This week’s music-marketing-inspired-man-crush comes courtesy of violinist Gil Shaham.

I wish more people in the classical music world had more confidence in the difference between taking music seriously and taking themselves seriously.

I also really like the way that it tricked me into learning a whole bunch of things about music without even noticing it.

I’m more readily impressed by home-made video than by big-budget productions. I think it has something to do with Jurassic Park. When I was at school, they made dinosaurs come to life on screen. They used some sort of machine to do it. In my head, the dinosaur machine comes in a big shiny flight case, and they keep it on the same truck as the arc lamps, the stunt car that rolls over, the big camera crane and the exploding bags of fake blood. So, my childish logic goes, if they’ve got proper lighting, they’ve got a dinosaur machine, and they can make anything happen on the screen.

I don’t have proper lights, a stunt car or a dinosaur machine, so I can only film things that really happened. That’s why I’m way more impressed by a classical music youtube video that looks like somebody made it at home. If you’ve got lights, you’re competing with dinosaurs and you’d better come up with something cooler than Paganini – but if you don’t even own a tripod, then that thing you did with your ukulele was actually pretty badass…