I showed my 70 Yr old dad this for the first time on fathers day. He loved it,but one thing he noticed at the start of violets tale, that I don't think no one has noticed, was his knees were up on the bed like someone who is having a baby. He just came out with it before any lyrics were sung. Such a cool moment. My Dad went down the rabbit hole. He just kept saying show me another Ren song. So proud.😊

Here's the origin story of the trilogy 🤩😁🤯 This wasn't originally a trilogy story. Ren read a small article in the paper about a 14 yr old boy killing a young prostitute with a knife in an attempted robbery. Knife crimes had been skyrocketing lately. Later that same evening that boy had been shot and killed by the police . It disturbed him, so he set out to write a commentary not just on senseless violence, but on how desensitized we've all become to it. The words he ends both Jenny and Screech's Tales with "It's such a Shame" we say these words all to often and just move on with our business without a second thought. The article quoted the lead inspector at the scene saying " So Young, It's such a shame". Violets Tale was written over 2 years later adding yet another layer of commentary by Ren. Not only generational violence but making us think (how can both these siblings be so cursed). Born out of violence on that cruel night and then both killed with brutal violence in the same night 14 yrs later. Here's a couple of things that made me go Hmm...🤔🤔 Jenny has the same traits as her mother Violet, quiet, voiceless, and timid. Where as Screech mirrors his father Stevie in every way, Loud, obnoxious, and easily prone & provoked into violence. They didn't know one another and had never met their biological parents. What made these kids so much like their parents? Was it simply Nature, inherited traits from their genetic makeup OR WAS IT Nurture, being brought up in the broken government social system filled with broken, mistreated & forgotten children? Love your channel & Woo hoo to Andy Rue Cheers 🥂

In regard to Andiroo’s statement retraction on being classically trained; Ren stated in an interview that he can’t “break the rules” of music if he doesn’t know them.

BP, You need to let Andi know that Ren taught himself to play guitar, he tried to take lessons before but couldn't wrap his head around sheet music or remember anything that someone tried to teach him, he had to figure it out himself. He also has stated that he tunes his guitar for ease of use with a song through trial and error on what notes he wants to hit and the easiest way to play them. He talked about all this in the Justin Hawkins interview.

The thing that I keep thinking about is this. Martin Scorsese spent $25 million to make Goodfellas and people lose their minds over the one shot of Henry and Karen walking through the restaurant. It was 3 minutes long. Ren & Sam made Violet's tale for less than $500 and it's a one shot that includes many of the same elements (going in and out of rooms, up stairs, etc.) and it's almost 6 minutes long.

Ren really blows my mind every time I react 😭 Like bro how is anyone THIS creative?? 🔥🔥🔥

Everyone is talking about one take this and one take that but can we talk about how the hell he did Hi Ren and The Tales while simultaneously dealing with noise complaints, angry landlords subsequent visits after said noise complaints, and people screaming at him out the window to "shut the f**k up" while trying to film the Tales! It's pretty mind-blowing if you really think about it. Idk. I wonder if it has a major effect on the overall performance? I mean, during Illest Of Our Time, they were dealing with some of the people living in that wharehouse taking bats and stuff. What if when he gets the budget to do whatever the hell he wants, his videos lose their edge? 🤔 Haha, yeah, right, I don't ever see Ren losing his edge! It's just crazy to see what he can accomplish when it seems like the world is trying to stop him!

With a background in classical literature, this feels very much like Chaucer would have been had he lived now. Classics were often a social commentary put in an educational format that was easily digestible. One of my favourite authors said that the two greatest ways to educate people is through comedy or through music. I would also add that the medium of tragedy is an effective literary device as well for educating people. Ren brings them all together in this song but his comedy is satirical in this song.

People get the rewind of the guitar because he says it but did you notice he played those same chords in reverse order to come back to where he started the lyrics from at the beginning so he rewound then fast forwarded. Simple, yet so clever

Great reaction, guys. Regarding the spiral staircase--not only did they use it acoustically, I think it symbolizes the whole story and the endless cycle of abuse.

His biggest project yet that he's working on has a £1000 ($1250) budget. Ren is going all out lol. It says so much about what he's been up to so far, and what he could do with the millions that he should be given to work with.

I think "reinventing music" is more possible when you look at his guitar training: he wasn't. According to an earlier interview, he had 2 guitar lessons: neither made any sense to him (he blamed his ADHD). When there was something he wanted to learn, he canvassed youtube videos until he found one he could learn from, and used that. His earliest training seems to have consisted of getting videos of Jimi Hendrix, slowing them way way down, and learning to follow what he did. No classical training. He commented on chromatic scales, and said he'd figured them out early because he liked them, and eventually learned that there was a name for it. He follows his ears. My guess is that this is why he's so successful at mashing up different styles and genres, they aren't put in separate boxes to begin with, but are "music". The man has EARS.

You all commented on the descending, sung chromatic scale at the beginning of Violet's tale. The descending chromatic scale is a trope signifying death, forecasting Violet's fate before a word is spoken. The fact that Ren gets that--knowingly or just intuitively-- without classical training is astounding.

So here for this 🤩

Ren said a few days ago (on a Twitch livestream, I think?) that the total cost of making the Violet's Tale video was $500 (five HUNDRED, not thousand). 🤣🤣🤣 The hospital was obviously not a hospital, and the bed was a child's bed with no legs so they had to get creative with the camera angle LOL

Andiroo is the only reactor, I think, to bop his way happily all through the violent scene😂😂😂

Ren is just mad talented.. those guitar skills 😮

Another thing I noted was that Ren says 'Jenny felt strange as if there was something in the air' just before me bumped into her twin, Screech. There is a lot of stories of telepathy between twins, if they hadn't experienced that 'twin' feeling before so it would have been confusing not knowing what it was, which may have added to Jenny's freezing and Screech freaking out and killing her.

I've been waiting so long for someone to mention the waltz-time in Screech's tale!

I'm still not used to seeing the 100K subscribers. Congrats again, guys!

I'm a 49 yr old industrial/goth 25 yr clubber...Ren is my new fav

Almost 3 years between the first to the last and the tale of jenny is 4 years old, need to take that into account when you talk about the soundproduction

I only noticed after a couple of listens, but I really like the way that Ren "moves forward in time" just before the hospital scene at the end. I don't have the ear for it, but I would not be surprised if it was the exact opposite of the guitar run he played to "go back in time"

As a classically trained pianist as well, I appreciate Andi's musical insight.

Always a pleasure seeing BP and Andy together doing a reaction to my fav artist Ren! The Tales are so well executed and they tweak all of our senses! Thank you ❤

If Ren were in Skyrim, he'd be the head of the Bard's College.

Ren tells the stories and the filming of the stories are all done so well i found myself looking for the bodies laying on the ground. The saddest thing about this is the fact each of these things are happening in every country at this very moment and the cycle continues

Hi Andiroo, Black Pegasus great to see you guys doing another Ren reaction together. This story always gets me, Ren can story tell and write. I'm starting to notice with these reactions there has been more technical obs, its great. Awesome...👍☝️🖼☝️🎇😌

A lot of people missed the fact that Jenny was the same age as screech she's only 14! out on the streets in heels in the middle of the night 😮that's not a very good sign of what she was doing😢

Nooooo waaaay! Something legendary doth cometh!!

@Andrewyourpicture Ren has mentioned that he was not classically trained and that he can’t break the rules as he doesn’t know them. Which reminds me of a part of a one of my favorite books: We spent countless hours discussing the craft of it. How songs fit together. How chorus and verse play against each other, about tone and mode and meter. These were things I’d learned at an early age and thought about often. And though Denna was new to this study, in some ways that worked to her advantage. I’d learned about music since before I could talk. I knew ten thousand rules of melody and verse better than I knew the backs of my own hands. Denna didn’t. In some ways this hampered her, but in other ways it made her music strange and marvelous. . . . I’m doing a poor job of explaining this. Think of music as being a great snarl of a city like Tarbean. In the years I spent living there, I came to know its streets. Not just the main streets. Not just the alleys. I knew shortcuts and rooftops and parts of the sewers. Because of this, I could move through the city like a rabbit in a bramble. I was quick and cunning and clever. Denna, on the other hand, had never been trained. She knew nothing of shortcuts. You’d think she’d be forced to wander the city, lost and helpless, trapped in a twisting maze of mortared stone. But instead, she simply walked through the walls. She didn’t know any better. Nobody had ever told her she couldn’t. Because of this, she moved through the city like some faerie creature. She walked roads no one else could see, and it made her music wild and strange and free.

Just to clarify the Hi Ren one take discussion…the audio is all done in one take live (which was take 3 out of the 4 that recorded)…most of the video is from that third take they did, but for certain parts of the video, they used shots from the other takes (i.e. the close ups where he’s standing up).

Love music 123&4 Would love to see him back! That kid is super smart ✌🏼

The best part about you inviting the "young guy" in is that I believe his young mind has to be ON FIRE after this. And that's the whole thing that Ren brings about. Completely changing the game and the idea of what music and what the music video is. My guess is that this will help him be even more creative than I can already tell that he is. It's like a whole new world was opened to him. I'll be interested to see how he runs with it.

I knew Andiroo would like this one! Great reaction ❤ Since the last twitch stream, whenever I see the start of Violet's tale in the "hospital room" now all I can think about is how they bought a child's bed by mistake and notice how comically small it is 😂

I think his bard intros kind of tells the stories before he sings it. Especially in Violet’s tale. Listen again and see if you see/hear what I mean.

Hello Andy. Nice reaction with some great insights guys. Big congrats on 100k🦇

Love the reactions! I never noticed the focus part either (I have probably seen this trilogy about 50-100 times now). Thanks for pointing it out BP, much love, congrats once again on the 100k. Have a great day!

Never get tired of watching your reactions! Andy is one of my favorites of your guests!

I think he told Justin Hawkins that he has no idea what the rules of music even are. There's no rhyme or reason (pun intended) to how he writes music. He just comes up with stuff he likes and then finds clever ways to put it all together.

I love how much focus you put into watching a video you ve seen sozens of times. It leads you to notice yet new things

I love the conversations that come out of Andy's reactions. Now, if you could get Andy and Joe E Sparks in a reaction together with you for a few of Ren's pieces, that'd be tight.

Hi Ren is not 1 take per se, Sam said they used different take on the spoken work at the end, but the song itself is a 1 take.

LOL Andy, you got me as a new sub when you mentioned Skyrim. 🎶🔥😎💖 BP, great reaction! I absolutely love seeing you bring in new folks and introduce them to artists. Bless you, brother.

If you want to hear a great breakdown of this song go to Virgin rocks analysis that lady is a historian and delves into what ren does from the Medieval Times

Well done andy. You are right, Hi Ren has an edit. They had to edit to get one of the cameras off the tripod and into a hand held for the monologue at the end…. I’ve stated this on almost all of bps hi Ren reactions, lol

BP WE LOVE ANDIROO ❤❤❤❤ He needs to be on full time 🎉🎉

Love when Andiroo comes thru. The song you both collab'd on is great also!

Really love the reactions you two do!! Keep em coming

Ren definitely uses his environment for sound effects.

Give him the acoustic "Animal Flow"😂😅 🐆 on a 🚎

Loved it, Always Great, nice to see a shift in his music, this is my fav, like In Story telling Musically , love his play, he just captivates me in this whole trilogy !!!!💯 💯

Love your reactions with Andy!

Great review guys! Always great to hear Andy’s perspective. Thanks guys!

Yessss! Another Andiroo adventure! Love listening to you picking up on the musicality. Represent for us musos

This is a great reaction! Love it when you bring him in!

nice!!!!! Glad to see andy back!!!!

That is so great! Pls stay in touch!

To clear things up with the "one take" on Hi Ren: They did multiple One-Take-Shots (4 or 5 I think it was) and they had 1 cut in the version they used and this is right before the camera gets close to Ren near the end. It wasn't technically possible to pick the camera from the tripod when switching to the more shaky hand filmed stuff. So there it was cutted. Samuel explained that way better than me under one reaction video somewhere on youtube. Still impressive though.

Congratz on 100k. Well deserved

Never noticed he plays so much with tempo in Screech's tale before this. The signature is 3/4 for part of the intro, and then 4/4. But the tempo slides around kinda crazily- usually every time he changes voice, though the "bard" voice takes some of the load by stretching his slides. That's clever, because a lot of it is constantly very slightly increasing the tempo measure to measure, and the bard bleeds off some of that tension.

I love when you have Andiroo on, keep having him visit - always great convos & he knows so much! :D

Love Andyroo’s insights on this, always a pleasure to see you two react together x

I’m so very happy! Great choices here❤❤❤❤

Welcome back Andiroo! Great reaction once again guys 😎 Yes Money Games pt1 next, I think you will be suitably impressed 💜👍🏼

You got to 100k because you're bloody brilliant. I wish I'd found your channel much sooner. I reckon 200k subs will come this year. Totally deserved: you're that good.

Hellz yeah! Let’s go! 🎉

Great reaction!! More reaction with Andy!!

You can tell that Andy is a trained musician.

Yo its not even a Monday but I love it and I'm here for it

Great reaction guys... One Love ✊🏽

Andiroo--i hear you on the "pub music" call...first thing i thought was the minstrel from The Witcher, no? i still love that guy's tune, and Ren may be channeling that just a bit. the thing Ren does better than anyone i can think of is his variations on vocal inflection, pacing, and the force he uses in plucking and/or strumming on his guitar to share the immediacy and intensity of the moment in the more urgent parts of a given song. for instance, when it's revealed the Violet is preggers and breaks her silence...it's an urgency she uses to beg the doctor to save her baby. babies (but she didn't know it was two of them). musical theater directors would LOVE to have Ren as both writer AND performer because of all that. boy's got so many skills, and not just decent at a lot of things, but OUTSTANDING at all he does. you can tell, even, that if he narrowed his focus for awhile and worked just on guitar, he absolutely could become an absolute shredder.

Yeah NF story is amazing❤

Yay, finally a reactor has spotted the focusing of the camera with the eye lids lyric. Awesome

Remember, Hi Ren was done is a concrete enclosed space, a tightly controlled environment, that won’t have air noise to move through the mic, which is what you can hear here in this one take.

Glad to see Andiroo back again...that's awesome. I love all the guests!!

Love reactions with Andiroo - knew he would love this. He should definitely check out MG1. I also love watching BP going back to different Ren videos and picking out new elements each time - much like us as fans too - listening to other peoples ideas about what Ren’s thought processes were/may have been. Thanks for another great reaction. 🔥🔥

He was a busker..that's how he mastered FX..... not from expensive software..but from his ears in different environments.

So Andy's disbelief that Hi Ren is a one-take is interesting to me because I recently watched a reaction from a musician (not going to list their channel because I don't want people swarming the video to argue) who said that Hi Ren was absolutely recorded in a studio, just from the way it sounds. And if you pay attention to the difference in sound quality from the end of the song to the start of the monologue, there's definitely a difference in mic ambiance (I'm probably using the wrong words-I'm not a sound guy lol). That doesn't mean he's correct, or that Hi Ren isn't a live one take, but it did serve as a good reminder to me that there's things that the Ren fandom-and by extension, a lot of reactors-take as fact and spread around and fervently believe in ("Ren was signed to Sony Records and got dropped when he got sick" is a good example), but is, at best, a distortion of the truth (Ren was signed to a label owned by Sony, and their parting was mutual; you can see how the truth spins into the more dramatic "good guy/bad guy" version that gets spread around, but it paints a very inaccurate picture of what happened). I've got enough faith in Ren that if I heard him say Hi Ren was a live recording, one take video, that would absolutely settle the question for me (I don't think I've heard him comment at all on Hi Ren, but I've been lagging on all the interviews because they're so danged long lol). And his track record with obviously live one takes (Jenny/Screech, Money Game) makes me fairly happy to consider Hi Ren one as well unless proven otherwise. But it does give me pause when reactors with studio experience find that assertion to be dubious. Ultimately, it shouldn't really matter, right? Being a live one take or a recorded song with a matching video is a matter of technical execution, not artistic end result. The fandom flashes the "live one take" as a badge of honor, as if THAT is what will prove to people that it's an amazing song. No, it's an amazing song because it's an amazing song, not because there's something inherently "extra" about being a live one shot. I'd be really curious as to Andy's take on Ren's live collaborations with Chinchilla, Chalk Outlines and How To Be Me. Partly because they're great songs, and partly because I'd be curious about his opinion on the recording of those.

Thanks!

Oh yeah … this will be fire 🔥

I've come to the conclusion that Ren is the human version of the Narrator from Disney's Robin Hood.

Best reaction❤❤

I believe he started with jennys tale as he has said he was inspired by the death of a prostitute in a knifecrime artical . Jennys tale and Screetch's tale being written close together and violets tale some time after .

Ren is bringing back the art of the Bard. MF'er is a RL modern bard.

'Hi Ren' was a one-take per Ren. Or rather multiple one-takes and they chose the best. I think I will believe Ren if he tells us how they constructed the videos. Even 'Money Game I' was a one-take. However, per Ren there were over 100 actual takes before they got one they liked. 'Illest of Our Time' appears to not be a one-take. 'Suicide' was definitely not a one-take since he added on the 2nd half after discussion with others. Ren also has a live version of the Tales posted that is amazing. There was a clip of a video of a live version of 'Hi Ren' too but cannot find the full version of that song.

Great reaction video lads.....

Does anyone talk about the coin he drops into the guitar for the bullet hit sound? Genius!

Interesting reaction. But the thing that grabbed me was your idea about inheritance of these two kids. It has its sense. Now I see it too. Thank you👍🏼

Yes, awesome reaction with Andy, he adds soo much detail. Do Money Game!!!

I LOVE THIS!! I also believe that “Hi, Ren” was mostly one take, but there were cuts. His hand positions between when he said “newsflash” and started playing…it’s obvious. That was a cut. Also: the “chromatic” run was not actually even completely chromatic. And it is one of my favorite runs I’ve ever heard in my life. And I’m old. And stupid. And I’m needs a lover. I love this guest. And I love this channel. You guys make me love music so much more. I appreciate you so much. And I am so with your guest that this is probably not him classically trained. This is a dude like Edward Van Halen, who he obviously took creative lessons from for the violet’s tale video.

Great comments about the musicality from Andyroo. Bring him back for Money Game and then Losing It to lighten the mood 😎

OMG I LOVE BARD CORE ! Please do a reaction to get it on the map!

The bardcore theme is real. Solid callout there, I hadn't connected that.

You're the first person I've seen who has commented on the eye/focus thing. It was something I spotted when I first watched the video but have been surprised that despite watching so many reactions to it, no-one even saw fit to comment on it (which suggests they either didn't notice, or didn't realise that it was intentional).

Yey, AndiRoo! Money game, by all means, please!

Yessssssssssssss

I can't stop thinking about Jenny being only 14 yo and walking streets at night in high-heeled shoes. Such twisted fates for all three of them, really. This is the purest balladry and Ren is, among all the other things, a true bard. And one hell of a storyteller, indeed. Gee...

Late to this but I really like Andiroo's break down in terms of music theory, something I also appreciated in his reaction to Hi Ren.

For ‘Bard” think Alan o’dale in the Disney cartoon Robin Hood. A (medieval)singing minstrel telling news through song as he travels from village to village.