How Hard is "Playing God" by Polyphia? (Reacting to your comments)

[Music] foreign [Music] hey guys in today's video I'm going to be reacting to a bunch of your comments on my recent cover of polyphia's playing God on my cool new loot [Music] this song was super fun to play and I want to thank all almost 3 000 of you who took the time to vote for me in polyphia's cover contest I had a pretty last minute entry but I ended up in fourth place so thank you all by the way if you're wondering what is this crazy instrument I'm holding you can learn all about it here now let's read some comments imagine a Renaissance Mosh Pit 10 times as brutal but no Distortion heck yes Mateo asked is this piece generally hard for you since he's seen me play complicated pieces before and I have to say yeah this was tough number one because you know this wasn't meant to fit on a loot and I thought when I first heard the piece maybe this is one of those pieces that are you know really amazing to watch and look very technically complicated but in reality maybe are not as hard as it looks unfortunately some of the hardest music like Bach for example doesn't actually come off as that flashy or fancy and it can take a lifetime to play that music well uh and yet people don't necessarily perceive the difficulty or understand just how complex that music is [Music] and then other times you can play kind of noodle things which maybe aren't too difficult I've never tried this eruption on an arch loot um things like that or maybe kind of fast slurs like the whole free bird solo is basically this type of thing um and it's really not that difficult but yet it's a crowd pleaser so usually I'm kind of suspicious when I hear something like this polyphia song is this actually difficult or is this something that maybe comes across as difficult but maybe is not I can attest having spent just a week or two trying to learn it uh this was hard foreign [Music] is the lead guitarist of the band I'm not sure exactly who wrote it I'm not really familiar with the band to be honest I stumbled across this song randomly on the internet thought it was cool saw people doing covers and thought hey I wonder if this this works on a loot when I was first trying it on loot I was running into a lot of walls because there's a bunch of effects on the guitar that worked really well that didn't work so well on on the loot this song has a lot of harmonics harmonics are produced by touching certain Frets lightly and getting a bell-like effect and for whatever reason they seem to come out easier on a single strung guitar loots are generally double strung and I had this one double strung but I found myself going to single strings to make the harmonics easier to play so that was one concession I made it also helped with the fast slurs and things one other thing I did to make this piece more playable on a loot was I took the third string which is usually an A and I brought it up a half step that way the top six strings are the same nominal tuning as a guitar but just in a different key the reason I did that is because I felt the chord shapes that he used were essential to keep because of those harmonics because he often plays a chord and then he grabs the harmonics that are right there in that shape and if you change one string you lose those harmonics so there's all these cool harmonic moments like [Music] love that Eddie asked uh if playing God or the band polyphia in general uh like fits my personal taste if I if I like them or if I just did this for you guys I don't really listen to a lot of math Rock but a lot of you guys have been following my channel for a while might know that I started off in metal music I grew up playing rock and metal I had long hair and I thought that's what I was gonna do forever I still listened to metal foreign [Music] I definitely wasn't raised on classical music I got into that later in my life and so I still listened to metal and enjoy it polyphia just never made it on my radar really until recently through this the song playing God it's not exactly my cup of tea not my favorite style polyphia is very heady in terms of the theory the terms of the the technique it's very technique driven music and that way it's really fascinating to listen to but it's not exactly what I would listen to all the time clearly great musicians so my compliments to the band uh you guys are super talented and the kingdom was shocked for no one in the Royal Court had ever had their face melted by elutinous before sadly he was accused of Witchcraft and put to the stake I also had a bunch of comments asking how long it took me to learn this and it was something like a week or two uh on and off I just occasionally would pick up my Loot and kind of try to memorize it and mostly I worked at it very very slowly generally anything that you want to play very fast has to be mastered incredibly slow and perfectly with absolute economy of motion minimum effort and once you can Master it slowly and work out all the details you can work it up to the next level and once you master that level you can work it out to the next level maybe that's bpms on the metronome you know 10 PPM at a time or something like that at the beginning I worked as slowly as my patients would allow for looking for absolute perfection [Music] so for example I didn't like my slur [Music] hardster with the pinky there we go [Music] it was really hard to get all the harmonics crisp and I spent a lot of time especially on those to make them perfect when playing God could actually get you excommunicated I was laughing when reading these comments because so many of them are about how people did not expect me to do this I think on YouTube I have this Persona as this like classical nerdy guy uh which is funny to me because I grew up as you know a rock musician like I was saying earlier and so first and foremost I listened to a variety of styles and I don't think any style is better than another one I think each style has something to um give the listener something emotionally or intellectually that it offers that no other style can give the exact same cocktail of of emotions I would really encourage all of you to take in as much music as possible don't limit Yourself by only listening to a small bandwidth of what's out there and say no no I only listen to rock like I said when I was early in high school Listen to Everything I found out that I like Mongolian throat singing [Music] highlight fomenko music from Spain I like loot music from the 16th century [Music] thank you [Music] I mean all these things were surprises to me I didn't think I was gonna like Opera I mean I thought Opera sounded um silly when I first heard it but over time I actually gave it a chance I understood it uh I found myself crying while listening to Opera that's not an emotion that I thought I had within me I never thought I'd be somebody who cried listening to music but that is the result of listening to understanding and allowing yourself to just experience that style [Music] foreign [Music] Rock doesn't give you that same feeling and so I think music different styles offer something emotionally something intellectually or maybe a combination thereof so for me this polyphia cover was first and foremost about having fun uh kind of a technical challenge could I even play this on loot why not but actually I ended up really liking the process and now I take the song when you've got a woo a chambermaid at 7 59 PM but have a math Rock gig at 8 pm Samuel noticed that there were a lot of harmonics in this song and he wondered if harmonics existed in the Renaissance or the Baroque Period you know I've played music dating back to at least the 15th century all the way to the present the first time I see written clearly indicated harmonics are just after 1800 you definitely start getting them incorporated into compositions and again harmonics are these cool bell-like effects they're really beautiful so it seems obvious that at some point people would have discovered them but like I said the first ones I've ever seen written down in a piece were in the early 1800s although it's important to mention that just because the first surviving example we have of written down harmonics as far as I know is in the early 19th century this doesn't mean people weren't doing it before in fact it's likely that that wasn't the first time someone tried it it's just the first time someone wrote it down it's so obvious to I think stumble upon harmonics but clearly they weren't being used a lot or at least they never really mentioned for example in the Renaissance As far as I know I had a bunch of comments about the fact that I didn't play a bunch of the the song like all the fast solo stuff but a couple people realized why for example a channel writes I was waiting for you to play the fast part but then I realized you didn't have enough Frets and that's exactly right loots typically didn't have that many Frets on the body they had tied on gut Frets these are Frets that we can slant and move to do cool tuning systems called temperaments if you want to find out more about those cool temperaments you can watch my video on that subject but when you get to the the body at some point you went into the body and then you can't tie around gut Frets anymore so sometimes they would glue on pieces of wood onto the actual soundboard the same piece of wood is the top but they usually only would do a few uh two or three this instrument is a little strange in that regard it has a lot of Frets more more than normal it has 12 Frets until it hits the body which is which is a lot more than historically they did usually and then it has a total of 14 Frets which is again more than historical but still with only 14 Frets the whole solo sits up here [Music] and it wasn't like I was gonna try to play it there liquid Flames writes how did you get so much volume out of those little movements in your hand it looks like I'm barely moving [Music] this is a general principle everyone can use in finger style playing but actually in all guitar playing or even piano playing um basically the phrase that we should remember is economy of motion what that means is don't waste movement only move as much as necessary for healthy movement with good sound production and no more so for example when playing an arpeggio a very beginner mistake would be to for example pluck with the arm their arm actually moves when they when they pluck the string but of course this takes the hand away and now the next note that has to be plucked has to be found again and then you have to find the next note and this takes time which slows you down if you want to play fast you have to stay close at some point I came up with a little phrase for my students the faster you play the closer you stay so when you pluck you can work to follow through with each pluck like you're closing your hand like this store says a pluck is just closing your hand one finger at a time right so you can follow through with each pluck closing the hand mostly moving from the large knuckle right you have three Knuckles you're moving from the large one not the middle knuckle is not the tip so if you move like that with great economy of motion and a still hands [Music] you can play very fast of course the same principles apply to the left hand beginners often move their fingers something like this you know up and down away from the Frets keep your hands very close keep your friends close and your fingers closer so when you play foreign you shouldn't be seeing giant movements from your hand everything should be very close and your fingers are moving almost imperceptibly from the outside imagine being lost in a huge Dark Castle and then suddenly you hear this playing you look and in the corner sits the vampire looking at you while playing this that bass note at the one minute Mark gented me to outer space [Music] tuning of these low bass strings so there's a whole secondary neck kind of there's one instrument on this neck and then one instrument on the on the upper neck and the whole point of having all of these strings open that we don't actually touch with our left hand is to have a scale in open strings we play only with our thumb DJ says oh my God that rosette is incredible he's referring to this here the sound hole decoration which we actually call a rose on a loot the rosette is usually the the classical guitar version which is an open sound hole with a little decoration around it a rosette but this is a rose which is a full sound hole beautiful decoration usually made out of some type of paper on my my broke guitar it's actually made of goat skin as far as I understand and through my conversations with luthier's the beautiful rose doesn't actually impact the sound it's just purely aesthetic it's about making the loop more beautiful so thank you guys for all the comments there were many of them that were just kind many that were in thought provoking and intriguing about you know how did I do things how did I approach things why did I do them the way I did and then many of them that were just hilarious so please keep the amazing comment sections going I always try to answer as many of them as I can before we go if you like my videos the easiest way to help me make me more of them is to like And subscribe for those of you who are interested in learning a pluck instrument I have lots of educational opportunities on the internet for you the first is I have an online classical guitar course which is a beginner course it's called classical guitar Pro it's six hours of videos of me teaching what I've taught hundreds of students in private lessons but now you can learn my method from the comfort of your own home for those of you who want private lessons weekly on Zoom from an expert teacher I have an online music school called arpeggiato this is a school for All Things That Go pluck so we have teachers who can teach you classical guitar finger style guitar electric Jazz Flamenco Ood ukulele loots the orbo broke guitar you name it so please do check out ourpaganto.com and until next time I just want to say thank you to all of you who keep coming back to watch my videos I have a lot more on the way so stay tuned and I'll see you next time [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Brandon Acker

Views: 429,279

Keywords: reaction, my reaction, playing god, polyphia, cover, lute, playing god cover, goat, brandon acker, tim Henson, guitar, acoustic guitar, guitar cover, lute cover, music, polyhia cover, brandon acker lute, brandon lute, archlute, steve vai, rob scallon, classical guitar, baroque, shred, virtuoso guitar, shred guitar, music cover, guitarra, chitarra, acker guitar, brandon guitar, theorbo, polyphony, playing cover, playing god acoustic, playing god unplugged, playing god tim henson

Id: eSeiau2g5M4

Length: 16min 26sec (986 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 24 2022