Many performers, including singers and musicians, attribute to YouTube giving them the exposure they needed to gain fame and fortune. But a performer who has yet to enter the record scene has just received a major update that could eventually be his ticket to the superstar.
It was last week when the roughly half a million subscribers of Paweł Zadrożniak’s YouTube channel were struggling with the news that Floppotron 2.0, an orchestra made of obsolete hardware, would make its final performance. The exciting rendition of Con te partirò (time to say goodbye) —a song originally made famous by Andrea Bocelli — was all they had to comfort them. But now Floppotron 3.0 is here and it’s bigger than ever.
Debuting for the first time in 2011, the first versions of the Floppotron used only a couple of floppy disks that produced sounds by moving the stepper motors that controlled the read and write heads of each unit at specific speeds. The faster they move, the louder the sound they produce. One of his first performances was John Williams’ The Imperial March of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, which has so far been viewed more than 6.7 million times on YouTube.
Five years later, Floppotron 2.0 debuted with some massive upgrades. He used 64 floppy disks for meolodia, eight hard drives that provided percussion, and a pair of flatbed scanners for grace. He would continue to perform countless classic songs, from the theme of Super Mario World to Queen’s We Are the Champions, but on June 6, 2022, Floppotron 2.0 made its final YouTube arc.
It was the end of an era, but the beginning of a new one, as today Paweł Zadrożniak has officially unveiled the Floppotron 3.0, which uses 512 floppy drives, 16 hard drives and four flatbed scanners that are connected by a combination of shutdowns. -M MIDI shelf equipment, custom hardware and a pretty impressive looking power supply. The inaugural performance of Floppotron 3.0 is Julius Fučík’s 1897 masterpiece, Entrance of the Gladiators: a piece that can be instantly recognized as the opening music of circus clowns. It’s an exciting but incredibly complicated performance that makes us wonder how long it takes Zadrożniak to schedule. At this point, it may be faster to learn to master a real instrument, but where is the nerdy fun in that?