Van Canto

van Canto is a metal band from Germany, founded in 2006 and composed of five singers and a drummer. Although the group is often classified as an a cappella ensemble, because their vocalists pretend to be/act in the stead of other instruments, which is a hallmark of the style, "a cappella" means "without instruments," so their drummer technically disqualifies them. Let's just say they're half and half.

van Canto fuses a cappella with heavy/power metal, creating what they call "a capella hero metal". While only two of the five singers perform the lead vocals, the other three will instead use their voices to imitate the guitars and the bass, using amplifiers to sound closer to the original instruments.

• Dennis Schunke (Sly) – lead vocals
• Inga Scharf – higher lead vocals
• Stefan Schmidt – lower rakkatakka vocals, wahwah solo guitar vocals
• Ross Thompson – higher rakkatakka vocals
• Ingo Sterzinger (Ike) – lowest dandan vocals
• Bastian Emig – drums

Van Canto provides examples of the following tropes:

• A Storm Is Coming: The title of their first album is A Storm to Come.
• Beyond the Impossible: well, they can't possibly cover anything surp- Master of Puppets!?
• Cover Version: Including "The Bard's Song" by Blind Guardian, "Stormbringer" by Deep Purple, "Rebellion" by Grave Digger, "Fear of the Dark" by Iron Maiden, "Kings of Metal" by Manowar, "Battery" and "Master of Puppets" by Metallica, "Primo Victoria" by Sabaton, and "Wishmaster" by Nightwish
  • Also, they have an Interview where they did a shortened version of The Trooper by Iron Maiden.
• Crowning Moment of Awesome: Well, here we have an A Capella Metal Group. That sounds great! That's a CMOA in and of itself.
• Filk Song: Seeing as they refer to their music as Hero Metal... Songs like Last Night of the Kings come to mind.
• Heavy Mithril: Some of their music comes closer to this genre.
  • Their song "Frodo's Dream" definitely qualifies.
• Heavy Meta: One of their songs is To Sing a Metal Song. They also covered Kings of Metal.
• Instrumentals: Inverted. Normally they have drums playing during their songs, but a few of their tracks have no drums at all, Last Night of the Kings for example.
• Letters 2 Numbers: One to Ten features this in the lyrics
• Neoclassical Punk Zydeco Rockabilly: Power Metal+A Cappella
  • Played on rakkatakkas.
• Power Metal
• Shirtless Scene: Bastian.
• The Smurfette Principle/Ms. Fanservice: Inga Scharf, lone female, and has joined the countless other ranks of attractive female metal singers.
  • To be fair though, she does have the pipes to back it up!
• Soprano and Gravel: Dennis and Inga.