Glenn Gould and shred guitar.

While walking home from a gig on Sunday, I listened to Glenn Gould's 1982 recording of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations. Gould is by far my favorite classical pianist, and not just because I used to talk to his statue in front of the CBC building when I worked there. He was a musician who was capable of great lyricism in the slower, aria-like passages of the piece.  He even sang along sometimes, something that is sometimes distracting when listening to his recordings; on the plus side, he had a fairly tuneful and pleasant voice, unlike his fellow singalong pianist Keith Jarrett.


But it is in Gould's trills and fast passages that I find the greatest thrill, and this is where this starts to be about the guitar. Gould's trills and fast bits - his shredding - are my favorite part of his music. I'd say that it's the evenness of his articulation at high speeds that I find exciting.  This is particularly apparent in trills and other ornaments, which are such a big part of Bach's music.  In those passages, I can hear the years of self-discipline and hard work that went into Gould's craft. That is, I'm listening to Gould's virtuosity, his life story, more than to Bach's music in those moments of speed and clarity. And because I'm a musician, I associate virtuosity with work.

How much time in a day to you devote to running scales and patterns? My onetime guitar teacher Geoff Young introduced me to the Six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin (BWV 1006) and I've been practicing them ever since, sometimes to the expense of technical exercises. Somehow I can get behind putting great music under my fingers more than running patterns. To shred, you must run the patterns.


Yet shred guitar per se has never really appealed to me. The metal shredding of the eighties, exemplified by Yngwie Malmsteen, Vinnie Moore and Paul Gilbert seemed kind of thin and pea-brained to me at the time. When it went out of style in the nineties, I was somewhat relieved. I embraced the slacker guitar attitude of grunge, which was more about tone, melody and effects like feedback. Neil Young became, finally, a guitar icon. Rock guitar became more melodic in the nineties and speed and facility came to be somewhat ignored. This was noticeable to me at the time, teaching guitar to teenagers. Compared to my peer group and I in the eighties, they had a noticeable lack of ambition and low motivation when it came to getting 'good'.

Now we are in the midst of a shred revival, abetted by YouTube, with the flames eagerly fanned by Guitar Player magazine. Rusty Cooley has emerged as a new shred man to watch, his practice regimen positively draconian. Orianthi, Michael Jackson's unused guitarist, seems to be blazing a trail for pop shred guitar, evidenced by her recent duet with Steve Vai. Robert Walser, in his 1993 book Running With The Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, deconstructed shred as the (male) pursuit of virtuosity; total mastery. And there's something to the heroic effort that goes into getting THAT fast and THAT clean. It can give meaning to one's life. I just don't know that it's my life. I suspect that I'll never be a shred demigod, but it's nice to hear some true, 10,000 hours virtuosity once in a while.