“The votes have been tallied and the results are in – an a cappella group from Rexburg will travel to New York City for a chance at the grand prize of Nabisco’s Oreo & Milk Jingle Contest.

The Kreamy Krunchies are a group of four current and former students of Brigham Young University-Idaho who got together to enter the contest last year. The group advanced last month to the top 10 of the competition and were recently voted by the public as…”

Continue reading the article at acappellanews.com

A nice little DC Examiner article about one of our favorite beatboxers/liveloopers Kid Beyond.  Read it here.

Marian Liu of the San Jose Mercury News wrote up a nice little ditty about beatboxing’s history.  Best of all, she’s got some good links at the bottom of the article.

“On the hip-hop scene, “beatboxing” — the term for the art of creating rhythms and sound effects with the human voice — has taken a back seat to rapping, DJing, emceeing, break dancing and graffiti art since it surfaced in the ’80s.

Until now.

The popularity of beatboxing is growing,…”  Continue reading.

This video has nothing to do with learning to beatbox. It’s just fun — gotta love Futurama.

Somebody apparently stumbled upon BeatOutsidetheBox.com the other day and really liked it. The subsequent traffic and visitor response has been a sight to see. Thanks for all of your suggestions and comments.

One visitor, Yonatan, suggested that I highlight Take 6, one of America’s premier a cappella groups. Take 6 has been nominated for 18 Grammys and won 10. Here they are picking one of their songs apart and putting it back together live. This is a classic example of vocal percussion being used in an a cappella setting.

Dave Baumgartner strikes me as a vocal percussionist more in my stream of experience. This solo doesn’t have a lot of popular sounds like nose growls and vocal scratching that so many hip hop beatboxers boast in their repertoires these days, but it does have some impressive sounds and tricks combined with obvious skill and dexterity. I may be wrong on this one, but he strikes me as an a cappella vocal percussionist that has learned to be a soloist as opposed to simply a solo artist. Dave, my hat’s off to you. This solo is great.

This is a short narration about one of the biggest names in beatbox history.

Because this video has professional sound and not too much EQ post-production, you can discern each percussion sound fairly easily. Watch it a couple times and see if you can figure out how to make some of these sounds. If you’re a beginner, don’t worry too much about speed or advanced sounds — just start with some of the basics. Beatboxers of all skill levels will undoubtedly appreciate Zenger’s unbelievable scratching.

Before the hit show Punk’d ever aired, MTV had another prank show called Stung.  In this video, Method Man and Redman pull a prank on some professional beatboxers.  The series never took off, but the prank is funny.

Method Man, Redman, & Matt Besser: Beat Box Prank

Known to some as Andrew Chaikin (the original drummer for the House Jacks), Kid Beyond has made a name for himself as one of the innovators behind live looping. Live looping is the art of using a computer and mixing board on stage to create pieces live in front of an audience, complete with everything from percussion to lead vocals. Here, he explains it better than I do:

There are a lot of guys doing this now, but for my money he’s the best one out there. His new CD Amplivate boasts four of his live loop projects and four DJ remixes. I bought “I Shall Be Free” (track 4) online and plan on buying the rest of the CD shortly.