The guy who made it is promising to make a run of more in depth episodes digging into the secrets of super fast metal picking if we give him some money. Go on, give him a tenner.
In fact the second, more instructional season, interests me less. I have never really been a shredder.
I was very interested in what the series had to say about the difficulties of learning to play, the mystique surrounding fast guitar playing, just how mainstream widdly guitar was, the process of transcribing and just how different learning guitar in his era was to the one today. It also gave a charming reminder of the naive and quaint attitude of rock players (at least of that time) to anything beyond Jimmy Page style pentatonic blues box playing.
Fast guitar in the 90s and 00s
To give some perspective, I started guitar in 1992. By the sounds of it, Troy started around 1986. That's only 6 years, but by that point the explosion in guitar related teaching resources - accurate tab, magazines and VHS instructional Hot Licks videos (yay!) had changed the landscape forever. Nonetheless there was still a bit of a mystique around what was fast becoming termed 'fret wank' - both from admirers and detractors.By 93-94 (when I got my first electric) the only shredder on the pop horizon was Nuno Bettencourt (who, as Troy details, had become a pop star for reasons entirely unconnected to his mastery of right hand tapping.) There were the metallers - but metal, like mainstream rock and pop would soon reject technical guitar almost completely.
In this transitional environment, information on technique was available freely in magazines from players like Shaun Baxter who gone precisely through that tortuous process outlined in Troy's video. Thus I learned to sweep pick by studying magazine articles. I didn't even hear any Vai, Satriani or Yngwie until college in the late 90's by which point I found much of the music hilariously naff. The music was completely moot - the technique was an end in itself!
This brings us to the politics of going 'widdly widdly squee' on the electric guitar. The relationship between popular music and guitar technique in the 90's and early 00's is very loaded - and dominated for around 20 years by the image of the priapic, strutting ludicrousness of 80's hair metal and its attendant guitar soloing style. The whole thing remained more or less beyond the pale even as synth pop enjoyed it's revival.
By the late 90's poor old Steve Vai had somehow gone from being the guitar mag darling to becoming the guitar mag whipping boy, with legions of mainstream players queuing up to berate him in print. Quite what Vai, who seems like a really nice guy, had done to deserve this apart from prance around in Lycra and do unseemly things with a wang bar at a time when it was considered both Big and Clever to do so, I cannot say. His main sin seems to be to have been ever so slightly behind the fashion curve, unlike Eddie, who managed to avoid the worst of the hating.
Would it be too much to say that the say unfortunate sexual politics, and the general capitalist attitudes of the 80s were symbolised in the image of the lycra clad, cucumber down the trousers, pointy guitar wielding guitar strangler? 90's bands were very keen to distance themselves from all of this. It's strange to think that scales or arpeggios could be politicised, but I guess they were and got chucked out alongside the outfits.
Today
Perhaps most importantly, the guitar is first and foremost the tool of a songwriter, and is likely to remain so.Rock guitar itself is terminally out of fashion. A Fender Strat excites no one apart from 12 year olds. Increasingly new guitars resemble the pretty but terrible instruments built in Italy in the 1960s or something you might dig up in a thrift shop. Retro, junky and vintage are the in things. Django is now cooler than Hendrix.
70's rock guitar is the music of blokes in their 50s and 60s. 80's rock guitar is pretty much forgotten. There's nothing 'cool' about it. Electric guitar is about the least sexy instrument you can play. It is commonplace.
I think the 90's democratised fast guitar technique too - most of the working players I know have great chops by 80's standards. A few are cutting edge technically and can play stuff no one else can. Fast guitar playing is now simply less remarkable than it was - just what you'd expect, in fact, given the explosion in guitar education materials and courses. (There is a bad side to this IMHO - more on this elsewhere. I believe Troy's struggle and hard work has value in itself)
They are many players and guitar teachers now who came up through Vai/Satriani culture and are actually much too young to remember, say, Dokken on MTV. They, like me, learned guitar at a time where the technical players existed in a parallel universe as divorced from popular culture as Morris Dancing. These players usually end up looking for playing challenges completely outside the mainstream when they realise that most bands don't want a super fast guitar solo every song. Or any song.
These seem to be the main outlets for bored guitar players:
1) In contemporary jazz. Usually technique here is a servant to the compositions and the improvisation, so players here have a different mindset, but as a rule many jazz players on the scene hail from a technical rock guitar type background. This has had a very interesting effect on jazz guitar playing in general. Sad to say, this is usually music played for other jazz musicians.
2) Instrumental rock and guitar porn fusion. Often on the clinic circuit - that is demonstrative music for those who play the same instrument. You now need to be technically astonishing or a session legend, it seems.
3) Gypsy jazz, bluegrass and other virtuoso forms of acoustic music. Shred for the craft ale crowd. Probably the most commercial option at present.
4) Classical. The least viable option for most rock players as it requires a completely different technique.
5) Tuition - passing on the disease!
There are some odd resurgences - Guthrie Govan for example toured with Dizzie Rascal a few years back, and has set a precedent for live widdly rock guitar in contemporary UK music.
Because of these factors, I think that the excesses of hair metal are starting to fade in people's minds. I hear a lot of musicians on other instruments praising, say, Allan Holdsworth, Eddie Van Halen or Frank Gambale. People no longer react angrily to displays of instrumental prowess, but rather respond to it in the spirit of fun. That's surely a good thing?
Coming soon - Widdly Widdly Widdly Widdly Part II. FWIW - my thoughts on the gory details of playing fast!
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