iPad band gives new birth to Xmas carols
A community church band uses iPads (and a couple of iPhones) to create an extraordinary Christmas carol concert.
Why should you have to tolerate people with strange eyebrows, woolly hats, and shaving problems turning up at your door and singing badly this Christmas?
Especially when you can enjoy the full power of festive composition brought to you by nice men with iPads, a couple of iPhones, and fingers as dexterous as those of the national knitting champion?
Please welcome the Northpoint Community Church iBand. In a year or two, all rocks bands will look like this. But, for now, with your festive proclivities leaning you towards your relaxed side, please bathe in the band's unique exposition of familiar tunes like Boney M's "Feliz Navidad."
As Christmas comes to soothe us from the year's turbulence, the sheer harmony and ingenuity displayed by these very happy men from Alpharetta, Ga., will surely lead this YouTube video to become one of the Web's most beloved.
As the members of the band twist their iPads towards the audience, tap them with certainty and guile, and even offer something of a hip-hop accent to holy tunes, only one thing seems to be missing: ultimately, the iPad is a little restrictive as an instrument of performance.
If you want to go all Pete Townshend on this thing, you'll only need a dustpan and brush to clear up the mess.
If a guitarist were to offer a rock-out version of "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen," he would, at the very least, be able to point his axe towards the audience, fling it over his shoulder, play it behind his back, and pluck the strings until they snapped in pain.
Instead, the Northpoint iPad performer holds his instrument politely in his left hand while his right taps out the requisite notes, like a personal assistant tapping in the minutes of a board meeting.
It might have been a little more physical had the soloist been able to avail himself of the (sadly fictional) iArm from the folks at PrankPack.com .
Still, it's clear that an inexorable trend, first set by the universally admired concert pianist Lang Lang when he iPadded his way through the "Flight of the Bumble Bee," is now upon us.
Oh, come (and rock yon iPad), all ye faithful.