Vahid Iran Shahi: Fastest Ever on Acoustic?

Vahid Iran Shahi…

Flight of the Bumblebee Acoustic

We have a separate category for speed guitar here at AGV. Why??

Well whether or not we like or appreciate the speed, it is something that we

as listeners judge most guitarists by…. if they have the chops… we

consider them (most of the time) a great player.

Guitarist Vahid Iran Shahi is a guitarist I personally haven’t heard of

until Mark Noad shared this video with me. Talk about chops!

Both his left and right hand are incredible…. in fact, I’d call Vahid un human like.

The “Flight of The Bumblebee” has become the song that everyone judges speed by

and Vahid pushes the metronome as fast as it can go here. Hey, super impressive at

the 220 speed-  and I didn’t need to hear it any faster to know that he’s one of the fastest and most coordinated ever.

Okay, with that said I just have to say that I did notice something after watching this

just one time and well, here goes..

After the speed starts to get just too fast I noticed hearing other notes from just the acoustic

guitar itself that were different than the recording.. Recording? Ya, recording.

If you listen REAL close, you can hear at times a very different totally acoustic tone sticking out,

which is not the primary sound in this video. I’ve tampered with speeding things up in the

studio myself and also hear the sound of the notes overhanging on each other, which is impossible

to achieve at these high tempos. As the speed increases, the sound of the notes will become more

staccato, not legato. … just not enough time to keep your fingers down on the notes that long.

Fake???

Well, let’s just say that a lot of the videos we are seeing technically are fake. They pre-record it first

and then play along. A good guitarist can play what they recorded and make it look like they are doing it live when the video is rolling- when in fact it wasn’t. But here we have a  extremely talented guitarist that has most likely turned the tempo up on a pre-recorded track.

Can he really play it this fast… My answer is yes… but it wouldn’t sound like what we are hearing. And you may ask, why would he do such a thing?  Look at the large amount of views. If Vahid wasn’t famous before he made this video, he is now! (Hey, I would do the same thing if I could play at these speeds… smart move).

Here’s a link to his facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/vahid.iransh…

I wanted to include another video for Vahid Iran Shahi.. Just absolutely incredible playing here as well!