Good Vibrations: Guitar and Cymbal Caught on Video

This gorgeous video of a cymbal (shot with a Phantom at 1,000 frames per second) made our morning. And then Kottke’s find below — brilliant footage of vibrating guitar strings — made our afternoon.

Hope you enjoy them as much as we did, and have a great weekend!

Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.


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  1. James Blanch says . . . | July 16, 2011 / 10:56 am

    The first video is great! …but the second one seems fake!

  2. Gareth Jane says . . . | July 19, 2011 / 6:45 am

    Check out this entire music video shot with a Phantom – cymbal, guitar, and gunfire included: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9nVs7bVKqo&feature=fvsr

  3. Gordon Divitt says . . . | October 11, 2012 / 6:48 am

    I’m with James on the guitar film. How can the strings be the only thing filmed in slow motion?

  4. Loren says . . . | October 12, 2012 / 5:28 am

    I don’t think the second video is fake, and it is in real time, not slow motion. But the wave shapes on the strings are not real, just an artifact of being captured at a certain frame rate. It is a little bit like when car wheels seem to be going in reverse in the movies.

  5. Loren says . . . | October 12, 2012 / 5:40 am

    … or it is like those videos of water droplets falling the wrong way:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRlNOyxWWf8
    The guitar video also demonstrates that the pixels of each frame are not captured all at the same instant, but in series. This accounts for the kinky shapes on the strings. The actual strings are always pretty close to straight.

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