…a guy at work sent me this link – technically brilliant, fun arrangement – but it ain’t guitar…
Reminds me of the video by that genius ukelele player, Jake Shima-something, who absolutely nailed While My Guitar Gently Weeps which was a “hit” a year or so back…
Sure looks like guitar. Two of them, even.
“ain’t guitar” as in “The music heard is coming from another source, and the performer is just pantomiming on the instruments- it’s all a hoax!”
or
“ain’t guitar” as in “That ain’t what I calls Rock n’ Roll, Hendrix must be spinning in his grave!”
???
I would like to second Mike Fun’s “looks like guitar, two of them.”
I’ll third that and I wouldn’t necessarily call it stunt playing, it is a technique known as free hands. I suppose using two guitars makes it a little like a stunt.
Her is about a dozen very cool videos on youtube.
Are any of these “guitar”?
Edit: My link is to all the ZackKim videos that GO mentioned.
I wonder if the OP considers a two-hand tapping arpeggio as playing “guitar”. It’s similar to the technique in the video in that the player does no picking. I’ve never liked the technique but I wouldn’t say it’s not valid guitar playing.
“It ain’t guitar” = Just a silly comment on my part - but I tend to mentally group folks into at least 3 categories:
Those who play guitar in a more traditional manner, picking/strumming and fingering
Those who use the guitar as a music-producing instrument/device, but don’t play it in a traditional way, including Stanley Jordan, Kaki King, Charlie Hunter, Stick Players -
Hybrids, with EVH, Tom Morello, Adrian Belew and others as folks who bridge both categories mid-song as examples that come to mind
This guy falls into category 2 - so from my standpoint, as a person from category 1, I regard it as a curiosity and nothing more.
But the only thing that really matters is if the music is good and I think that in this situation the answer is Yes…in a curious sort of way…
The Canon in D Zack Kim plays is exceedingly dull. That’s a piece that can stir emotions even when played poorly and yet his performance is so uninteresting that I couldn’t listen to the whole thing. I listened to a few other pieces and in every case the music would have been better served by a different style of playing. It’s a neat stunt but I wouldn’t want to listen to any of it more than once.
I have a musician friend who wrote a few compositions in which she plays 12-string guitar and Celtic harp simultaneously. The guitar is open tuned, and she picks it while playing the harp with the other hand. She developed the technique when she had no decent recording equipment and was trying to figure out how the two instruments would sound together.
Perhaps a bit of a stunt, but audiences always seem to be enthralled both at the feat and the music. The resonance effects are pretty cool.
I think I would have to agree with WordMan. The kid is playing piano on a guitar more than he’s playing guitar.
Agreed on Canon - I gave up around the 2 minute mark - but I did rather like his Fur Elise (although it got a little sloppy at the end) and ahem Super Mario Bros.
One thing I did like about his Canon, though, was that it led me to this guy’s rant about Pachelbel. Funniest thing I’ve seen on Youtube in quite a while.
IMHO, it’s guitar playing. Technically impressive (at least it would take me a long time to learn to do it) but not very engaging guitar playing. As the thread title says “Stunt” guitar.
Jake Shimabukuro. There’s a ton of his stuff on YouTube.
Yeah, he’s good.
Note that the videos are in chronological order, and the more recent ones, e.g. Misty are quite musical.