Billy, It's already been posted here before. He's a SG101 member from France i think.
I like this one, they've almost got the sound but.. are they stoned or something??
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2E__Jvrsr4

crumble
Billy, It's already been posted here before. He's a SG101 member from France i think.

Ooooops!

Be careful following the masses. Sometimes the "M" is silent...........................

And he just played what any surf musician plays just with different tone. Tone without musicianship is totally acceptable in the surf circle, but musicianship without tone is unacceptable.

Voodoo_Idol
I think this kind of criticism is uncalled for. Based on the evidence I've heard, the guy you're bagging on is as good or better a musician than many of the regular posters on this site, including those of you in active bands (Ivan, and formerly Zak, excepted).

http://www.myspace.com/theclocktones
http://www.myspace.com/thegrabators

For that matter, I could almost make the same statement about the pair in the second video.

Seriously people, it's not like surf music is so incredibly difficult to play. Get your egos in check.

I don't know about Billy - but my comments aren't directed at his musicianship. It's a crappy clip - "how to play surf guitar" should have an addendum "thru a tinny little amp on a les paul. There's nothing even remotely surfy about it, other than that he hamfists his way through Pipeline and Miserlou. He looks extremely excited to be doing so. Is this surf music? I hope not.

Over 9000 views, and yet a quality clip of a real surf band doing a real song can't muster 200? Less than 200 means not even everyone here has viewed The Madeira clips. That's pretty weak.

"You can't tell where you're going if you don't know where you've been"

Clearly I don't think everyone thinks tone is king, but I have read quite a few posts here where people put way too much significance into the tone of a band while I thought their musicianship clearly suffered, when compared to some other bands that didn't have as traditional a sound who had better musicianship.

Maybe I'm just not seeing through a facade of kindness people are putting up when people are talking about bands. Perhaps the tone compliment is just an attempt to say something nice in the cases where I see a lack of musicianship.

JakeDobner
Clearly I don't think everyone thinks tone is king, but I have read quite a few posts here where people put way too much significance into the tone of a band while I thought their musicianship clearly suffered, when compared to some other bands that didn't have as traditional a sound who had better musicianship.

Maybe I'm just not seeing through a facade of kindness people are putting up when people are talking about bands. Perhaps the tone compliment is just an attempt to say something nice in the cases where I see a lack of musicianship.

If one of the posts you're referring to is the thread in the gear section, I definitely don't think Setzer is lacking in musicianship at all. Granted, I wasn't crazy about a kind of sloppy Maleguena I've heard him do live, I think his version of Caravan is fantastic, very inventive and not easy to play.

Sorry, off topic... anyway, I found the topic's link extremely uninspiring. I wish "real" guitarists would stop perpetuating the notion that surf can easily be emulated with a few tricks (like power tools) and some crappy onboard reverb. Maybe the real secret to getting more youtube hits is playing a surf standard on a non-standard instrument like an LP?

Mike
http://www.youtube.com/morphballio

Billy, where are your instructional videos? Easy to pick on someone else....

I wanna play just like him when i grow up...

Icetech
Billy, where are your instructional videos? Easy to pick on someone else....

His would have reverb which would equate to "God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world."

I do enjoy me some reverb.

Geez, are we still dwelling on this? Brian! Feel free to delete this thread anytime you desire or at least make us an instructional video on how to delete such threads on our own!
Just be sure to add Reverb! ;D

Be careful following the masses. Sometimes the "M" is silent...........................

morphball
That's partially correct; like any other search engine, it has a lot to do with the meta tags (which is possibly more important than your description). For instance, here is the Madeira video tags:

Madeira  surf  rock  sandstorm  pongracic  space  cossacks

Very bare bones... even though "Madeira" and "pongracic" equates to sheer awesomeness with all of us in the know, many people are just not going to stumble upon this gem doing casual searches.

My one and only youtube video is inferior in every way, but has received almost 1465 hits since November 2009. Why?

surf  surf-rock  guitar  shred  instrumental  misirlou  hava  nagila  Michael  Brennan  morphball  Pulp  Fiction  Quentin  Tarantino  Greek  Jewish  Middle-Eastern  Yamaha  SGV800  Gomez  El  Sonido  G-spring  Alesis  SR-16  Sony  PCM-D50  Flip  Mino  HD  Audacity  Adobe  Premiere  Surf  Coasters  Meshuggah  Beach  Party  Dick  Dale

My advice is to just throw ANYTHING that you can think of in the tags, no matter how far a stretch.

Good points - You may also want to add "Lady" and "Gaga" to you list - that a joke.

Here is the king of views on surf guitar how to - It's John Benton playing in HBKahuna's garage - this is the good stuff.

Surf Guitar Old School Style

Also, unrealated, but I ran into it searching for the John Benton clip and forgot this clip was on youtube.

Squad Car!

Yeah, thats me and some of my band playing with Eddie Bertrand, Tim Fitzpatrick, and Jim Frias, not to mention the above mentioned John Benton.

That's a surf lesson!

"You can't tell where you're going if you don't know where you've been"