Our Most Popular Videos Ever!
October 25th, 2024
Over the last six years we’ve been recording bassoon-related videos from time to time, covering topics including performances, overhauls and restorations. When we recently totted them up, we were amazed to find we have published almost 90 videos, with a total of over 800,000 views across YouTube and Facebook!
To us, that seems an incredible number given that we aren’t professional videographers, and all the scripting, editing, recording and playing of instruments has been carried out in-house.
A big thanks to Jacob who recorded, edited and published every single one of them, alongside his normal job. We are also so grateful to all the people who have taken the time to view our videos and also to comment and give feedback.
Here are our top five most popular videos (plus a bonus one) across our channels:
1. In top place with over 33,000 views (across Facebook and YouTube, in 8 months at the time of writing as it was published in February 2024) is our video on replacing an ivory bell ring. This video generated quite a lively conversation on Facebook about the rights and wrongs of removing ivory bell rings. Ever-more-strict legislation is driving the need for removal of ivory bell rings unfortunately.
2. Coming a close second with over 31,000 views is a performance of the Hummel bassoon concerto on a lovely Heckel 6000 series bassoon. This video was one of our earlier videos and has proved to be consistently popular since first published in 2019.
3. Third in popularity with almost 28,000 views (and over 500 likes on YouTube!) is a performance from Mahler 1, Movement 3 played in a quartet comprising a contrabassoon (Amati), two bassoons (Heckel 7000 series and Puchner Model 23) and one of our own mini bassoons. Our favourite comment on this video was: “Wow, hearing music like this makes me so glad to be a bassoonist. :')”
4. Fourth with 25,000 views is a performance of an excerpt from the Gigue from Suite 1 for cello by JS Bach played on a mini bassoon. The best comment was “this takes the bass out of bassoon”!
5. Fifth with more than 23,000 views is a duet on a Heckel 10000 series of Mozart’s Sonata for Bassoon and Cello. As a commenter said – what can be better than a Heckel 10000 other than two of them!
Bonus video – coming in at number 11 with just under 20,000 views is one we couldn’t resist adding – an eight foot tall contrabassoon. This contra was brought to us by a customer for a full overhaul and is something of a rarity, being a British-made contra by J. Higham, and we aren’t aware of there being another in existence. If you know otherwise please get in touch and we will share the information.
For the techies among you, we generally use two professional mics, varying their positions as necessary, going into an RME audio interface to an Apple Mac mini, and then edited on an iMac using Apple software.
