On September 24, 2026, former Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman performed piano for over 150 rescued moon bears at the Animals Asia sanctuary in Vietnam. In contrast, a North Carolina man used metal guitar riffs and pinch harmonics to scare off Black Bears earlier this year. In a video posted to Instagram on April 22, 2026, Andy M. Phail used his guitar and a half-stack guitar amp on his porch in North Carolina. For those unfamiliar with the term, a half-stack includes a speaker cabinet and a separate amplifier head mounted on top. Together, they produce a heavy guitar sound, loud enough for genres like heavy metal.

In the video caption, Phail explained, “Dude, since these dudes broke into my Jeep and ate 5 chocolate cakes, they will not leave my complex alone. Halfstack vs da bears, (I think they call her stumps cause she has 3 legs).” Playing metal riffs on his porch worked, driving the bears back into the woods behind the dumpster.

Viewers took to the comments to point out a hilarious minor detail. It soon became the focal point of the video. The guitarist appears to have an ankle monitor attached to his right ankle. Viewers joked, with comments such as “The ankle monitor makes this go harder” and “The ankle monitor is there for the bear’s protection.” Another commenter hilariously referred to the ankle monitor as the “Irish Rolex”. Given this minor detail, it now makes sense why the guitarist is safely positioned on the porch, aside from the obvious threat of a bear. It adds to the overall success of the guitar playing, driving the bears away from a safe distance.

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Other Instances Where Instruments Have Been Used To Scare Away Bears

This isn’t the only time music has been used to drive away bears. In 2024, a trumpet player used this technique at Lake Tahoe in California when a bear got too close for comfort. Mateo Mavero Duran, trumpet player for The Outlaw Mariachi Band, whaled on the trumpet, defending their campsite. Much like the video from earlier this year, this successfully scared the bear away. With these three examples, we can easily determine that bears don’t like heavy metal or mariachi. However, they do respond and take interest in classic piano playing.

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Power metal can be a challenging genre for vocalists. With all the high registers they have to hit and whatnot. For ex-Kamelot singer Roy Khan, after years of singing, he’s revealed that he can no longer perform some of his biggest songs the way he used to.

In an October 2026 interview with El Cuartel Del Metal, Khan—who is currently singing with Conception—discussed his “The Black Halo And Beyond” tour. The trek, which traverses Latin America, finds Khan performing tracks from Kamelot’s iconic The Black Halo album, along with other songs from his storied career.

Former Kamelot vocalist Roy Khan admits that it’s hard for him to still sing the way he did as a younger performer

During the conversation, Khan admitted that some of his songs are much more challenging to perform these days. “You can’t really hear it,” he said, as transcribed by Blabbermouth. “What we do with the songs is we take some of them down one or two half steps, depending on how tricky they are for me to sing these days. And then it’s like being back when my voice, my register, was a little bit higher.”

“So, that’s how we deal with it,” he continued. “You have drop-tune pedals now that you can use on bass and guitars, and that’s how it works. So a lot of the songs are not in the same key as back in the day. Which before was a problem because you couldn’t really tune guitars and bass, let’s say 20 years ago, in a way that wouldn’t mud up the sound and make things sound ugly. But nowadays, the technology is so good that you can do that. Which is a big help. Otherwise, I would have had to structure the lines a little bit differently from what I used to do it.”

Roy Khan is currently playing Latin America on a legacy tour of his older Kamelot material

Khan eventually weighed in on how his changing voice has impacted how he crafts new music. “I always like to push myself to the edge of what I can do on records,” he said. “On albums, I kind of like being on the edge of what I can do. And I haven’t really gone for the really, really high stuff since way back with Conception.”

“On Flow [1997], for example, the last album we did in the ’90s, there were no like really super-high vocals. So that ended with ‘In Your Multitude’ [1995] way back,” he recalled. “So, I don’t really feel that I think any differently from what I did back then. I just naturally came to the conclusion that my voice sounded better in a slightly lower range.

Khan finally added, “Of course, there’s a lot of people that will wanna hear me do the really high stuff still, which I can do, but I don’t have that… It’s more airy, it’s more falsetto-like than what it was on the very first Conception records.”

Photo by Steve Thorne/Redferns

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