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Strictly Advanced Guitar Techniques - Shredding
Beatmag's regular technical columnist James Spectrum (AKA Jari Salo of Pepe Deluxe)
While I do think that there should be very little reason for a person, especially a single one living in a city, to own a car, I also regard the concept of 'burnouts' as one of the greatest cultural achievements of the 20th century.
Here are a few nice examples of reaching out to make the day (or night) a bit brighter for ones fellow man. Consider this: If you cancel your yearly trip to Torremolinos, you can burn quite a few gallons of gasoline on burnouts and still call it an 'environmental choice'. However, good things don't come cheap. We all know that almost every car ad is desperately trying to convince you there's a beast under that hood but there's no escape from the fact that the chances of a little tin can having any relation to a Real Entertainment Car T are about as good as mine to sport a perm. Again.
While checking out the clip you probably noticed that there's some backing music that's unfortunately somewhat obscuring the beautiful roars of the engines. Do not blame the artist though, as he (Paul Gilbert) came up with the most genius way of playing the guitar since Spinal Tap's Nigel used a violin as a bow: Paul used a drill with three picks on the end of it!
That must be the closest way of doing burnouts with any instrument: lots of unnecessary noise and immature fun. Often followed by a good amount of smoke. I've heard a rumor that there was serious discussion among the members of the Nobel committee to give the guy a prize. If anyone knows which one, please contact me.
Some time ago we, being a group obsessed with sounds rather than with any sort of 'musical values', felt a strong subconscious urge to follow Paul's path.
We built special triangular guitar picks with fastening screws on them, sent them to guitar wizard Mika Tyyska and then went to see him a few days later to do some recording. Mika had done some pre-production work by burying his guitar strings in a flowerpot and watering them twice a day. This is an old and trusted method of aging the strings for that smooth vintage tone, and it's been often used during the winter when the ground is frozen and/or the wildlife is hunting among the human settlements.
Once again careful preparation paid off: the combination of hearing the sweet sound of drill-guitar and seeing Mika's special anniversary Iron Maiden poster brought tears to our eyes and made the hairs on the back of our arms stand up!
When the warm-ups with the drill were done, it was time to really engage the hyperdrive. Slowing down the tape recorder to half speed, we asked Mika to put the drill away and do some of his own ninja-style one string guitar-acrobatics.
There's no point in giving a detailed explanation of the playing technique as this is one of those 'need to know' basis things and unless you're born to shred, you don't really need to know. If you know what 'shred' means you're already wayyy too deep in guitarology.
Anyways, what we were aiming at was emulating another 1980s sonic sensation, the swirling chords so common with Commodore 64 games. Due to the fact that the synth in C-64 only had three voices, the programmers used arpeggios (playing the notes of a chord one at the time) that were so fast the separate notes sort of blended into one chord.
The geeks did it with a single oscillator while we aimed at doing the same with one string. After recording a few takes the tape speed was returned back to normal (thus doubling the speed of the recorded guitar), and it was time to listen to the results. Not bad! The only problem was that even at half-speed Mika was already almost as fast as the computer! But don't take my word for it. Listen for yourself.
Sound clips (right click to save)
Drill Guitar
C-64 arpeggio chords followed by normal + double speed
guitar
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