Going Viral

Details

Published on Monday, 06 April 2015 00:00

Written by Frank J. Pasquale

The Rise and Fall of an Overnight Internet Sensation

There are moments in recorded history where the course of human destiny is changed by a matter of mere minutes. One such event took place recently in the 2014 NFC Championship Game when the Green Packers were a minute and a half away from going to Super Bowl XLIX and a comedy of errors cost them the game and they were upset by the Seattle Seahawks. This was the end of the line for the Packers’ season and the Seahawks went on to the Super Bowl.

The Seahawks destiny would then be shaped by a single decision that took less than a minute to enact and The Seahawks would eventually top the colossal blunder of the Green Bay Packers. The Seahawks excelled in their folly by losing the Super Bowl on a single play with less than a minute remaining in official time. Rather than running the ball in for a touchdown from the one yard line, Pete Carroll, the overconfident coach of the Seahawks, decided to throw a screen pass on 2nd down with a mere  1 yard to go. This of course led the ultra-cocky Seahawks quarterback, Russell Wilson, to throw an interception on the goal line and ended the game. This also ended the dreams of Seattle winning back to back Super Bowls and will forever live as one of the dumbest plays in NFL history.

All in a matter of minutes.

Another event that would change the world in a matter of minutes (at least for me and all of us at PCG) took place on the evening of December 31 2014 and encompassed a total of 1:32 minutes. This minute and a half would reshape Pasquale Custom Guitars and give us massive worldwide exposure in 2015.

This event was totally unplanned and unfolded in a seamless, organic way that hardly seemed noticeable at the time but would eventually explode into a mass of viral exposure that would leave this humble author stunned by its scope. This event is forever chronicled on YouTube and is now known as “Slayer Mashup”.

If you have not seen it, you can check it out here: http://youtu.be/YD-1fBWHioA

This story behind this video began on Wednesday Dec. 31s, 2014 at about 5 pm.

Drew Creal, who is the brainchild guitarist for the Nashville Band Muir and close family friend, had come over to Pasquale Custom Guitars HQ to discuss plans to develop a signature 8 String guitar. We had spent the afternoon picking out woods and discussing neck profiles and pickups etc… all the fun stuff that goes into designing a custom guitar.

Afterward we invited Drew to the house for dinner and a chance to celebrate New Year’s Eve together. He would be leaving for Nashville in a few days and it was good to spend some time together catching up.  During the course of the evening we caught up on our lives and the conversation eventually led to my daughter Gia telling Drew all about her gymnastics class and all the toys she had just gotten for Christmas. After dinner, Gia put on her gymnastics leotard and we then proceeded to the basement so she could show Drew her gymnastics routine and all of her toys.
After about 10 minutes of gymnastics and toys, we started to prepare for the New Year by doing what any metal head would do. We put “This is Spinal Tap” on the Big Screen and waited until 11:59 to switch over to watch the last 10 seconds of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve to hear Ryan Seacrest blabber about the “nothing” that constantly rattles around inside his bubble head.

During this time Drew pulled out the First Act Discovery Guitar that we had gotten for my daughter at a Goodwill store the summer before. (As a guitar maker I would never pay full price for this abomination of a guitar. I would never have bought this guitar at all except for the fact that my daughter wanted it only because it was pink.) Drew started noodling around on the guitar for a few minutes and then handed it to me. He then he pulled out the First Act Discovery Drum Set that we bought for my daughter at a yard sale and he started playing Heavy Metal Blast Beats on it.

We sort of looked at each other for a minute and both seemed to have the same idea. We ran the little guitar into a Line 6 Spider IV and set the amp to the Insanity Channel. Drew started playing blast beats and using the ride bell which always reminds me of the great Dave Lombardo from Slayer so I started playing a mash up of some riffs that sounded like Slayer. My daughter started laughing hysterically. She began running around the room like crazy so my wife grabbed her cell phone and recorded it.

The cool part is that there was literally no discussion about what to play or preparation of any kind between anybody. Drew and I never discussed what to play. We never coached Gia to run around and I didn’t expect my wife to record it. What you see is just 2 guys jamming who just found a groove and then everything unfolded exactly as you see it.

We watched the playback and thought it was hilarious, then we put the toys away and watched the ball drop on New Year’s and didn’t really give it much thought.

Now here is where it starts to get crazy…

As an afterthought my wife decided to upload the video to her Facebook page because we thought our friend’s would get a kick out of it. Overnight it had almost 9,000 views with 250 shares. The next day I shared it on the Pasquale Custom Guitars Facebook Page and it just kept going….

We uploaded it to YouTube on January 2nd and by January 5th it had nearly 2 million views…and it just kept going.

By the end of the week it had been posted on Reddit, The Chive, Time Magazine, The Huffington Post, Metal Sucks, Metal Injection, Revolver, Billboard Magazine, Guitar World, Nikki Sixx /Sixx Sense Radio, and just about every other music and entertainment media outlet in the world. 
We had been featured on the TV Show “Right This Minute” and we have been contacted by “America’s Got Talent” to possibly do a Guest Spot on their upcoming season. I was doing radio interviews with MDR Jump radio in Germany and it seemed like the world was exploding…over this Minute and a Half of goofing off.

As I began to digest all of this I started to analyze why this silly video was such a phenomenon and It led me to some key observations.
The first element is that there was a realness to it. It clearly was not faked and the sound was not perfect, but the humor came from the fact that this is clearly pushing these instruments beyond what they are made for. Part of the intrigue is to see what happens next. The drum set begins to fall apart, yet we kept playing. Every note on the guitar was played on one string because it wouldn’t stay in tune, yet we kept playing.  We change tempos and rhythms and the intrigue is to see where we go next and if the instruments will make it that far.

The second element is that everyone can relate to the humor in this video. You have a middle aged rocker dude playing guitar next to a young thrash dude drumming on some thrash riffs on Kids Toys… That’s funny. The fact that we look WAY to serious about it is funny. The fact that it sounds like a typical Slayer Song is funny. The fact that it’s NOT a Slayer Song and everyone thinks it is, is even funnier. Metal fans find it funny because its brutal music played on pink toys. Musicians find it funny because they know how hard it is to play brutal music like this, let alone play it on kid’s toys.

Parents find it funny because they know how crappy those toys are because they have them lying around in their kids rooms right now. The reality is that EVERY parent has some form of these crappy kid’s toys laying around their house and have never heard them sound like this before.  As we speak there are probably some drunk dudes in Iowa tearing through their sons or daughters’ closet looking for a plastic ukulele to play some Cannibal Corpse tunes on.  The fact that we stumbled upon this formula by just goofing off is rather amazing.  It is a very real and relatable video which helped spur it to go viral.

 
All of this of course led to a flood of traffic to the website by people looking to get their kids these “Pre- School” Thrash instruments.  Since this was so unexpected I had to quickly revamp our Pasquale Signature Line to incorporate a “mini” line to meet the demand of this “new market”. I am proud to say that any of our Signature guitars are available in scaled down mini versions and that we now have an economical line of Lil’ Thrasher and Lil’ Shredder guitars that are available with complete amp packages. (More details about the specs of these guitars will follow in an additional blog).

This led to the production of our second video. Metal Mashup Part 2. This video would be a great promotional tool because it would feature our very first Pasquale Custom Guitars Lil’ Thrasher V guitar.

If you missed it, check it out here: http://youtu.be/Q56wh_T7ncU

We would incorporate some of the themes that made the first video fun. Two delusional rockers would live vicariously by auditioning some little kids to be in “The Biggest Metal Band in the World”. We would build a theme arc between videos that would draw out our personalities etc. First Act sent us a new drum set to use for the video because the last one took such a thrashing.

We also released one final video of “out take” footage: http://youtu.be/iYRyFhD3L3Y

Through it all we gained a whole new audience and got exposed to a whole new market. I finally made it into Rolling Stone and Time Magazine like I promised my parents I would do when I dropped out of college in 1989  and we revamped our product line to add  “mini” guitars as well as our Lil’ Thrasher Series and Little Shredder Series Guitars.

Things are good!

Stay Tuned.