Aesthetics of FAKE Guitar - Ben Levin

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Thank you to

I'll be posting many fake guitar examples all week on Instagram @BenLevinMusic
I hope you have fun making fake performances of your own! It's a great creative exercise really. I find myself imagining lots of cool guitar ideas and then figuring them out for real after I've made the fake version of the idea.

Anyway, wishing you well and lots of music,
Ben

[markl]

This makes me think of Adam Neely when he said “music isn’t a competition of who can play the most complex and difficult music, its art”

[ErinWi]

I'm glad that there's somebody like Ben around to take a thing that everyone makes negative and finds good in it. Let's be cheaters! So long as we're open about it.

[davifks]

You mixed 2 things people love to hate, fake guitars and autotune. Perfection.

[squid-boy]

WRONG music is a war to see who can play instruments the best

[nicholasguerra]

I think this is essentially the same as TAS runs (tool assisted speedruns) in gaming. Once you admit its "cheating" you open the door for just about anything, and TAS runs aren't necessarily looked down upon so much as they're just treated as a seperate category of speedruns. This is still music and its still definitely playing guitar, but its pushing the boundaries while still being artful, and whats wrong with that

[Bladavia]

Nothing wrong in manipulating and enhancing a performance artificially, in fact this is what most musicians do all the time anyway to achieve the best possible aesthetic. But yeah it's getting immoral once you start doing it in a stealthy manner to convince people of a skill you don't have, impress them and get money and social media attention for it. I'd say it's a matter of intent.

[SkeeterMcBeater]

This is the coolest vid you've made so far. This shit is crazy. I wanna try.

[BunnyFail]

Alternate Title:


𝐁𝐞𝐧 𝐋𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐧 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐍𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐞

[Adrimixmi]

Lol did you intend to play over the Nyan Cat chord progression from the beginning, or did it happen to fit when you wrote the music that was going to play with the guitar ?

[NahreSol]

Finally got around to this, and what a great video!!! Enjoyed it thoroughly!! Some of the examples reminded me of multi-keyboard music!!

[garygrinkevich]

This reminds me of when i was a kid starting in design, trying to copy the perfect cereal box illustrations in crayola markers not realizing that it wasn't my coloring technique that was wrong it was that a crayola marker can't do a smooth color washes or blending, not only that but professionals don't use markers to render with, they use a professional vector graphic software with infinitely editable Bezier curves but to my limited knowledge at the time i thought all things must be hand drawn, inked, and painted like a comic book or else it was "cheating" or plagiarizing, i had never thought of the computer as just another art medium until college, learning about fonts, grids, color pallets, photography the golden mean, heirearchy, etc. all the details and hours of production and revision required to get a final print ready version was no less impressive than free handing it on a canvas. when normal people see a cereal box they don't see the amazing one of a kind illustration someone spent days concepting and hours rendering, and more hours revising because a they're cereal plant manager is suddenly a sr. design expert, they see a printed image on a box destined for the trash. Anyway cool video dude.

[pindakaas]

I used to think any kind of electronic music was cheating (I was an edgy 15 year old...).

[QuistJam]

You sir - are a treasure!!! This is frickin brilliant

[xSismeyx]

I appreciate the strong double-trio era King Crimson vibe from the fingerstyle polymeters.

[QuistJam]

Also. Zappa's Jazz from Hell springs to mind listening to the last midi arranged parts!! ✨

[MaximeTanti]

Tom needed the mask because his solo was so sick

[stockicide]

It's sad when people make a logical leap from a reasonable position: "Pretending that you can play guitar faster than you actually can is unethical" to an unreasonable one: "Using sped-up guitars in your music is CHEATING! >:("

[DwarvenHydra]

“Really fast down picking licks” James Hetfield would like to know your location

[killers]

Squarepusher on Just a Souvenir album:

"This album started as a daydream about watching a crazy, beautiful rock band play an ultra-gig.
...
They played instruments either of their own design or conventional ones that were modified such that they could be used to generate a range of sounds not typically associated with a rock band. For instance, one of the musicians appeared to be using a device attached to the body of his classical guitar that allowed him to accelerate or decelerate time in his immediate vicinity. ..."

[ShallieDragon]

Fake guitarist on Instagram: *plays solo at 3x speed*

Ben Levin: "Hold my field recorder."