Hilarious Van Halen video – what happens when the synthesizer is wrong?


I stumbled upon this blog post over the weekend, discovering a very funny Van Halen video from early October, 2007.  Apparently, the synthesizer in the opening of the classic Van Halen tune ‘Jump’ started playing at 48K instead of 44.1 K, causing a….bit of a problem when the other instruments came in.  Eddie Van Halen tried to adjust, but 48K puts the pitch solidly in the quarter-tone register, making for a horrifically out-of-tune rendition.  It’s painful (yet also funny!) to hear them soldier on through the wretched intonation problems.

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Comments

3 Responses to “Hilarious Van Halen video – what happens when the synthesizer is wrong?”

  1. Jesus Apodaca on October 22nd, 2007 4:29 pm

    I love how the audience really doesn’t seem to care, or even notice.

  2. Joe Lewis on October 26th, 2007 6:05 am

    That was disturbing to watch…

  3. Kevin on November 23rd, 2008 12:37 am

    I do midi recordings and have my own studio. Have had similar problems like that when i dont set my asio (Input device hardware/midi input device) to my DAW software (Recording program Protools/Cubase). But theres a significant difference also. It would speed dramatically up too like high speed tape dubbing used to do back in the day. They probably have midi softsync which i heard on a studio blog the pitch of that classic oberheim was set too high… LOL still funny though. Sad.. No Mikey!! notin wrong with wolfy.. What im sayin is that sample rate changes from 44.1 to 48 to 96, you’d really really know the difference! It would play really fast or slow depending what you set the rate at.

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