RL Burnside is a sneaky guitar wizard
I think most people who don’t play guitar don’t realize how insane RL Burnside’s guitar playing is. He’s a goddamn Guitar Hero (and obviously much much more), and learning to play like him seems to be the Holy Grail of playing for a lot of people out there. I mean, check this out and tell me it’s not badass:
You can’t even see what his strumming hand is doing it’s moving so fast, but you can hear he’s playing a melody, the bass notes, and percussion all with one guitar, looking so damn cool like it’s no sweat off his back, and singing at the same time. There are loads of subpar YouTube videos made by highly technical blues purists (an oxymoron if I have ever heard one) all attempting to teach folks the secrets to RL’s superhuman gifts.
I remember being totally dumbfounded the first time I saw the above video of him playing (and the others from the same series, also on YouTube). I couldn’t tell what he was doing even though I was looking at it with my own eyes. Listening to what he was doing didn’t help much either, since he was basically playing three parts at once and I couldn’t tell them apart. The most confusing thing is how effortless it looks — his hand looks like it’s just strumming up and down, with such shrewd and casual movement, and he’s only using two fingers from each hand. To boot, he’s singing beautifully and without distraction, as if his mouth and his hand were separate machines.
Anyway, I’ve spent the past few months figuring it all out. I thought I had it for a couple months, and played his songs, and realized eventually I was doing it all wrong. I went back to the videos and watched them over and over again and I finally got it. All the instructional videos on YouTube are wrong, and the few pieces of RL Burnside guitar tablature out there are insufficient — they cover the notes, but not the style or strumming technique. I guess if there’s a demand, I could make a video teaching people how to begin to play like him, but at this point I feel like that would be like a magician explaining away his tricks. But, even if you know how to do a magic trick, the skill is in actually doing it, and I promise you that playing like RL Burnside takes lots and lots of practice. If you want a lesson on how to really play like RL, leave a note here.
