“Miming over technical stuff cause you can’t actually play it… I think that’s f**king s**t”: Rabea Massaad slams the “endless pursuit of perfection” that grips guitar culture
In the age of social media, one perfectly executed shredding clip can transform a guitarist’s life. In the cases of Machine Gun Kelly guitarist Sophie Lloyd and The Smashing Pumpkin’s Kiki Wong, going viral even has the potential to skyrocket some to rockstardom.
However, Rabea Massaad believes that the constant pursuit of success has lead to a rise in “fake” guitar playing in online videos.
In a new YouTube video, Massaad explains how this “endless pursuit of perfection” has almost normalised a culture of “miming” in social media clips, with many guitarists pretending to play pieces they’re not actually capable of performing.
“What’s the point in writing something so difficult that you can’t even play all the way through?” he asks. “Miming over the technical stuff because you can’t actually play it, I think that that’s fucking shit.”
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While he doesn’t name any guitarists, he notes how plenty of online riffers have been exposed recently for “faking what they’re doing and getting a big name off it”, whether that’s earning followers, money or even signature guitars.
Of course, miming your way through a guitar solo has its time and place – top tier guitarists have been miming their way through music video shoots for years. However, the difference is when a social media star is pretending to be performing technical licks “off the cuff” live. “Playing insane guitar parts suggesting that it is in the moment… I think that that’s misleading,” Massaad says.
As more impossibly perfect clips circulate, it also raises the standards of guitar playing to unrealistic levels. He notes how this “unobtainable level of technicality that doesn’t really exist in the real world” could have dire consequences on the next generation of guitarists.
To illustrate his point, Massaad imagines a young guitarist watching a perfect viral clip, assuming they “have to reach that level” to be good. Little do they know, Massaad says, the guitarist on their screen hasn’t even “reached that level” of “unobtainable perfection” they’re pretending to perform.
However, that kid might not clock if someone is pretending, leading to them giving up at the first hurdle, thinking “it’s not worth the effort because they’re never going to get that good”.
“It feels shit to basically feel like you’re not good enough, that you have to [re-record something] so many times just to get it right for this one minute clip,” Massaad says. “It’s exhausting.”
As Massaad notes, some of the best guitarists fumble here and there. The imperfections are what add “soul” to your performing. He points to Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt as an example: “There are plenty of live videos out there of him making mistakes and playing bad notes and being a bit sloppy… but it’s cool because he’s performing and he’s loving it.”
“Just embrace the imperfections,” he says. “Some of the best solos and best performances out there have imperfections. It’s part of being human!”
Faking clips for social media has been a hot topic as of late. YouTuber Jacobra Records even released a 40-minute-long video alleging that viral Japanese guitarist Ichika Nito mimes in some of his online performance videos.
Considering Nito is a high-profile guitarist online, with Unprocessed’s Manuel Gardner Fernandes even picking him out as a viral shredder to check out last month, the claims sparked a frenzy online. Fellow YouTuber Charles Berthoud added his own video response musing over the allegations, reflecting on where miming can sometimes be acceptable.
He argues that it all comes down to intention. If you just want to share a track, or show off an interesting riff you wrote, that can be okay. However, if you’re miming and the video is focusing on how impressive your “live performance” is rather than your writing, Berthoud believes it is outright misleading.
“All of this complicated issue just comes down to ‘are you deceiving your audience?’” he says. “There are obvious ways of deceiving your audience, like labelling a video ‘live performance’ even though it’s not actually live.”
However, even if an artist doesn’t try to pretend something is performed ‘live’, they should still consider whether they could actually perform what they’re miming live. “You’ve gotta be very honest with yourself about this [and think] ‘could I play it 90-95% perfect most of the time?’” he says. “If the answer to that question is ‘no’, then I would say maybe don’t post that video, or at least don’t present the video in a way that makes it look like you could.”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
