That time I ended up in a TheFatRat music video

TheFatRat (Christian Friedrich Johannes Büttner) is one of my favorite artists ever.

I grew up listening to his songs - they helped me power through some pretty tough times, and inspired me to pursue a music hobby of my own.

I don’t know what my life would’ve been like without Christian… but it definitely would be different, and definitely not for the better.

The song Monody, in particular - with its soul-stirring flute, warm, soothing strings, uplifting breezy lead, and, above all, Laura Brehm’s ethereal vocals, gently appearing in the middle of the song like a soft, distant memory that I don’t want to forget - will forever hold a special place in my heart.

It’s also one of the direct inspirations for my most recent song, Sea’s Promise (with the lovely vocals of my good friend Emlym).

It was enough for me to just enjoy TheFatRat’s great songs, but little did I know that I would be able to sneak into one of them.

On January 13, 2024, Chris posted a short on his YouTube, where, as he stared right into the viewer’s soul, he challenged them to record themselves playing a small part of his upcoming song. People who genuinely did that would get their names added to the upcoming music video.

I didn’t understand the music notation used in the video.

I didn’t own any instrument.

I didn’t know how to play any music.

But when I saw a chance to be in TheFatRat’s music video - once-in-a-lifetime chance…

I. HAD. TO. DO. IT. Pass an opportunity like that?! Are you kidding me?!

I asked all my friends if they had any instruments. No one had any, except for a guitar. And there was no way I could learn to play that part on a guitar in under 2 weeks.

So I settled on the thing that I already relied on for my daily and professional life… A mechanical computer keyboard.

I needed a virtual piano that supported playing across 5 octaves on a computer keyboard. A lot of them don’t, which is understandable, since you can only comfortably translate keyboard characters to 2-3 octaves to keep the natural positions of piano keys.

I chose an online virtual piano from Recursive Arts. It assigns white keys to normal alphanumeric characters and black keys to those characters with Shift held down.

I painfully mapped notes from the challenge video (first having to learn how to read them) to these characters. Here’s the result:

gWDS *WiO DTgH
WYsD JHlL EiLS
lPJH qTOS GTgS
QTPT GIHg *WiO
DTSg (EDI DYgD
%(Ot

This sequence needs to be repeated twice to play the full challenge.

Once the notes were mapped, it was “just” a matter of “typing” the song quickly/consistently enough. I thought it would be easy at first, since I’m a good touch typist, but ohh, was I wrong.

I kept messing up characters or timing over and over. I had to practice for like 2 hours, and I still couldn’t play the entire thing perfectly. So, once I managed to play it well enough, I decided to keep it at that and upload it to YouTube on January 15.

I wasn’t sure whether this attempt would count, since I didn’t use a real instrument. (Though I guess one could argue that anything you can play something on is an instrument.)

But I didn’t have to wonder for long.

Just 2 hours later, TheFatRat himself quoted my tweet.

TheFatRat @ThisIsTheFatRat · 2024-01-15

Holy cow! This is tough. Fantastic job.

Theo Ratkin @theoratkin_ · 2024-01-15

When all you have is a computer keyboard but you really want to be in @ThisIsTheFatRat's #SailAwayVideo

View quoted post on X

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I don’t think I have to explain how excited this immediately made me 😅

Not only that meant my name would be in the video.

But, more importantly, my favorite artist noticed my desperate attempt and decided it was impressive enough to respond to it himself which was (and still is) mindblowing to me.

The Sail Away music video came out on January 26, 11 days later.

And, sure enough, I’m there! 2:32, 2nd column, 3rd row.

I’m honestly surprised so few people completed it, I thought there’d be at least two or three pages of names.

So, here it is. How I got to be a tiny part of my favorite artist’s music video. I know it’s not really that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, but I will always cherish this little achievement of mine that paved the way for my further musical endeavours.

I’m super grateful to Chris for creating this challenge. It was such a cool thing to do.

Also, it goes without saying, I absolutely love the song, especially that this one features Laura Brehm too! What a callback to all these years of me listening to Monody.

If you’re interested in music stuff that I do (a lot of which is inspired by TheFatRat, as mentioned), check out the music section of this website, my Bandcamp, YouTube, or my latest song, Sea’s Promise with Emlym’s beautiful vocals.

Thanks for reading and have a good one!