“Simple!”: Watch Polish wunderkind Marcin give Will Smith a masterclass in percussive fingerstyle guitar
Listening to Will Smith’s latest track, First Love, you’d assume he was backed by an entire flamenco ensemble. However, the percussive rhythm, twanging melody and bassline are all performed by Polish guitarist Marcin Patrzałek. And he’s playing everything simultaneously.
In a new Instagram video, Marcin breaks down his impressive percussive fingerstyle for Smith. “You reached out to me, and you wanted me to come on your track and do something on the guitar in a Spanish style,” he begins. “I thought, okay, I have to show him how I do it…”
READ MORE: Why Marcin is changing the acoustic guitar whether you like it or not
As Marcin says this, he’s playing a one-handed “bassline” almost unconsciously – and that bassline is the foundation of his sound. After rapping and tapping out a beat on the guitar body, Marcin explains that his style is not “multi-tasking”, because he isn’t thinking about his left hand at all.
“It’s not [multi-tasking], because I’m not thinking about this hand,” he insists. “If I was thinking about every note I was playing, how could I have a conversation with you right now? Maybe it’s like on a movie set… when you want to say your lines, you don’t want to think about every single word, right? It has to be natural.”
Smith concurs, noting that: “In acting they say ‘you [should] learn your lines so well that you forget them when it’s time to say them!’”
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Marcin then builds on this foundational bassline. With the left hand at the back of his mind, he’s free to focus on improvising; he can knock out some percussive beats, twang out a melody on the rest of the strings, or dance his fingers to add more spice to the rhythm.
In order to build the sound of First Love, Marcin utilised a classic flamenco technique. He shows Smith a golpe, which “means punch in Spanish”, before explaining that he wanted that it sounded “a little thin… so we make it a bit deeper”.
To deepen his sound, Marcin begins whacking his wrist further up the body of the guitar. “It’s like a heartbeat,” he says. He soon involved his fingers, tapping them in a way that almost feels like the rapping of castanets.
“It’s kinda like tap-dancing,” he notes. Soon after, he decides to let his hands dance around the guitar even more fervently, fingers flying as if he’s been put on fast forward. Throughout, Smith nods along to the “freaky” rhythm, absolutely in awe of Marcin’s playing.
By the time Marcin is on full-power, piecing together his bassline, wrist thumps and dancing fingers, all-the-while fingerpicking a melody, the guitarist is positively beaming. There’s something playful in how he performs, the rhythm coming to him with ease. And Smith says what all of us are thinking: “that is amazing!”
While his style clearly comes as second nature to him, it feels incredibly cheeky when he insists his inhuman skills are “simple!” Christ, Marcin, don’t rub it in!
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
