone in on those first. First of all, Bing is now using the Facebook API to show what your friends have liked within their searches. What does this mean? Well, Bing has been having a growing in relevance as far as web exposure recently, and this is a huge step towards making it a real competitor to Google. Two weeks ago I talked about how Facebook’s biggest draw is that people are more likely to be interested in what others in their social circle are interested in. By leverage the “Like” data from Facebook, Bing can now theoretically become the most powerful tool for finding searches relevant to your interests. I say theoretically because, despite their pretty video explaining everything, I’ve yet to actually find a search that actually displays Like information. More information on that as it becomes available, but again I absolutely can not stress enough how increasingly important it is to have a Facebook presence.

Additionally: Remember all that stuff I said about setting up an engaging Facebook Page for musicians and using FBML to make a nice custom landing page? Throw that out the window. The new hotness is setting up your landing page using iFrames. Mashable explains it in length better than I could, but to summarize: By using iFrames now for your Facebook Page landing page you can now utilizes languages like PHP, ASP, JavaScript, etc, to give your page some dynamic content. You can still use FBML to make an engaging and effective landing page, but for those who know how to use it the ability to be able to use iFrame to deliver data is incredible.

In just 2 weeks things that I have talked about have changed pretty drastically from a marketing perspective. The internet, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, all change like the wind, and can get difficult to keep up with, and that’s absolutely why I write Just the Tips.

So back on track:

Why YouTube is Especially Important for Muscians

So immediately I’m going to give you a pretty powerful stat: What do you think the 2nd most powerful search engine on the internet is? Bing? Yahoo? Facebook? Well you can probably guess by the context: It’s YouTube. Not only that, but Google now embeds YouTube search right into it’s dynamic search. That’s pretty incredible stuff if you’re looking to get exposure. By why is it especially important to musicians?

  • Videos have sound. GASP! It’s no brainer that you can upload a video with your music in it to YouTube. People do it all the time. This gives fans and fans-to-be a way to listen to your music without having to dedicate any hard drive space or time into download an MP3. Users and listen to it on the go, fans can pull it up on their iPhone and play it for a friend, or stream it at work; the amount of applications are endless.
  • Videos have VISUALS. Well…they should anyway. Your video doesn’t have to be playing guitar, or sequecing a song live (though it could!). You don’t have to do a whole AMV to post your music on YouTube. You can simply just have a static image, or a loop video like OCReMix does. You make something like this pretty simply in iMovie or Windows Movie maker, and it doesn’t have to be all sorts of flashy. My advice to you is to put as much information about yourself as you want people to know, without over doing it. I’ll go over this in much more detail in the upcoming weeks.
  • Talented artists get a A LOT of exposure on YouTube. Have you heard of Justin Bieber? I mean, you probably have, but did you know he got discovered on YouTube? I don’t hate the kid. I don’t care much for his fan base, but he got where he is today by having some degree of talent, and a YouTube account. Be warned: This isn’t the last time I’ll bring him up in my discussions of YouTube, either. So be ready.
  • To combat plagiarism. As I’ve said before in the OCR Plagiarism thread: You absolutely can not control whether or not you or your music will get onto the internet, because it absolutely will. It will not necessarily be what you want to end up on the internet, and it will not necessarily be in the places you want it to be on the internet. You can’t stop it, however you can control it. How? By making sure that all the information you do want to show up shows up first, more often, and more relevant. If you get popular enough, it is certain beyond a reasonable doubt that someone will post your music on YouTube. It may have an innocent omission of information about you, or they may be trying to pass it off as their own. You can search down every iteration of your song on YouTube, and flag all of them as inappropriate, and how YouTube takes action against them eventually or you can post your music yourself, with all your legitimate information, so that there’s absolutely no question what the official source is. I can guarantee you that if you post a video of “Zelda Ocarina of Time/Chrono Trigger: Eponapoch (Guitar Remix)” posted by Willrock07 with a video about you, and links to your Facebook Page, and website, and all kinds of info, it will get more hits on YouTube than some kids “ZELDA KRONO TRIGGR GUITAR MIX” with a picture of a dancing storm trooper by coolkid0009 with 30 videos of the same thing and bad spelling, and hopefully yours will show up in the “Related Videos” sidebar when that DOES happen. Optimizing video titles, tags, and descriptions will be important for this as well, and will also be discussed in the upcoming weeks.
  • People can’t stop watching YouTube. The thing is addicting. I go to watch my own video of Shnababula‘s amazing live Terra remix, end up clicking on the Batman playing Terra in Black Video, then I see Terra in Black in Guitar Hero, then I see You Are Not Alone from Final Fantasy 9 in Guitar Hero, then I find You Are Not Alone on Classical Guitar, then katethegrate’s Roses of May from Final Fantasy 9 (love her, by the way), and then…crap I’m supposed to be writing a column here. SEE WHAT I MEAN? Powerful stuff. You want your video to show up on YouTube, because people will find it, and they will watch it. Hopefully they’ll like it and know where to go to find out more about you and your music!

So there you have it. As mentioned about, in the weeks following I’ll be explaining how to optimize your videos themselves, your profile, your titles, tags, and descriptions. I’ll also go over some other ways to drive traffic to your profile, and get yourself some more exposure: namely covers. Pretty huge, but that’s for another time!

As always if you have questions about anything discussed, or suggests on what you might hear about in future articles, post a comment!