What are you listening to right NOW!
- Thread starter Jack Lynt
- Start date
Man plays the world's stupidest guitar. OK I admit. It is pretty cool.
Last edited:
lol, my guitar is one that this guy designed, but it's not bizarre like this one in the video. Steve is just bored because he mastered the one neck guitar 30 years ago. In case you've never heard of him, he's considered the best guitarist on earth. Sadly, like all musicians that have gone beyond the outer limits of theory and performance, most of his music is unlistenable. 15 albums of instrumental tracks so horrendous that one song played at moderate volume would be enough to disperse a pack of Cthulhu.
This song was unusually coherent for Steve, featuring a chorus that some people actually enjoyed.
The guy does build a great guitar though, and is said to be an extremely nice person. I bought and played basically every great guitar design over the years, and finally settled on one he built.
Last month, Idris Elba decided to become a singer. I was shocked when it wasn't terrible. It's actually a better version than Massive Attacks original.
Steve was actually in a movie once, though no one remembers. He played the Devil in this classic retelling of the story "The Devil went down to Georgia". In the film it appears that Daniel san is battling with Steve in a "guitar duel" but in reality, Steve played both parts.
Now that's a cool guitar. And yes, I had never heard of Steve Vai. (This side of Benny Goodman, my knowledge of popular music is pretty shallow.)
But reading and listening around a little, I see that I certainly should have. The guy certainly is virtuosic, and it's easy to see why he is a legend. I like a lot of it, and admire all of it. Cool that he worked and toured with Frank Zappa; both taking rock, taking metal guitar, somewhere beyond.
Last edited:
I agree. Not terrible. But it sounds like Idris is imitating someone, who I'm not sure, some American growling bluesy voice. But this is what the Brits do, starting with all those cute young English kids taking the world by storm by imitating Little Richard, Chuck Berry, etc.
Last edited:
She's really good, I particularly liked the gavotte in this piece. A really expressive player who is 100% into the music. Aside from the music, you can tell from the eyes. This is what it looks like when you're in the zone, you're not really looking at anything other than quick check to make sure your hand lands in the next position accurately. Her entire brain is listening to the music and considering how to express the next phrase.
Yup. I don't know if it is just Bach, but you see these beatific expressions on musicians faces when performing him. Like this girl.
I like that the Netherlands Bach Society (making beautiful videos of All of Bach--god bless the NBS) picked a kid to do this invention--fitting since Bach wrote it as an instructional exercise for his son, Friedemann, when Friedemann was around this age.
Anyway, I thought of the lute, on the topic of complicated guitars. It kind of defines an aspect of what baroque is--complex and beautiful. As a guitar player, can you imagine playing it?
Last edited:
I used to play Bach etudes on classical guitars in college. They are of course really good for developing a working knowledge of theory. I've played quite a few guitars, that one is I think just an 8 string with a half dozen drone strings or similar. It's basically a regular fretboard, with 10 steps extra range like a baritone piano sort of, and then the strings above are basically a mini harp. You can play this harp part by just training your thumb in 6 motions that you can cue. The tricky part is landing back on the fretboard strings with timing after picking the harp part. Also with these extended range instruments, they look cool but almost all the music is written for standard instrument range, so even with the very best 8-10 string players in the world, the extra strings go mostly unused. Also it's a long reach across more than 7 strings.
ahh. I see, thanks for the info. Still, it must be a bitch to tune. I count 26 of those knob thingies.
Last edited:
Yeah, you need to be quite good to play such an instrument, and yes stuff like that is extremely annoying to tune, because as you tune the strings each string slightly detunes all the other strings, according to it's size and location, so you have to tune a 6 string 2-4 times to really get it locked, and it just gets worse as you add strings. Those low harp strings probably throw all the other strings a bit out when it's tuned for example.
Bach himself probably enjoyed the challenge, in writing for the lute. He tuned all his instruments himself, and was (of course) expert at it, from the great pipe organs to the notoriously hard to keep in tune harpsichord, famously inventing (or at least refining) a tuning system for that instrument in which every major and minor key could be played equally well, and demonstrating it (eventually twice) in his collection of keyboard pieces, The Well-Tempered Clavier (The Well-Tuned Keyboard).
Last edited: