Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, played on Pampers nappies

24 October 2017, 11:37

This is procrastination at its finest.

Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture was originally written for cannons – but presumably, your average Joe won’t have any of those lying around in their attic. However, your average Joe might just have an old bag of Pampers nappies.

YouTuber Procappella lives to 'make products sing', so he's recreated an insane (but extremely catchy) version of Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece, using bags of Pampers.

Procappella’s aim is to make products sing using just the object and their bare hands. To re-create the piece, they had to generate three octaves from G2 to G5 (37 notes) from the Pampers.

“That must have taken AGES!” we hear you say. That’s what we thought, and thankfully Procappella have given us an explanation…

“The way to create this sound was tricky actually, and I'm not sure how to explain it in writing, but bear with me please. You know how there's a rubber on the sides of the diaper? Well, my initial thought was that plucking it would be enough to generate a sound. However, I found, to my shock and dismay, that it isn't. The sound simply wasn't harmonic enough.

“I thought about getting some sort of a rubber band and tucking it behind the diaper so that it wouldn't be seen on camera when I pluck it and would still generate the sound I wanted. However, that violates rule #1 of Procappella which is that all sounds must be generated from the product itself, and that no other objects or human elements other than my hand can take part in the making of a sound.

“So, I thought about strengthening the diaper rubber by adding more diaper rubbers to it. Therefore, I used 10 other diapers (20 rubbers because there's a rubber on each side) and put them on top of each other, then tucked them behind the diaper so that the camera wouldn't see it.

“I was slightly disappointed with this move even though I didn't violate rule #1, because I was hoping that one diaper can actually generate harmonic full scale sounds. Still, at least I committed to the premise of this channel.”

Guys – you nailed it.

Check out the full video here and follow Procappella on Facebook and Instagram for more procrasti-tastic videos.