Music analyst 12tone goes deep in taking apart The Cranberries' 1994 song 'Zombie', an "undeniably powerful piece of protest music". 12tone goes into the music structure of the song, and connects it to the message it is putting out. 'Zombie', 12tone points out, "puts a voice to the grief of ravaged communities where violence has become a part of everyday life, and it reminds us to honor the dead by doing everything we can to avoid creating more of them".

"Sometimes, there are musical ideas so complicated that they wind up being not just physically impossible, but conceptually impossible as well. But did Brahms write one of those? Well... It's complicated" - an interesting new music theory video by 12tone about Johannes Brahms' composition Variations on an Original Theme, opus 21, number1, which is supposedly just impossible to play.

Composer David Bruce connects the physical qualities of instruments and the music that's written for them. His video is essentially about the way the design and layout of instruments affect the music that's played on them. He starts off with samba, but also goes over to west Africa and Spain.

"Why did the sound of an inflatable clown toy falling down the stairs so capture the musical zeitgeist of September 2022?" - that's the question the music theorist Adam Neely explains in his latest video. The "sound" is the song 'Cbat' by experimental hip-hop producer Hudson Mohawke, supposedly the perfect "sound" to have sex to.

YouTube music theorist Adam Neely wonders what we expect from AI and how might it replace human musicians. He thinks "it's clear that something going to change somehow and something might get lost... but a great deal of other stuff [will get] added".

Raymond Chen, Microsoft’s principal software engineer, has discovered that Janet Jackson's 1989 song 'Rhythm Nation' heads the power to destroy laptop hard-drives. Chen said it "contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used”. Music theorist Adam Neely was there to explain the heart of the issue.

Adam Neely's band Sungazer couldn't start a synth on their Hamburg show on a boat, which inspired the YouTube music theorist to make a video about stage fright. "Fear can be a good thing because it keeps you present and it keeps you hungry... We can use our fear and redirect our energy back out onto the audience to give our performances more vivid emotional color" - is the conclusion.

YouTube music theorist 12tone's new video serves exactly like a late-night show - in 24 minutes it's fun, engaging, clever, and has plenty of music (well, parts of one song, actually). 12tone reconstructs Tom Petty's 'Free Fallin'' - "the most LA song ever written. 'Free Fallin'' is both Tom Petty's celebration and his admonishment of my adopted city, wrapped in layers of complex production and lyrical nuance that challenge listeners to reexamine their concepts of freedom while also being just super fun to sing along with".

The animated music theorist 12tone went on a quest of describing what makes something butt rock? What does it mean, and what does it sound like? He sees three stages of the genre and defines what exactly it sounds like. Fun video.

Adam Neely and his Sungazer bandmate Shawn Crowder watch people play covers of their band's songs like 'All These People', 'Threshold', 'The Dark', and others. At one point, what their fans did becomes "almost impossible". Quite impressive stuff.