Get Ready To Shred
There are many great technical guitar players in the world: Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan (RIP), Yngwie Malmsteen, Carlos Santana--and often times these guitar gods have the ego to match (especially Malmsteen). Enter the "shred" video. What is a shred video, you might ask? A shred video takes concert footage of one (or more) of these incredible players and overdubs the sounds a talentless air guitar master might make if handed a real guitar, with hilarious results. Guitars are often accented by keyboard, drums, and vocals where visually appropriate (not to mention enthusiastic crowd sounds). Think of it as a kind of Mystery Science Theater 3000 for music. Watching Eric Clapton play something that might generously be called free jazz almost made me pee my pants. Witness:
And it doesn't stop with Clapton. With a simple YouTube search for "shreds" you can find lots of examples to keep you entertained for hours. Here are some other performances of note: Led Zeppelin, Steve Vai, Santana, Creed, and Slash.
~ Alan Wiley
Tony on April 25, 2008 at 03:45 PM
you know what would be really cool? if it was actually clapton playing and it sounded good.