We salute this YouTuber who used an AI bot to help create an AC/DC song called Great Balls
Funk Turkey has given the same treatment to Metallica, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nickelback
It’s been too long since we’ve heard new music from AC/DC, but YouTuber Funk Turkey has quite possibly scratched that itch with Great Balls.
Turkey, aka Arkansas musician and producer Kirt Connor, employed an AI bot to scrape the Genius Lyrics database of all the band’s songs, and the resulting lyrics, with lines like “I’m gonna ride on the dog a touch too much,” are very AC/DC-ish indeed.
But the true brilliance of Great Balls lies in Connor’s musical accompaniment, which is a ridiculously on-point recreation of an Acca Dacca tune (specifically, 1981’s For Those About to Rock [We Salute You]), down to the Malcolm and Angus Young-like electric guitar tones and the raspy Brain Johnson-esque screech.
Connor has also given Metallica, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nickelback the AI treatment, and the results, in all cases, are similarly impressive.
We recommend the Metallica parody Deliverance Rides in particular, for which Connor says he recorded the music and vocals “in my kitchen, on a couple of cheap guitars, a crappy mic, and an old copy of ProTools.
“I tried to get a sound somewhere between the Master of Puppets album and the Black album. Lars' drum sound is quite hard to get right without spending a lot of money (or, in some cases, buying a trash can). Guitars are multi-tracked a lot.”
To check out all of Connor’s work, head to the official Funk Turkey YouTube channel.
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Rich is the co-author of the best-selling Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion. He is also a recording and performing musician, and a former editor of Guitar World magazine and executive editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine. He has authored several additional books, among them Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the companion to the documentary of the same name.
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