Garza Podcast - 194 - BERNTH: Changing Guitar YouTube Forever, Belphegor & Learning Technique

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

Garza sits down in-person with Bernth. Austrian guitarist, composer, session musician & YouTuber. Since 2020 his YouTube channel has gained over 1.3 million subscribers. https://linktr.ee/bernthSPONSORS:https://neuraldsp.com USE CODE: Garza for 30% OFF!00:00 - Hand/Wrist Guitar Warm-Up07:28 - Austria To California08:38 - Belphegor11:28 - Studying Jazz Guitar12:34 - Seiler Und Speer19:19 - Heavy American Music20:48 - Learning Metal Guitar24:20 - Learning Guitar Theory & Technique31:52 - Riff: Black Metal35:42 - Open/Closed-Hand Picking38:52 - Pursuing Career w/ Guitar42:35 - U.S. Visa Citizenship46:38 - Starting Youtube 49:40 - Making Technique Videos51:51 - Exercise: Walking Spider1:00:00 - Diversifying Career1:13:03 - Working Regular Jobs1:17:57 - Learning English1:20:20 - Switching Content Style1:21:28 - Playing w/ Adam Jones & Tool1:28:56 - Wah Pedal1:30:36 - E Standard 1:34:15 - Ibanez Signature Guitar1:44:52 - String Gauges & Picks1:49:38 - Elemental1:52:50 - Learning Crazy Guitar1:56:27 - Tips: Starting YouTube2:07:55 - Exercise: Modular Picking2:14:36 - China/Australia Tour & New Music

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And let's get to the podcast. What was that? A lick? It was lick? Was that, was that, was that, was that, was that, was that, was that, was that, was that, was that, was that, was that, was that, so that you don't have to sit here for half an hour. Yeah. Trying to warm up. Yeah.

So that we can start. How long does it take for you to warm up? Um, I think it's usually half an hour where you feel like you're properly warmed up. Yeah. Are we recording already? Oh, yeah. We're going. Berth is an honor to be hanging out with you. Thank you for having me here. I mean, you already started with a pretty great question.

I just came here and it was like a one and a half hour drive. And sometimes that happens as a guitar player. Of course. You're very familiar with that, I think. Yeah, a little bit. But I don't know it as much as I should. Okay. Yeah. For me, it's, I think, mostly the right hand. because I think, especially for metal players,

I think if we have some guitar players watching, they are probably playing metal, or rock at least. I feel like a bad habit that still kind of affects me a little bit when I started out with riffs. Yes. That with fast alternate picking or tremolo picking,

I was using a lot of my arm. You know, I don't know if you remember the first time trying to learn a Slayer song. Yeah. Like Angel of Death or something. I think as a kid I was mostly like really just pushing from my whole arm

in order to try to keep up with the record yeah so it was looking something like this I think and that hurts after a while oh okay so I don't want to go like on a super deep guitar thing for four hours yes do it please no no but

the one thing I wanted to say is for me I feel like like when I come here and I have to play right away the thing I need to focus on is unlocking that right hand for me. Unlocking the wrist, okay. Yes, the wrist, especially. And a fun thing that anyone can do that doesn't really sound like metal

is when you go to a clean sound and you just have dead notes like this because it's kind of impossible to do this, like coming from the full arm also looks a bit wrong from that angle probably. Are you drumming? Yeah. So that's something that I did a little bit earlier.

Okay. When you went for some coffee, because that's absolutely impossible to do it with a super stiff kind of motion like that. You need your wrist. Oh, yeah. So this kind of wakes up the wrist just doing dead note patterns like this. Want to give it a try? Oh, yeah. Nice.

This is my first guitar lesson I've had in probably 25 years. It's not a lesson. I just can't shut up about this. Nice. Awesome. Is that it? Yeah, you can see that it's clearly coming from the wrist. Try to do that with your full arm while keeping the wrist super stiff. Yeah. Oh yeah, it's coming from my bicep. Oh really? Yeah, so if you use your whole arm, yeah, it feels wrong. I feel it with my bicep but you want but just the wrist.

Nice. Yeah, it looks and sounds much much better. Is that? Is that? Is that a how it was supposed to be. Really? For sure. I just nailed my first guitar lesson in 25 years. Burnt, thank you very much for that. I looked like such a specific person, like coming on here and just talking about it, by the way. But it was just something I wanted to mention because you talked about warming up. I'm always looking for just a simple warm-up.

Actually, what you said was right is just unlocking my right hand. I'm like, how can I unlock it just in the... And I found like it's been more easier techniques. I noticed. Someone just told me just get your like just do nothing like just do this

for like 30 30 minutes Yes I was like oh it was it was a it was a it was bog Yeah nice I said play

just like play slow I was like Oh yeah I'm like I'm just trying to warm up And it's trying to like you know Do like suicide sound songs

You know I'm like And then I've noticed I don't feel too good But then I started doing that Just a simple Just unlocking Just the wrist

I mean for him He has a lot of iconic Rhythm parts I'm sure he played this Fears of Madness Rift. Oh yeah. I think that was one of the shorts that you posted. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Legendary. That's really cool. And the other thing I go into, after just doing dead note stuff, of course, you can always just throw a chord in there as well so that you don't just listen to dead notes for half an hour.

So you could do it. Do something like this. Wow, it was funky. Yeah, it sounds a bit more like funk. Yeah. And the. The next thing that's really cool that changed pretty much everything for me is I come from three notes per string pattern.

Where you're playing three notes per string, that's the typical shredder stuff. Because it's easier to speed up than two notes per string. Like if you come from pentatonic stuff and you always play only two notes for every single string, it's kind of hard to jump in between the strings. But if you have three notes every single string, you have a bit more time for each transition. I come from that and I used it quite a lot, but I thought that what gets my hand going and warmed up very quickly is actually doing the two note by string stuff that I'm not doing that often. So just for a very simple example, if you just have like an octave, so twice in that case, and you do something like this, I'm just two. Two strokes per string.

And then you have to skip a string. So two strokes on the A string, two strokes on the G string. Okay. I'm just going back and forth. Are you going down up? Yes. Yes. So I feel like that's also something that's impossible to do

when your wrist is very stiff because you will get stuck in between the strings and you will touch the string in between. So since you can only do that properly when you speed it up, With a wrist movement, that's also something that really keeps my hand going at the start. Maybe that also helps. Thank you for that. Do you, Berndt, do you come a long way?

I mean, literally you came from Austria. Yeah, only for this podcast. Oh, yes, I know. When did you... Okay, so you recently moved to California. Yes. Right. When was this?

This was actually after... a European tour that we did in January before the tour started yeah I basically gave away or sold everything that I had and I didn't have an apartment anymore and officially kind of lived in the tour bus for one month because I didn't have anything in Austria anymore which was a weird feeling and right after the tour I got on a plane to LA and started my life here so it's not I feel I feel like it's I don't know three years ago or something but but it was in January. So you've been here in about eight months, less.

On and off, because I did a couple of tours in between and some shows in Europe. So I'm never really that much at home. But I do feel like I live here by now. Yeah. That's the thing. What made you moon from Austria to here? So I had a really good time in Austria because I got lucky and got to play for a lot of great acts. The first thing I ever did.

that's i guess considered a professional quote-unquote job is i played for the extreme metal band belthagore which is the only austrian band in that kind of metal sector that tours internationally and i did that for one and a half years and i did my first two u s tours with that band we were opening up for sepultura which was pretty cool wow it's heavy that's sick that that was pretty cool and also for for d side you had glenn benton here a couple of months ago i think yes yeah and that was great but it was not enough for me to build life around that because yeah was extreme metal and it was that kind of thing where you're constantly on tour but it doesn't fully pay the bills yeah so you can't do a job on the side but you also can do just this one thing

it's a weird yeah you're you're kind of like stuck in the middle yes Exactly, where it's not a hobby, but it's also not a job yet. Yeah, and you found them that they needed a guitar player from MySpace, right? Yes. We talked about that, yeah, MySpace was pretty huge back then. And I remember just being, it was that phase in Austria where you have to either go to the military or you do the other thing, which is, it's called Civil Instaglia, which I knew what they're using English, like public service. or something.

Okay. So you don't have to go to the military. And I had long hair, so I didn't want to go to the military. Of course. So that they don't cut it off. And it was on one of my last days working there. And pretty much before I had to figure out what do I do next.

Because I didn't have a plan with life. I knew that I wanted to play guitar. But I went on their MySpace for some reason, I guess to listen to music. And it said looking for experience touring guitarist. And I was like, that's not me because I played two shows. in my entire life. I'm experienced.

Yeah, I got experience. Yeah. Sick, it counts. Yeah, but I felt like it's a once in a lifetime chance. And I don't want to say a light on my resume, but I kind of presented myself as, I know what I'm doing. Yeah, of course. You have to.

Because, yeah, on one hand, I also didn't think they would ever reply to me because I was 16 or 17 years old. Oh, wow. So, but they did reply to me and initially declined. They said I'm too young because there was a, a US tour coming up and I'm not even allowed in the clubs. Yeah. But either they really liked my audition or they didn't find anyone else.

But I ended up getting the gig and did that for a while. Then I'm trying to sum up my Austrian history more quickly. Oh no, no, no, Brent, take your time. I studied guitar. I actually studied jazz after that. I was going to ask you, why did you, because you went to the Vienna music Institute, correct? Yes, that's correct.

And you went for jazz guitar and pop guitar? Yes. Why did you choose those two subjects? So I, like musically, you can not really choose between a lot of things. You can either do classical or jazz, like those two kind of world.

And while classical is really interesting, technique-wise, of course, and I feel more drowned to that. Musically, I want to play with a pick and I want to play electric guitar. So classical was not really an option. Oh, yeah, because you wanted an electric option.

Exactly. I wanted to do it. I was like, why is he learning jazz when he just said he didn't want to learn jazz? Yeah. I'm not, okay. So I didn't become a great jazz guitar player, but I did learn a lot about theory over there, which was very helpful. And right after that four and a half year period, I got quite lucky and I got a gig, pretty much now the biggest band in Austria, but only famous.

in Austria. Yeah, what we're talking about that. Yeah. What's the band name again? I'm not. It's called Seiler and Speer. I would love to hear you pronounce it. No, I try, I'm not going to try to say that.

Oh, no. How do you say it? Seiler and Speer. Sailo Esphere? Yeah, that's pretty good. It works. I'm Austrian. I will send it.

I will send it to them. I'm Austrian now. Yeah. Sick. They will love that. So I've been with them for 10 years and now I can't play all the shows anymore because I can't fly back and forth. And I moved here for a reason.

Yeah. But just a couple of weeks ago, we did a stadium headlining show. That show was massive. It was pretty fun. Holy freaking crap, dude. I posted a YouTube video about it a couple of days ago because I played a very cheap guitar, like the cheapest Amazon guitar at that show, trying to prove a point that you don't need the most expensive gear. So I did that for...

How does sound? It sounded pretty much okay. The only problem that I had is because we only played the... one song with that guitar and I only used one wireless system so I just had security locks and I took off the guitar I was playing and switched the wireless on the other guitar

and we didn't test it as much and it had much more output than this one that I'm playing so I had to kind of while playing dial back a little bit and figure out because I was like oh this sounds a bit too hot because it was like a song that's just a pop song and it was kind of like this it was already

distorting a little bit. So that was the only thing, but it worked perfectly fine in the end. And so playing for this band was awesome because we started very small and then we moved further up and up and up. Biggest show was like 127,000 people and it was live on TV as well. And that definitely makes you a better musician. Because if I fuck up one note, I will hate myself for the rest of my life. with that kind of massive show.

So that was great to learn, but since this is an Austrian phenomenon, you end up playing the same venues over and over again. And you can essentially only play like 20 to 30 shows maybe each year. That's already a lot. 20 and 30? I think so. Yeah.

Because it's not a big country. So you can't really play the same city every month. Yeah, that's the word I was looking for. Like the band was a Austrian phenomenon. Yes, exactly. And you were a part of it. Yeah, that was pretty cool. You just sold those for like three records, right?

Yeah, is it four? Okay. I think four. Four by now. The recent one came out a couple of weeks ago. So that's not my band or project where I'm like the boss or anything. It's more like a pop act. Two guys are the stars.

And they have a band surrounding them. Okay. But the feeling since we started from the bottom was always like it's more of a band. Because when you look at the live footage, It's also not them in front and the rest of the band. Like hiding behind a curtain or something. It feels more like a band. But of course, it's not like my idea or my big project or anything like that.

I'm just more or less a hired gun. Rippin. Yeah. It's paid to play some many notes for pop music. That's ripping. It's not a bad gig. I remember you were talking about, how far, just to get people perspective of you, How far is the town you grew up in from Vienna?

It's around 40 minutes of a drive, which is very long in Austria. It's nothing here to drive somewhere for 40 minutes. Yeah. But in Austria, it was like, so far away. Man, 40 minutes? Yeah, and Vienna is like this big city, this scary big city. Really? Yeah.

Wow. What was the town called? It was called Vienna-Norijstead. Yeah. You didn't miss anything in case you didn't visit it yet. Okay. It's just a small town really. And one of my memories, as I brought up when we talked earlier,

is trying to pick up my first suicide silence record, the cleansing. Oh, wow. Because that was not easy in that town. It's not because it's an obscure record or band, but the small shops that you went into only had stuff that's on the radio, they didn't have a metal section or a rock section. So I had to drive all the way to Vienna to pick up that record. And now it's kind of a full,

circle moment. It's a big, it's a big full circle moment here because you grew up in a town where where you couldn't even, you couldn't even express your ideas. Yeah, it was, yes, it was, I did find some people to play music with and had some fun with them, so to say, but I knew early on from the first rehearsals that I want to do this for a living. And I'm sure you're familiar with that when you work with people in a band and you're like, I really want to push this and everyone's like, I don't want to rehearse this week.

Just want to have a couple of beers. So it was always that kind of feeling. So I knew that I had to move to Vienna. That was the first step. And now after 10 years of doing all of my stuff there, I felt like the next logical step is coming here. How old are you when you moved to Vienna? I was maybe 24 or something like that.

Oh, wow. And I stayed there for around 10 years. It was a good time for sure. But building this YouTube channel over the last five or six years, I could see that like 0.7 or 8% of my audience is from Austria. And it was a bit of a shock for me coming here for the first time because I didn't even think about, I wasn't sure about moving here.

I just wanted to come here and see how it's like. And I just posted a story. And I got a crazy amount of, of replies on that, wow, you're in LA. Let's meet. And I was like, well, so that never happened to me when I posted like a story. I'm in Vienna. Yeah.

Good for you. Okay, okay. So that was a bit eye opening. And also like people stopping me on the street and they're like, I watched the YouTube videos. I love them and it's so cool. And I didn't, I have to. When I had that in Vienna, it was mostly from tourists that were visiting.

Yeah. But not really from people. people living there. So that was my kind of my main reason why I wanted to come here. And... It's just the next logical step.

For me, it is. I also really like it here. So it's not just a career thing. Of course. I feel like I always lived here in my head, kind of, because all the music that I listened to growing up,

all the movies, all the entertainment, everything I consumed came from here. And I never really listened to any Austrian. music or yeah what were you listening to is there any like Austrian like this

just Bethel Gore and that and that yeah I think that's that was the only band that I really like about the Gorn Korn is it yeah I mean my first first big band that I got into was slip not they really hooked me with the whole image of the band

it was very mysterious back then I got into them in the Iowa phase shortly before volume three I think okay so so you're listening to Iowa you listen to state anger yeah and that's and then you're going backwards, right?

Yes, exactly. So my first Metallica record was St. Anger. Fuck, yeah, dude. Which is funny because they did exactly. Maybe it was a bit of a calculated effort that worked on me because I feel like they kind of tried to appeal to the new metal fans to the kids a little bit with that record, like tuning down and being a bit more aggressive.

Yeah. And back then when I listened to that, I had no idea what a snare drum is. Or I didn't know anything. I just, I knew how it made it. me feel and it kind of caught me like in this phase of I'm really into slip knot and corn and all these bands and it kind of fit in but then I went into their back catalog and that's what made me want to pick up a guitar so that was the big and you were so so you're 12 13 and and you took and you took a couple private lessons right yeah I did actually it was a bit

frustrating because I didn't find anyone that was into metal so they kind of one and me to do that kind of stuff which sounds very wrong with this tone that's kind of heavy yeah it sounds really good dude that's a fucking blue slam dude yeah i should do that that's a fucking Austrian blues slam yeah maybe that's that's what we should do actually um i was gonna ask you what did the yeah what did that first couple private lessons even teach you so it's probably just like every fight that just get your fingers going yeah i feel like the first thing was power chords that's very useful. You do need that quite a lot, of course.

That was my first revelation because I didn't even have a guitar back then because I started kind of multiple hobbies as a kid. And my parents were trying to get me interested in stuff, but it was only interested in video games. That was my big thing growing up. So when I was like, I want to start playing guitar, they were not excited about now we have to buy this guy a guitar. Oh, yeah.

So we just buy you all these video games. Yeah. What the fuck. Yeah. So they weren't really sure that I would actually. actually go through with that. Yeah, yeah. But I got hooked pretty fast and I didn't have a guitar at first.

So the private teacher gave me one of his guitars. And I remember just going, not knowing what I was doing, I was just like only fretting like single notes or something. Yeah. And that was like a big moment once you discover the power cord. Oh my God. Yeah. That's it.

That's what I want to do. That was pretty cool. But in terms of rock. I used to bring him stuff that had all these crazy guitar soles in there because I was drawn to that quite quickly. And he was like, I have no idea what these guys are doing. So I felt like, okay, I can't really learn from you. Then I went to like a public music school and they wanted me to play blues again. And then we're back.

And then we're back. Yeah. The same thing. So I kind of realized I have to study this thing by myself, like these techniques and all of that. Oh, yeah. And the first thing I did is because I got into Metallica, into the 80 stuff, is I printed out all of the records, like the tabs. I made these big folders that had the full record in tabs, like from 911 tabs or Ultimate Guitar or something.

911 tabs. Do you remember? Oh, of course, yeah. Nice. Yeah, 911 tabs. So my biggest goal was just getting this to work. Riffs like this or one that's not that popular. Stuff like this.

I got on that riff. It's pretty great. And it's so heavy. Timeless. Pretty great, yeah. So that really got me motivated. just trying to figure out the numbers and where they go on the neck and playing along to the records that got me into technique.

And it was a pretty long journey because at the conservatory where I studied jazz, I did mention I learned a lot about theory, like seventh chords, and even chord reammonization jazz pieces playing. A what? Like one of the tests that you. had to do on a regular basis was about re-harmonizing jazz tunes. So you would just get the lead sheet with the chords. Yeah. And you would have to think about replacing or alterating the chord changes. So not just picking any random chords instead of the chords that are on there,

but explaining why, why that would actually work in a theoretical context. So it's exactly as fun as it sounds. Yeah. Wow. So you would be like, well, yeah, instead of this dominant seventh chord, I could actually play a diminished chord instead because if you extend it on top of here, those are actually the same notes and there's only one note that's added on here that's adding a little bit of dissonance on there. This weird stuff. So I had to do a lot of that and it did help me quite a lot, but they never talked about technique. That's the thing. Never, never. Never. I had one. Are you serious? Yes. I had one teacher there much, much later when I was in the third year already, I think, who told me for the very first time,

hey, the way you're holding the pick is kind of weird. You might want to adjust that because up until this point, I was playing with an open hand, which is okay. A lot of great players do that, but I was also playing with a reverse picking angle. So the pick was not facing the strings like this. It was actually backwards like this, and the hand was open like that. So it looked something like that. And it worked for some juggling stuff into the occasional scale.

Yeah. But I hit a speed plateau with that technique. Yeah. Once you hit a plateau, you're like, oh, now what? Exactly. And there was no way. I was practicing very hard back then already. But I felt like I'm not really making any progress.

And I don't know why. Because when all you look at is yourself from this angle, staring down at the guitar, it's kind of hard to be like, ah, now I see it. I have to hold my picture. Yeah. Someone kind of has to tell you sometimes. Exactly.

How old were you when you went into the Music Institute? I think it was in my early 20s, around 23 or something like that. 23. Or 22, something like that, I think. It was pretty much after, not right after, but after that the touring that I did with Belfergor. Where I just hit that point of, okay, I can't really keep doing this. Is that where you got that strap? No, that's actually a pretty new one.

That's pretty funny. I don't know if you can see it. Yeah, this is the first time I've ever seen someone put a snake on a strap. It's pretty cool. That's a Richter strap, and they sent it to me. When I moved to LA, I partnered up with some different companies because I started out from scratch here. Yeah. Didn't really bring anything.

Oh, wow. And I wanted to get into making music and making videos pretty much right away. so they helped me out and this is one of the companies that sent me two of these really cool straps they are quite dangerous so oh yeah

poke my eyes out but they look pretty cool did you tell them to put in the snake no I think that's one of one of their models that you can get oh really oh damn so anyone just get a fucking snakey strap dude okay that's cool

yeah it helps you it helps you play with more picking attack yeah of course yeah that's good for metal that's some hidden confidence yeah what do what was it like a touring with a belpacore because uh they seem very uh serious yeah it was it was i saw i do i saw a freaking i think it was one of your videos it was actually one one one of your videos there was like a freaking there was like a woman dancing she was naked and she had a fucking upside down cross taped to her belly yeah and was covering her

her freaking, her freaking private area? It was not my idea. Oh. And a lot of pyro? Yeah, I was very young. I think in this clip I was probably 18 or something. This is it? Oh, yeah.

That's me. Nice J. We both had the same windmilling technique. She was scary, dude. I watched some videos, some suicide silence videos yesterday. So I was prepared and you also. I got to prepare for his podcast. I got a fucking windmill, dude.

Yeah. I think we both destroyed our next problem. Yeah, I'm pretty... But it was interesting because I was obviously the young guy, the really young guy that shouldn't really be here. Yeah, this chick.

Oh my God. Yeah. I was just watching just like casual. I'm like, oh, okay, I want to see him play with this band. And then once I saw like this woman come out, fucking naked. Yeah. A freaking tape on her freaking tape-y post, dude.

That's pretty interesting. Upside down cross, man. It's where it got me. I was like, wow. Yeah. I mean, with a lot of bands like this, a lot of theatrics, of course, because that's what people want to see. Totally.

And where was the show? This was the Partisan Festival in Germany. Okay. Fucking scary, dude. I don't know if you ever ever played it. It's not like a huge festival, but it's pretty cool because there are only, I guess, more extreme bands over there. So this is where a band like this, I think we have co-headlining, the co-edlining slot

and after us, I think Morbid Angel played. Oh, wow. That's dope. I think. Is this it? Fucking a... Convience your passion in a new business with Shopify

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Records So who do Party? Party. Pargy sign Yeah. Metal open pit. That's a good

selling point. Oh yeah. So they have Who do we have this time? Yeah, this is the other Austrian band who

I hear you for this guy. This is the only other I guess internationally successful Austrian band I have played on one of the the records a bit of acoustic guitar stuff.

This is an interesting one as well. Is Ascobar from Austria? I have no idea. Okay. We have to look into that probably. I was just curious. Oh, but bloodbath, for example. That's awesome. I like bloodbath. Yeah, it looks scary because it was like a nighttime slot, so I assume, yeah, I mean,

was that one of your first time? That was, I think, my first kind of bigger festival and my first like multi-chem recording They're like after the show, you get professional video. I looked cool. Oh, shit, fucking his head-banging, dude.

Yeah. But they were nice to me, for sure. There was, of course, this element of, okay, I know I'm very young. And you're letting me know I'm very young. Sure. That kind of thing. But they were respectful because they saw that I took it very seriously. So I practiced the songs a lot.

And it wasn't just like I just want to party and go on tour. I want to play these songs to the best of my abilities because this is what I want to do

with my life and I remember that the drama always had to warm up because they're like 260 BPM blast beats nonstop. Yeah.

So before rehearsals he had to warm up and I always kind of joined him and did like sweet picking arpeggios over the blast beats and we were both

warming up. Oh crap. And what were some those rips? There was a lot tremolo picking stuff so it was good for the right hand for sure and there was a lot of stuff like the classic more black metal kind of stuff where you have tremolo picking over more than one string which is quite interesting i guess the biggest cliche is the this kind of

chord progression yeah what's what's a what's a what's a burnt what's a fucking black metal chord dude it's basically just a minor chord like if you're in standard tuning if you're exactly, yeah, that's the one. Then you just move it down, one left step. Do you also bar the high E? Yeah, you can for sure. And if you want, they had more of a, I guess, death metal sound in there as well.

I think they called it blackened death metal. So they had also... Oh, yeah. And tricky... stuff with that is that it's pretty fast and there's some players like if there's a triplet blast speed or something they just do the campfire chord approach but for me it always sounded much cooler so actually do some solid yeah you got that smooth wrist action yeah so this is nice dude i'm fucking i'm about the core dude that's sick this sounds pretty great because

because I feel like this is the way to do stuff like it doesn't have to be black metal it just can be any kind of just playing just any clean chords and stuff like this that's the only moment where I disconnect

from the bridge because I feel like for the shredding stuff I'm the most in control when my palm is resting on the bridge and my hand is not floating around because that way I can also switch between open and closed notes. So I started this run with a palm muted note.

And then went into some open notes at the end. Something I like to do to just go back and forth. Between that. So in order to do that, I have to have my palm on the bridge. But for those kind of faster strumming patterns, it starts to feel really weird when you're on the bridge like this and you try to strum across all the strings like that. So that's kind of where my wrist pops out like this.

And I'm still touching the guitar so that I'm not completely disconnected. So I'm still touching it. Is that said it? I'm fucking black metal, dude. You are? For sure. Okay.

So that's, yeah, I guess one of the best ways to do kind of trammalo picking. across multiple strings to not do anything like this or like that. Yeah. But to just have the wrist pop up. You're nailing all of this.

It's great. How's my wrist? It's great. So is it more like that or it's more like level? I think the most important thing is that you don't feel like you get stuck in between the strings and that it feels awkward because if you angle it too much,

you might feel like... Hmm. So this looks really good to me. Of course, there's the age-old debate with any guitar playing if you should close your hand or keep it open. Yeah, so there's two kinds of players. Yes. Two kinds of guitar players. Some have the open hand, which is me.

I'm fucking sick. And or you have like the closed hand. Yes. Right. And you're more of the close hand. I'm the close-hand guy. I tried to play at that. I'm like, ah, I can't like.

I just lose it I lose it. For sure. I lose it. I mean, if you ever want to get into that, for me, it was not a seamless transition because I also started out

with the open-hand approach. The reason why I wanted to change it is because I was sometimes kind of touching the knobs or like the pickup switch even and I was playing like this. And I felt like in my case there's just a lot of additional weight

like with the fingers flopping around like this. So it just, even if it looks weird without playing guitar, I was just sitting like this and was doing that. I know it's very suggestive. It looks very smooth and looks like it's done it a few times. So when I go like this, I can feel like my fingers flopping around a little bit.

When I close my hand like that, it feels a bit more ergonomic. So that's the first thing that made me go, maybe I should give this a try. And I feel like the one thing that's making the transition. a little bit difficult for people who give this a try is that you tend to really clench your fist when you give it a try for the first time. Yeah. So we're like, okay, I'm going to try closing my hand and then you're like making a fist like this.

It's like you're about to get into a fight. Yes. That's not what you want. So I literally just close it like this and there's no kind of pressure. I'm not curling my fingers like this and putting a lot of force on that movement. I'm really just closing it like that. And the next thing that puts off a lot of players is that they feel like

they're rubbing against the strings when they close the hand with the knuckles which results in a lot of string noise we'll try to demonstrate so that kind of worked but you had a little bit of noise in there didn't sound properly clean

and it was mostly because I shouldn't do that with the fresh tattoo oh yeah but I was rubbing against the strings quite a lot and I also started bleeding at one point on one of my fingers because it wasn't paying attention I was just trying to push the speed.

Yeah. So that's the other thing that I learned. If you lift your wrist a little bit like this, when you're playing, those faster alternate picking runs. If you do something... And you focus on not touching the strings with anything but your guitar pick.

That also helps a bit with making it more comfortable. Okay. But it's a transition that also took me here. It's not like you're instantly go like, oh, that's much better. So it takes months. Months, okay. It's like, man, I'm not getting it right now. What the hell? What the hell? It's not for me. The hell. So it seems, it seems like right when you started playing, you, you already had it in your, you already had it in your mind that you wanted to commit your life to playing guitar and music. For sure. This was 12. You knew exactly what, what you wanted, you want to get out of, you want to,

your country, travel and play. Yes. There was, I mean, growing up listening to all these bands and watching all the iconic live videos that we all know, like the corn performance at, I think, Woodstock, where everyone's jumping. Yeah. And it's just the coolest thing ever, still. Still, it's too to stay.

I'm, I still watching him like, wow. Yes. Get fucking goose pumps. That's the one. That's, I mean, it's impossible as a kid that's into music. And. You're like, what the, it's so heavy, too. I wonder how it sounded there being there.

Wow, this is a fucking wave. It's the ocean. Yeah. This is an ocean in new metal. That's so cool. I mean, watching this as a kid and also how they are performing and there's so much energy. I know even still, like, it's like, fuck, just to feel it still. Years later.

Oh, yeah. So that's, watching that made it relatively clear that this is what I want to do. And I feel like it's like this for a lot of people, but most people never do it because there's not a traditional career ladder that you can climb. Sure. But I apply for this job. I get my degree and then. Yeah.

So there's no clear path there. Yeah. There's no, there's no clear path at all. Yes. No. And I feel like maybe you've asked this question. So all of your guests so far, how they got to this point. Yeah.

And I feel like stories are probably completely different. They're all different. Yes. You can work really hard, but you can't really plan where you end up. But if you. know that this is what you want to do. I feel like if your brain can't physically stop thinking about it 24-7, you will find a way. And I would encourage everyone to give it a try because it's just like switching, it's my analogy,

just like switching from open to closed hand is not an instant transition. It's also not like you get the call, you have to big gig and then you're doing this. Yeah. That's not how it works. So it's going to be a very, very, very long journey. A journey that you're still on. I'm at a start, to be honest. Yeah. I don't feel like I did anything super great so far.

I did some things that I'm kind of proud of. But I have much, much bigger goals. And I don't think that will stop at any point because that would be the worst ever. If you're like, okay, I did it. Yeah. But there's always what's next. what's the next thing? So moving here, I'm just excited to see what, I mean,

I'm definitely open when it comes to joining an act. That, I mean, I feel like drummers are getting swapped more often or quit more often. There are a lot of guitar players out there. So I don't know. They also have to be in the world of that band a little bit most of the time. It's not like they're hosting an open audition. Yeah.

Mostly it's the guitar tech or. Yeah, you just hear about it. and then you're kind of in. Yeah. So that's exciting for me, but also when it comes to technique and just playing the guitar itself, because the more I practice,

the more I realize what I can still improve. It's one of those things, the more you know. The more you don't know. Yeah, exactly. Same way. Yeah. Nice.

Yeah, I'm getting kind of tripped out just like looking at you because sometimes I get like, oh yeah, they're from like a different country and they were here. You're here because of that. Yes, for sure. What a trip, dude.

I also wouldn't have gotten my green card without all that. Without all that because there was literally my case that I had to make with like a 900 page document at the end of why, like it's called EB1, EB1, I think. Yeah. So EB1 visa for extraordinary abilities where you kind of have to prove why you're important. for the yes, why they should bring you in. So I had to kind of make a point

and David Hasloff wrote a letter of recommendation for me. Are you serious? That's fucking sick. That was pretty fun because we made this one metal track. What a cool guy. Yeah. That was pretty fun.

How'd you ask him? I think via email, we got in touch with him and he still remembered that we did a song together even though it was 2020. 21, something like that, I think. And that was great. Adam Jones of Tool also agreed to write one,

but we didn't, couldn't make it happen because we were just writing like SMS. He was trying to send him stuff via email, and I didn't have his email. He just sent it via SMS. And then I was thinking, how is he supposed to print that? Like straight from us. Oh, sure. So it kind of got lost a little bit, but he was also willing to help out,

which is very nice. That's cool, man. So I had some people that, helped me and I think it got approved like one day after or something. Wow. Which was, which was great. And I got a green card right away so I can become a citizen, I guess, in five years if I passed the test. The only thing for me is I might lose my Austrian citizenship because they don't allow dual citizenship, I think. Really? I have to look more into that. I don't want to spread any rumors. Yeah. Yeah, you need to do some reaching in that one.

Yeah. But. Well, it looks like you're stuck here. Yeah. I love it here. I mean, I had my first show here pretty much a couple of weeks after moving. It was in New York, Carnegie Hall, which was kind of cool. That's where I always wanted to play.

They have two venues. We did the smaller one, the Sankle Hall at Carnegie Hall. And it was with strings, with this bass player, with Childspaer, too. And it was my first U.S. show. and people got a bit emotional because they were like, you're finally playing here and I got to see the first show

and it was also a big moment for me. I did play here with Belthigo in the past, but it's not like my music or something. It's you, man. That was really cool. So we are already in touch with an agency here. I already have managers helping me out.

And we're trying to put together something for next year already. We will have, I think, one show in L.A. just to test it and give it a try and then hopefully a full US tour. And in October, we're coming to China, South Korea and Australia. Maybe we could add some links below. Of course, yeah, yeah. That would be very nice because it's my first time over there

and I'm quite excited. Congratulations, man. I mean, you also go on tour very soon. So to you as well. I mean, you started way, way before me and build this band over so many years. So this is something I really admire for sure, because that's your thing.

It's not, didn't get hired and like, play these parts, show up at eight, leave at 11. True. I forget. Started in my room. I'm sitting on, on dinosaur blankets.

All nice. Yeah, just thinking and watching TV. It's crazy. Being a child, a child. Yeah. like 14 or something it's weird I think it's still still still

going yeah to to the starting point yes it's crazy I went on your YouTube channel I was like wow his first video was oh no it's really bad it was he was 14 years ago

yeah what what made you post that first video I felt I was still in the in this band at this time you can see Belfiger session because I'm just a session musician Yeah. And the other thing was my own band,

that never really went anywhere. You can see the sock I have on the guitar. Oh, that's a sock. Yeah, that's very important for it. I didn't have a... No excuses, man. Oh, yeah. No excuses.

No shame also. Yeah, true. So I put that one out because I felt like I wanted to... I wanted to do this for a living and websites didn't really work that well anymore where you're like, hey, check out my website. website and YouTube was

becoming like a digital kind of card you could give like a business card almost where you're like

check out me playing yeah put up a cool video or you try to look cool at least so that was the first video I ever did of course it went nowhere

I had like 20 views or something how old do you hear was it I would have to do math and I'm very bad at it was like 14 years ago and I'm about to be

30 24, so. 24, 20? 20, I would say, yeah. I'm glad you said it first in case it's wrong. I'm wrong here all the time. No. Wow, 20 and you just

you just decided, okay, I'm just going to put this, yep, there we go. June, wow, June 8th, 2011, 17,000 views. I mean, now it's got a bit more views because people get curious what the first video is, I guess. and the fun thing about is I'm from the future I'm here to tell you will be famous after 90 years okay that's cool man

yeah that's very famous but I'm proud of you man it's cool but really cool I started posting there and it went nowhere so I always had this face of I post something I get 20 views I'm like I put so much work into this no one's watching yeah so I stopped and then two years later I still had it in the back of my head all the time

because I was checking out musicians on YouTube and I wanted to be one of those people who actually entertains an audience in the best case or just helps people or whatever. So I always had phases of posting two videos, posting nothing for one year, posting three videos, posting nothing for two years. Yeah.

Until five or six years ago, I started to, I think you're about to get to that point. Yes. So that's kind of slowly the point. where I was like, maybe I should try to do something every week, not just once and then nothing for a year. Yeah. So that's when I very, very, very slowly started to build some kind of momentum with the videos. And the cool thing about that was I was actually making these videos about exercises I was doing myself.

Because my main goal at this phase was just improving my technique because I never, as I mentioned earlier, no one ever told. me how to hold a pick or actually build some speed and how to synchronize the hands and all of that. So I use that as journey for myself to try to find exercises to correct my bad habits, like keeping the fretting hand fingers very close to the neck and syncing up the picking with the fretting hand notes and all of that. You were making your own techniques to fix your own habits. Yeah. Wow. I always tend to make my own exercises because I feel like it's very helpful to pick up exercises from somewhere.

one, but I used to buy books where it was like, okay, play this exercise. Yeah. And I didn't know why. So it was like, yeah, just play it because it's good. Sure. But I had very specific problems that I wanted to fix, for example, the pinky finger, always bending away from the fretboard. So I needed to kind of come up with exercises or just watch my technique up close

and try to identify when is that actually happening. And how do I get my fingers to stay closer? the neck. So I just kind of made up exercises based around what I was really struggling with. And I just, instead of keeping that to myself, I just put them out every single week. I was like, hey, this is what I'm working on right now. I feel like it's really helping me. Maybe it helps you as well. So that's kind of how the YouTube stuff started. Wow. You found, it's crazy how you found some answers within yourself with your technique.

Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. And then you would just share it. Definitely. Wow. Because I know how frustrating it is. I don't think I'm still frustrated. Oh, yeah. For sure.

It never ends. It never ends. You always feel like you're doing very well and you're recording something and you're ripping through scales and it sounds good. And then you watch the video and you're like, okay, did the pinky thing again. Because in your head. I got the worst. my biggest weakness on my plane

people will say Garza, you just suck in general No I do my pinky One is weak But I do that I saw a video you did I'm like

No That's me My pinky is just like It's like It's like I have a competition How far out can I put my pinky It's like way out here When I'm playing

Yeah I'm that guy It does tend to do that Quite a lot. I mean, there's one classic exercise. Classic. I feel like... Yep, that's me.

Yes, stop it! You fucking took a picture of my pinky, and you put it on that thumbnail. Stop it now! I can't. The one that everyone does is in the chromatic or semi-chromatic scale, just from the fifth to the eighth thread,

where you do something like this. Exactly. And then the next note and the next string. So this is something... See? Exactly. That's literally how I play it. For sure.

If you would want to fix that, because it always depends on how deep you want to go into that. The one thing that helped me out a lot is actually doing this correctly because some people just do these chromatic drills, just playing note after note. But what you're actually training right here is developing that kind of curl with your fingers, because it's also not great, especially for legato. If your fingers are just touching the fretboard like this or maybe even bending like that. Oh yeah. control you want that nice kind of curl so that you don't block the strings also so what really helps is doing this exercise like this where you actually keep you keep them all on there oh fuck it's hard yes perfect nice that's exactly what you want but but but but you want to keep

these fingers on still on there too yes oh oh Perfect. That's hard. It is. So it's the same thing, but it's not. Exactly. Perfect. Oh, fucking shreddy, dude.

Ah, shit. And the weird sounds that you get at the end is exactly what you want. Those two notes overlapping, because it means that your pinky is nicely curled. If it would not be curled like this, it would actually block that string. So you would not hear that note. So that's a nice. We have like checking and controlling that you're actually developing that curl with your fingers as well. Yes.

Perfect. Nice. Ah, now you're lifting the middle finger. You see, you want to do that for some reason. I'm trying to flip you off. Yeah. All intentional. It's so hard.

Wow. Wow, dude. It's, in theory, it should be easy, but not keeping it. Keeping your fingers there. Everyone that's watching right now, if you think this is super easy, just give it a try. It's actually...

Yeah. Nice, you got it sounding great already. Okay. Perfect. Very nice. Also with the alternate picking, just to sync up every single note. I feel like that's not the most musical exercise, of course.

If you do that for half an hour, you will... Yeah. Not like what you're hearing. We always hear those overlapping notes all the time. But it's a really effective one. to keep the fingers close to the neck. And I just try to find exercises like this one

that are not just exercises because exercises, but just workouts that fix a very specific problem that I'm having. There are also a lot of picking work. I could show you 378 of them. We don't have that much time. I need every tool that I can get. Yeah.

Thank you for that free lesson, man. I'm going to try that. I don't want to call it a lesson like I'm coming here. hearing like learn this i just really like talking about that stuff no it's cool i mean it's i mean it's it's it's going to help me and then would you uh do you stay on this string or do you go up like so when you would actually play the full scale and one thing you would want to pay attention to is that you don't anchor too hard with your fingers because when most people do this for the first time in order to stay on the frets they push down really hard yeah but you can actually just

gently touch the strings. My guitar also doesn't have the lowest action of all time. It's actually factory setting. I didn't lower it. But I can still just press very lightly, and I get the note to sound really nice, and I don't bend it out of pitch. So that's the first thing.

To actually stay quite relaxed, and do I have the fingers on there, but it's anchoring super hard. And when you would... It's always the middle finger. Why is it always the... That's a dumb nail. Yeah, it is the thumbnail.

Oh, fuck. Nice. So you're just going like super gently. Yes. On your fingers. Yes. It depends on what you want to do with the instrument. It's always nice to have some picking attack

and especially live. It doesn't look that cool if you're just trying to relax your whole body as much as possible. Yeah. But if the goal is to build speed at one point, it always just helps to have the fingers close to the neck. And it's much easier and much cleaner compared to when you're going super hard. So it's much, much easier to build speed and to stay in control of what you're playing with all the notes in the best case. If the fingers are very relaxed and close to the neck. So if you would keep going with this exercise,

you would play to the next problem point, which is not just the first transition, but you would... So if you continue to the next notes, you still keep the other fingers on there. It's getting crazy. It always looks like this. Oh, it's kind of like a walking spider.

Yes, it's called the spider exercise of it. Oh, is it? Okay. Nice. Oh. So you can do it in both directions. And I always just, someone told me, practice this exercise and I only got the tab.

So it was always just doing note by note. But I found that this is much more effective when it comes to keeping the fingers close to the neck. Just always moving the one finger that you need for the next note, keeping the others on there. That's pretty cool. It's like a really chill spider. Yeah.

Just a chill spider. He says like, okay. Definitely not speed exercise or anything. It's actually really good to do it slow. Nice. Perfect. Oh, I see, oh, fuck. I see where it's getting crazy.

Oh, yeah. Wow, that got way harder. This part is hard. Yes. Exactly. Okay. That's the worst. Cool.

Because these two fingers often feel like they're kind of glued together and they're not moving independently. Yeah, yeah. You've got to like really separate them. Yes. That's a great exercise for it. That's fucked up. Thank you.

for that man that's cool i hope it helps oh yeah i got something new to practice cool any new any new fucking tool you know any any new uh tool for for my toolbox nice okay so you you and me did something similar okay so so you just started trying to do like weekly videos right and uh was it that what really opened up your eyes because you're also doing this and you're also touring at the same time but then COVID happened. And then did that teach you, oh wait, I can't rely on money from touring. I kind of have to have, I need to have some foresight. Is that correct?

100%. I think it was very similar for everyone. Where, I mean, touring is already an instable income, especially if you're a session, guitarist or hired gun and you don't have full control over the band. they could decide to work with a different guy anytime. If you didn't do anything wrong, they just like, it was great, but we want to try something different. I feel like that happened to a lot of people

that are great musicians and they didn't do anything wrong. So it's already not the safest way of earning a living. So I always felt like I should have multiple streams of income so that I'm also not forced to, if I do this with my own music and I'm the boss, there are also some people who do that and they play like 200, 250 shows a year, which is also not what I want because I always need to do something different. Yeah. But as I said, that COVID phase where you couldn't even think about going on tour or doing

anything in that space, that's also where I went much, much deeper on the channel, where I made like two videos a week, I think. And I never had a standout video that took off completely. It always felt like a steady kind of improvement. Nice. So that definitely changed everything. Just this approach of don't just do one thing and expect it to take off magically.

And then you're like, ah, it just doesn't work. YouTube is not for me. Just give it a couple of months and you will see it doesn't feel crazy at first. But if you have a video that has 100 views and then one that has 200 views, that's actually a huge jump. The big jump.

That's like twice the views. Yeah. So just trying to appreciate those starting, like at the start, I feel like you always want, I don't know, 100,000 views right away or a couple million views right away. But once you appreciate like the small growth and I promise if you look back, like we just did 13 years back or something, you're happy that your first video didn't take off because it's pretty bad with the sock and everything. Yeah. I mean, it could be a thumbnail, mate.

Don't do this. It's a big fucking fat sock. Yeah. Don't be that guy. See, man. Dude, I got, I got dumbno ideas. Yes. Dude, that's a fat sock.

That's another part of our job that we talked about. You're in there. I'm learning, dude. Dumbails are massive. It is. So you learned, um, so, so you, you kind of saw the importance of, wait, this is like the biggest platform on the planet. I should put some energy into this.

Definitely. And I'm learning like the ends and outs. For sure. I actually, I kind of got my start on Instagram a bit. because it's much easier to make videos there because the whole thumbnail and title concept doesn't matter. Sure. The video is good and people watch it for a decent amount of time.

You got some chances over there and don't have to think about psychologically how might I get someone to click on that? Yeah, yeah. So I had some videos that did pretty well over there, but you don't really form a connection with people that much through short-form content. So just like scrolling for the videos and you see a guy did you like and then you see him again and again

this is cool and after a couple of weeks you might not see that person anymore say oh I might I'll follow them yeah then you follow and we also discussed followers and subscribers don't really mean anything anymore it's hard to explain that to people because yeah I've learned yeah

throughout this journey you learn oh wait subscribers don't even matter it's all it's just perception so I want the I want the subscriber count only because I know on whatever like the agency or a manager will look at the subscriber account all wait this this is a big channel when we know it doesn't really matter it doesn't too much it is good to have it for sure because um as the algorithm has at least a subscriber is to initially initially test the video on

yeah but it's not like it gets shown to all of my subscribers and it is like one point four million I know it's weird. The only thing it does that helps is that YouTube has at least some kind of audience to show the video too first. Yeah. Before it opens it up to more people. But if you just, if you look at a couple of channels, you have some people killing it with 50,000 subscribers. Yeah, man. Compared to channels with 10 million or something.

Yeah. And that's kind of the exciting thing about that, that you don't need that anymore. Because as nice as it was for the big people out there, when subscribers really mattered. I feel like right now it's more of a level playing field for people. Yeah. And you see someone getting 100,000 views that has like 10 subscribers or 15. Yeah, that's crazy. I do like that about it.

But it also means that you have to be much more competitive and actually understand how all of this really works. Yeah. Dude, I think it's an ongoing thought process for me because, I mean, I was, I was one of those guys. Like, just an average, like, musician, doing the band. Oh, I don't want to do social media. I don't want to do marketing. YouTube. It's a very like, it's, unfortunately, it's extremely,

that's how your average person that band thinks. I was one of them. And as this thing has gone on, I'm like, I find it totally fucking crazy how band, people in bands don't understand how the biggest platform on a planet works. no one really knows managers, agencies,

there's maybe a few people in bands of music that have channels like I'm still in shock how this YouTube seems to be like this big loophole where it's like no one they want to play music but no one seems to understand

you have the biggest platform and no one wants to post on it. And yeah, I also learned oh because this is fucking hard. It's so fucking hard. It's way harder than start. This was way harder than,

way harder than starting a band. I can't even compare. It's this, it's way harder. So I do understand why people aren't doing it, but it still doesn't take away the, the shock that people aren't paying more attention to the biggest platform on the planet.

And then when we, and then when you're proud of the song, People get frustrated that people aren't hearing it. It's like it's a different time, man. From now to, I guess, I guess back in my day, like 2005, the competition was still very small. Now you're competing with everybody. And either you accept it or you don't.

I'm still, again, I'm just in shock how people just aren't looking at YouTube and at least try and do your best to understand it. and then when you and then when you try to explain the other people that aren't in this world like the YouTube

and you try to explain it to them it's just such like I've such a massive disconnect like wow you just don't this is no understanding nothing I was like fuck but I don't get upset because I was that guy

I was that person too I was that guy too I was just a normal musician that just expected everyone else to do the work for me If I do a great song, then the rest of the work can happen. But it's a very old school like Altaida model. Yeah, I mean, I understand frustration completely because it is frustrating when you put,

especially with a long-form YouTube video that you put a lot of work into. Yeah. I have some videos where we spend weeks on just trying to get it to work and make it the best we possibly can. And then the video doesn't do well. It doesn't really inspire you to keep going. that much because it feels wrong. But it's also kind of what we as artists asked for all this time to be in power of our own stuff.

Dude, you literally put it. You put the words, okay, way better than I did. You're right, you're right. I feel like because coming from Austria, maybe I have a different kind of background on that as well where I always felt like I'm in this random country. How am I supposed to quote unquote make it as a metal guitar player here? No one listens to metal.

there's no scene. Yeah. I can't just randomly move. I, of course, I wanted to move already when I was like 14 or 15 years old. I already saw myself here. Wow. It doesn't work that way. I actually met some people who did it that way and I admired it a lot, like not building

anything, just coming here and then you start. Oh, shit. I mean. Sure. That's the way you do it too. That's pretty, pretty tough. So for me, the whole online thing is, where I saw that opportunity for me to, even though I'm not exactly based in the center of the world,

I can still build something there and at least have something where people know me from. Yeah. And it results in some awesome things quite often. And as you said, I feel artists most of the time, especially with, I know a lot of touring musicians from that world because I've been part of that world for such a long time, longer than doing. YouTube and all of that. And I know a lot of YouTubers that are really just doing that stuff and they hate each other. That's the interesting thing.

So, yeah, for the touring musicians, you're a YouTuber that sucks. Just sitting at home, shit talking Metallica. You've never been on a stage before. And for the YouTubers is always, these professional musicians, who do they think they are? They all have this big ego and they're all idiots. That's funny.

I never thought about it that way. That's pretty funny because I'm right in the middle. I do both of the stuff. And those people tend to complain on both sides. And I'm just like, stop complaining, you freaking pussy. I don't know. We're all just trying our best and just working very hard.

It's very hard to go on tour. Yeah. It's very hard to make content. So I feel like it does help bands quite a lot. I think most of them are just a bit scared of coming across as a YouTuber all of a sudden. Sure. Where they're like, I'm this cool. guy on stage. I'm a little bit mysterious. I don't want people to know everything about me.

That's kind of what makes this band so cool. Yeah. And then I have to make videos where I'm like, this is my morning routine. Yeah. Kind of debunking all the mystery and become too approachable. So maybe that's where some of that comes from. But also, as you said, it's just a platform that's not that easy to understand. And especially as a band, if you drop like $30,000 on a music video and then no one clicks on it. That sucks. No, dude. I can't even imagine. Yeah, again,

yeah, I guess like the model now is if you're, if you're playing music or any kind of art, like, okay, you have your song. You're posting once on YouTube, maybe once a year,

maybe, more like once every two years. For us, that's like, what the fuck you doing? Yeah. That's fucking crazy. If it flops,

you're fucked. It was like, oh my goodness. But, yeah, just, There's no, there's no, uh, momentum. And, uh, I think from the, from the, uh, touring aspect of it, I think, if I was put a word on it,

gun on my head, I say it would be laziness. Musicians are inherently just lazy. That kind of comes with the territory. Like, you, you want to play music to not do this. So it's, you don't, you, you, you play music to not be in a form with, with the business, to not be, you know. but so I would put a word to I think it's lazy because I was that person too

just fucking lazy I was lazy as fuck it's lazy yeah anything that's very consistent and feels like a job is often a bit of pudding for people yeah but once you get into it and for me it was the big realization because I worked really weird jobs

in Vienna when I was trying to kind of make it with my guitar playing and all of that what was your first job I did a lot of call center stuff. Oh, you had the worst job ever. It's, I mean, I, it depends. It was, yeah, it was pretty bad.

So for the first one, it was also a bit sketchy, kind of. Because I thought I signed up for a good thing because I was working for non-profits. And I was calling the donors. And that's what the job description said. And I was like, it sounds awesome if I can help out in that way. Yeah. But what my job actually was is trying to get them to say they are a bank. information so that they can take money monthly or quarterly out of their accounts,

which is understandable from the side of the non-profits as well because they want to plan with the budget. But there were a lot of people that were aiming for the commissions. Like the more customers you get, the better you do. And they were mostly talking to elderly people. They were like, I can't get your David card now. I need to. Oh shit.

What is this? What am I doing here? So that was a pretty strange job and I did not do very well because I just always asked people. They said no. And I was like, okay, that's fine. Because I don't want to be that guy. Yeah. Yeah, but think of the animals.

Are you that heartless? Give me your bank information. So that was a rough one that I did very poorly at. And then I switched to a bank where I was also in a call center calling customers where I felt like that's more professional. but it also wasn't because the job was just getting the customers into the bank without any reason, making them think there's something wrong with their account or something, kind of. Or there's some new account and they will save a lot of money. And then they book an appointment with you.

That's your job. And then they show up and there's nothing happening. It's just the people there need to sell something. And the job of the call sign is to get people into the bank so that the guy there can sell something. So there was kind of made up this white lies kind of about new products or you have to come. It's very important. And then they come and the guy's just like, don't you want a new car? Just trying to sell them something.

Yeah. So I did that for five or six years, I think. And I made like six or seven hundred dollars a month. My tuition fee at the Vienna Music Institute was 300 a month and the apartment was 300 a month. Oh, so you were broke? Yes. Yeah. I was completely broke, yeah.

For not that long ago, actually, not that long ago. Yeah. Wow. Kind of came from nothing and gave some guitar lessons here and there maybe on the side and played some gigs with some smaller bands where it just like make $50 or 100 or something. So I could buy groceries and all that. But really, I feel, I feel like, It was very important for me to go through these four or five years where I did that

because it makes you appreciate all the stuff that I have now much, much more because there was some people studying at the conservatory with me where the parents paid for all of that. They paid for the apartment for the tuition fee and gave them some extra money to go out and party. And those were not the people that finished first. They were like, ah, didn't make it. I need another semester to do all the courses. So they kind of enjoyed that a lot, of course.

Yeah. Because I just go there for twice a week or something and the rest of the time is time off. But for me, it was like, I can't wait to be out of here because this needs to stop. I need this degree because I need to get out of the call center and out of this part-time job and studying guitar thing. Yeah. So I was really kind of hurrying up, making sure I finish on time so that I can move on from all that. That really helped, I think. Yeah, you kind of put yourself under the pressure, right?

For sure. because it was not fun. Damn, dude is broke, dude. Yeah, it was tough, especially as a musician because it was always like a huge investment to just buy any piece of new gear or something. Yeah. So it was not like I was getting a lot of free stuff

as a random guy in Austria back then, even if I played for like this one band already. I remember Ivan is supporting me relatively early in my career. But even with the endorsement, deal I could only afford like the three or four hundred dollar guitar that they dropped 50% off or something. So yeah. Yeah.

It was important. I appreciate it now for sure because I think if you're born into something like this and everything comes naturally right away, you don't, we don't really appreciate it in any way. Yeah. Yeah. It built your personality. You know? I was going to ask you, what a, how old were you when you learned English?

It was pretty early because I will never lose my accent, of course, because I always feel like a complete fraud when I try to talk like an American or something. I even sounded like Arnold when I did that, I guess. I sound authentic. Yeah, Arnold is trying hard. Yeah. I think it also, yeah, it also makes him stand out a lot. So I think that helped this career for sure.

Yeah. So I'm not, I definitely don't want to. imitate any kind of accent. I sound how I sound, but I was very interested in English because I just wanted to understand what my favorite bands were singing about. Wow.

And so I always got the best grades in English. I wrote like the best essay in the entire year at like the final exam of the school there was it. Because I always was really good at things I very deeply cared about and really bad at stuff that I didn't care about, like math and chemistry and all of that.

I wasn't very good at that. But with English, it was always really important for me because in Austria they watch movies in the theater that are dubbed in German. So you always see the mouth of the actor move and then there's a weird German monotone guy where the actor is like really expressing emotion is like, yeah, me it's very bad

so I couldn't watch movies like this. Oh wow. And I also like saw, Park was airing on MTV, Germany, and it was dubbed in German and none of the jokes because they're English language jokes. So I was very much drawn to just sitting there with like with the corn booklet or Slipknot booklet. I was like, what does this word mean? I don't get it. And just looking it up and then memorizing it. And so from movies and music that came pretty quickly. I did have it in school as well, of course, but if I wouldn't have to

that connection or that big need to actually understand it and speak it. Also, with the YouTube channel would be a completely different story if I started in German. Because it sometimes helps to serve a niche market with what you're doing online. But since... But then you're trapped. Yeah, then it's pretty hard to expand. Yeah, you were almost trapped doing just the lessons aspect. Yes.

And that's what also helped you kind of break out of that. Exactly. I plateaued a couple of things. of years ago at like 200,000 subscribers or something where I was just talking about my picking technique all the time about exercises I was doing that's not interesting for even not for all guitar players. Yeah, yeah. All of that nerdy stuff. So I made that pivot and started playing more, started posting a lot more music and some fun kind of ideas. I think that was around the time actually right here. This was my very last lesson video on the channel. If you go down just a little bit, they wanted to

right, five levels of rhythm complexity. Oh, yeah. Three years ago. Yeah. And as I can see from the thumbnail, you have queen tablets and sep tablets in there. So that super niche, that's not very interesting for everyone.

And that was the last one. I feel like where it was like a classic kind of lesson thing. And after that, it was much more about just performance stuff and just being more creative with the videos that I make. So that, yeah, also I got to play with Tool.

That's sick, dude. Hey, you know, Adam Jones? Yeah. That's awesome, man. That was really cool. He watched some of my videos on Instagram because he's watching a lot of musicians on Instagram, which I think is really cool.

And I was just doing my thing. It was one of the things. Doing some shredding stuff, like alternate picking. Some of the sweet picking stuff that I like to do. And he just taught it. and reached out to me. And at first I thought it was a scam

because it was like Adam Jones with his profile picture, hey, you want to play with us? It was like, just give me your banking info so we could get the airplane. Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

I saw the checkmark and back then it actually meant something you couldn't buy it yet. Oh yeah, yeah, true. And we started talking and it was pretty surreal and they were on tour in Europe and they're playing this song called Opiate. where there's a long kind of jam section in between

and he told me to just play a solo for I think two minutes or something or one and a half minutes or something so not short while they were just kind of freely jamming a little bit so that was quite interesting to do that and once again that's also one of the main reasons

why you should start posting you never know who's watching so you never know who's watching they won't post comment like if James Hatfield watches this video right now for some reason he won't be like, cool video bro. You will never know, but it's probably popped in, you know, maybe.

Yeah. If you're here, I'm a big fan. James, so if you're watching, man, you gotta be on the podcast. On the pod.

Yes. I can recommend it. See you in two years. Yeah. The goal. Oh, that would be great. So,

yeah, when I made the shift into doing more stuff like this, that's also interesting. That's fucking crazy, dude. It is a pretty, fun.

They're fucking crazy. Wow. It's good that there's a bit of video footage because of course I wanted to come like with seven cameras and. Sure. But they don't allow videos at their shows. Only the last song right here. Got the fist bump from Maynard.

And a boy. It was pretty cool. So at the end people were allowed to film the last song. I was allowed to say goodbye. They got me back on stage. I got a hug from. He's so big. Danny is so big.

Wow, dude. They must fucking. love you, man. That's crazy. They made me feel like I was a part of the band that was the coolest thing. So it was not like wait outside the venue and come for your spot. So I was having catering. I was in Adam's room backstage and we were talking about guitar stuff.

He was showing me some of his upcoming signature guitars. I was showing him some exercises, of course. That's what everyone wants to know when he talked to me. Like, what can I practice? What can I do? I showed him this two-not-pastring stuff that we talked about. where you get the wrist working because it was also a thing for him

that he sometimes uses the arm for some stuff and he showed me some cool hammer on stuff actually because he has a lot of riffs where there's a I know it makes no sense but it's sick it's really cool

so that was fun and just they say like never meet your heroes is a very popular saying but they've definitely does not apply to these guys at all. That's awesome, man. The only fun thing was Maynard, because when the break was happening in between the song, and I was slowly walking up stage and plugging in and everything,

he was saying into the microphone to the entire audience, don't fuck this up. And I was about to start. And I was like, yeah, I mean, I didn't plan on doing that. That's great, man. But it was partly as a joke, I think. Of course. I hope.

Maybe. Maybe. Who knows? Who knows? That was. And yeah, there's actually a video of it online. It's the worst video ever because I think it was filming. Because they kick you out if they catch you filming.

It doesn't matter what kind of ticket you have. So I think he was just trying to. Having like his beer like. Yeah. Exactly. And it's also pretty far away. I think this is a great view. Yeah, at least there's some evidence that it really happened.

So he really said something. Yeah. He was like, don't fuck this up. Nice. I've been Germanic. I think some of the solo stuff is actually at the start of the video, where it was like... Dude, that's crazy. Do the, uh, your own spotlight? Yeah. Oh, that's sick, dude. That was pretty cool.

Dang it's spotlight, dude. Oh wow. Yeah, some shredding stuff. that's awesome man you deserve it brother some sweet picking stuff yeah it was it was pretty fun I just tried to play what Adam liked in the videos

so yeah tried to make him happy that's great man that was cool that's a I mean talk about a dream for sure the only frustrating part of course was that after this ended you're not in the band or anything so it's just a one day thing and I felt like on this day I really felt like

what this is where I want to be like the whole big arena production of course the set they have on stage all of that is great the team is awesome that they have working there they had like one crew member who was doing

like a COVID test because it was during that time if one guy gets sick on this tour it's going to be a problem so super big professional production many many trucks and the cool thing was that it was a very loud stage which is I'm not used to that anymore. Do you guys play with in-air monitoring? No, the wedges as cranking, yeah.

I haven't done that in maybe 10 years or something. Wow. So I also got in-years for that because I really wanted to hear what I'm doing and not mess this up. Oh, yeah. But at the soundtrack, I was playing without in-years because I think they prepared them for me and they also have wedges. And it was the loudest stage I've ever been on and was shaking quite a bit because Danny is really playing with a lot of punch and power. So that was... He's powerful.

A cool, cool feeling on stage. Because with the pop band that I'm playing with there's not a... I mean, I do have my solo spots but most of it is like cling guitar stuff. So there's not... We also don't have any caps on stage

and we play with campers pretty much direct. So you don't really have stage volume. Yeah. So it can feel a bit sterile sometimes. this was my first metal show in a long time where it's like,

oh, this is loud and I can feel it in my bones, like the bass. Oh, my God. Yes. A freaking band, dude. That was cool. For sure. That's crazy, dude. And this is the one we did recently, the stadium one.

And I just have this pedal board right here, the camper profiler. How is it called? Remote. Yes. The camper remote. That's it. There's like no monitor, no amp on stage. Is that the same wa?

That's here? So that's my kind of backup thing. It's the quad cortex. It is also mission engineering wa that I'm using for the camper. I don't know if it's the exact same one. They make one for camper and one for quad cortex, but I think it might be the same pedal in a different color, just so that it matches.

Yeah, like, huh? Yeah. Interesting. And I do like to use that one. It's a bit awkward to sit like that. It's very old school, of course. People don't use wah that much anymore. Yeah, the was.

They go out on the game for a bit. Yeah. So I'm trying to maybe bring it back a little bit. You can kind of articulate some phrases a little bit. where in I try to do that with like I said before maybe he's starting around

muted and then opening it up and that's just kind of another rhythmic layer you could add on some shredding parts where like opening up the yeah the wind closing it so I like fun dynamic stuff

hell yeah like this yeah that's just me so you're the first guitar player to come here with a guitar tuned it. Standard E. Classic. Classic E. Has that always been your like tuning or or what? Yeah. I feel like as a bit of a nerd I'm drawn to the tuning a little bit

because of the theory background and when you study at the conservatory with the guitar in standard tuning and figure out your chord voicings. I personally like to play a lot of extended seventh chord chord voices. Like this one, for example, where you have the ninth in there. Yeah. The minor third on top. We have that kind of dissonance. It sounds nice.

So the whole fretboard visualization aspect of it is a little bit easier, of course, if you're used to standard tuning and you keep your guitar in standard tuning. Yeah. That's one of the reasons. And the other reason is that the music I make myself is a little bit kind of diverse. It's not only metal. I do have some metal stuff. occasional classic

riffs like that one where you have chamelow picking and all that of course but got a rock dude yes but a lot of the stuff that I play is like arpeggios and tapped stuff that's just

slightly distorted a little bit and I feel like with standard tuning I can do the best of all words that I kind of like I like the old school Metallica stuff and riffs I like the more modern Math rock kind of stuff that's also not down tuned that much.

Yeah. So it works for me. And you can always, like for some songs, I have, like this one is tuned down a whole step. As you said with the modern technology, it's so easy to just down tune by pressing. Oh, it's one, it's one button. Yeah. This one is one whole step down. It's in D.

Oh, D? That's super lovely. Oh, nice. It's D, right? Yeah. But you're, I'm hearing both right now, like the guitar in the room and also the sound. Oh, nice. Yeah.

Perfect. But you like an octave lower than me. Yeah. Awesome. It's crazy that it works for clean stuff and for overlapping notes. Oh, yeah. I love, I love the, uh, sick, dude. I think that's, that's very, very cool.

that you can do that nowadays because you used to have to bring all those kinds of different guitars oh yeah this one fucking button dude actually what so what kind of guitar is this this is an ibnest i hope i don't mess up the name a z 24 oh2 okay uh always a lot of numbers and i'm having my my signature with them is coming out in september and it was like an almost two-year process i think and it's congratulations man oh thanks it's a big deal it's not out yet it's coming Everything can go wrong still. But it's... Oh, we got the police outside.

I hope they're not looking for me. Yeah, no, someone stole one, so they're trying to... Oh, no. So this is the one that I'm playing usually, and it's a fun one because it's not really a metal guitar. It's more of a fusion guitar. Some people would say it comes in black as well. Yeah.

I have the black one, of course. Of course. But the interesting part about this guitar and what I like about it is that it's very versatile. because it doesn't have like full-on EMG pickups in there. You can do that kind of funky stuff where you have to pick up in the one, two, three, fourth position. Where you get that kind of, it's always hard to describe a tone. Spanky, clean tone, I guess.

It's just a little bit distorted, just a little bit crunchy. It's a sound that I really like with where you can really hear the... Oh yeah, you really hear the percussion. Yeah, it's dope. I like that a lot, but it can still also... Do the metal stuff, of course. And what's very special about this guitar,

I think yours is similar when it comes to that. When I started out, everyone told me to go for the thinnest neck possible in order for speed. Yeah. To do the technical stuff and to move the fingers. and that didn't really work for me and it took me, I don't know,

10 years to figure it out because I just thought that's a fact and I never even bothered trying anything with a thick neck because that's for the those guys. Those guys suck. Yeah.

So then I noticed that a lot of fusion players that are really great I actually play Are they playing them? Fat neck? A bat boy? Bit of a thicker neck. And this guitar is actually played by a lot of awesome fusion guys like Martin Miller and Tom Quayle.

Those guys have a similar guitar to this one. And I really like their playing. So I just decided to give it a try and felt better about my finger technique immediately because I wasn't pushing that hard. Because I feel like with a thin neck, if you have relatively long fingers, I was pushing too hard because there wasn't that much to grab on too. Yeah. So I was kind of cramping up a little bit sometimes.

sometimes and with a bit of a thicker neck now I have a grip that's much more relaxed where I'm not anchoring that hard and I'm having an easier time with legato stuff with hammons and pull-offs and all that so I like all of all of this stuff about the guitar but there's some things I don't like that I could add to my signature yeah because one thing that's always frustrating for doesn't affect all guitar players but the knob placement is not optimal for all picking techniques like if you go super deep into techniques and all that. And what I like to do with alternate picking is I follow the strings as I'm playing for

the scale. So I'm not anchoring and doing this. I'm really following. And sometimes you slightly kind of change their position. Yeah. You just touch it. So we moved that one and it was kind of a big deal because they usually don't do that for their guitars.

Oh wow. So I got them to do that, which is great, I think. And I got Fishman to make some pickups because I do like those. But I feel like they could use a bit more clarity for some stuff to sound a little bit muddy. And I love the fishmen pickups quite a lot. Yeah, yeah. They're really great. And I got my own ones that they made especially for me.

Oh, really? I'm quite excited. Oh, congrats, man. They will be in the guitar. I don't know if they will be available right away separately as well, but they will be in the guitar. Is this by coming out, do you mean you're going to get their? first one or is it going to drop on the internet in September? They will, um, the guitar will be officially released, I guess, in September for pre-orders.

So that's when people will see the instrument. I will be at guitar summit at the German NAM convention, so to say. It's like the biggest thing we have in Europe. I will be there presenting the guitar for three days at the Ibane's booth, just talking to people playing, giving master classes and all that. And I think that's where pre-orders start. so people can order through Sweetwater or Tomon, which is the big European one.

And it should get shipped out early next year or at the end of the year or something like that. Oh, congrats, man. I mean, it was a bit of a process. It took almost two years. It takes a while, dude. It takes a while. It's a very big company.

So I was talking to the German guys. They have to talk with the US team. Then they have to talk to Japan. Make sure that everyone's on board. Then we had the perfect design. Then another one of the artists came out with a guitar that looks pretty much, I won't say who is, but everyone knows who he is, came out with a guitar that looked exactly like the one that we were building for over a year.

Polythea. Maybe. But it was not intentional because the German team didn't talk to the American one. And at one point they were like, oh, those guitars look exactly the same. Timing. That was bad timing. So we kind of had to start from scratch a bit because I didn't want it to look exactly same.

I still wanted to be unique because everyone would have been like, or it's just doing the same thing like the other guy. I know it sucks, dude. That's all people see. I believe ideas, sometimes there's a certain time that ideas come. And I think that's why something comes in your head.

You got to do it that moment because I think the ideas are out there and just depends who fucking grabs it. Yes. You know, or sometimes a few people will grab the same idea. around the same time. It's always kind of like, what is that?

We actually named a record, speaking of that band, we named the record almost identical to theirs at the same time. I think their record is called Remember that you will die? Yeah, remember that you will die

and then we've parted a record called Remember You Must Die. Oh, okay. And I think they were putting their result first and we're like, we're not going to change ours. Yeah. And people say anything, I do not care. If anyone wants to fight,

I'll fight all the polypia. I was kidding. But dude, it's just a weird, what a fucking weird coincidence. But luckily, the fan base is so, I think, separated that no one,

I haven't saw, I haven't seen one thing comment about it. So this is just a weird time, the exact same time, you pull this, the same, or almost identical idea.

Like, man, it's, like, where are ideas that seem to come from, man? It's crazy. It's a cool title.

It's a bit depressing, of course. But it's true. I love. it's a fact yeah it's crazy they yeah just the same grabbing ideas so so did you change the the position or what did you of the knob yes okay for sure it's not i don't want it to be completely out of reach because maybe you've seen my old cd obsession already people comment on this all the time in my videos whenever i play something i immediately oh yeah yeah yeah i always roll off the guitar

because i don't want to be that guy that starts to talk to you then you can hear so i I learned that very early on. And I even do that when I'm practicing on the couch and the guitar is not plugged in. Yeah. And I'm practicing. And then also change pickups when the guitar is in plugged in. We all do it.

We pick up some and we start playing it. Even if it's not plugged in, we like, we turn it volume up. It's like, why am I turning the volume up? Yeah, it always feel like an idiot one second after.

It's not fucking plugged in. Yeah. So I don't want it to be too far away because I always do that. Because it's important when you're playing live and the singer is doing a big emotion. speech in your sure you have that

note coming out so it's still nicely in reach but it's not like exactly at this point where the wrist is sometimes

fighting that thing so those are the main things for me that I wanted to do a very versatile guitar that's great for the modern matthrock kind of stuff

but you can also do metal with it or anything anything except you can even do that probably yeah that's the theme

in this podcast that fucking riff dude it's a fucking oh it's even better that that tuning works much better it does

it's fucking way heavier nice perfect I've got chorus and a fucking octave on it as all blues players it's a fucking sick ass

fucking rip dude did you so did you go with the with the thicker neck yes for sure it's not a crazy

thick neck so don't want people to think that it's like you can't even wrap your around it or something. I think that thicker neck is coming back.

I think people are realizing, oh, shit. Like, you're just taking off all that tone. I think that might be the case as well. Even playing, too. I'm like, oh, shit. For me, it's really the playing where I feel like if it's too thick, it's also not great. But if I have nothing, like, if it's so thin and you feel like you're playing

like this and the fingers get a little bit stiff. Yeah. Just didn't end up feeling right for me. So I think that's a great thing. And that's also going to look. cool. I mean, that's the other thing they really want to make sure to do that they don't grab a guitar in their roster and slap a different color theme on it. And it's like, that's the signature guitar. So I really like that approach of let's try to make something. So I didn't really make

this guitar just for me. I made it for everyone who's like watching my videos and always asking what guitar would be the best. Oh, that's cool. Or the easiest to play with. Yeah. So I feel like that's a great one. I've always, uh, People are asking him like, do you, like, you never ask people about string gauges. You're actually perfect because, I guess, where do you start? Standard-D. What's like, what's it good, where's it a good gauge to a start at? I'm the most boring guy ever. I go 10 to 64, 46.

Okay, so that's the most standard you can go. But I did try out different stuff. I had a hybrid set for quite a while, maybe a year where I had nines on top. And it was fun at home because. you could kind of over exaggerate bands nicely and had a big wide vibrato because the strings were a little bit softer. So that was kind of nice.

And it worked for all of my licks and solos as well at home, perfectly fine. But then we went out on a tour and I was taking out this guitar with the hybrid set for the first time. And when you play live, you do play with a bit more like, adrenaline, especially first couple of songs you go on stage. Like, yeah. Let's do this.

I'm horny. Yeah. And when I did that with the lighter strings, I was often overshooting bands a little bit. Oh, yeah. Because I wasn't sitting at home doing this. I was like, oh, yeah, it's a freaking horny bend, dude. Yeah.

Yeah, you got to control it. Exactly. So I had that happened to me. And with some of the shredding stuff, I think once that was the pivotal point where I switched back. I was playing some kind of shred lick in the higher section of the neck. And something like that happened where the string was feeling so loose for me while I was playing that I was kind of bending it over over the fret like this.

And that's when I switched back because I felt like they are nice at home for that kind of extra range with bending and vibrato, but as soon as I stepped on stage, I missed the kind of a little bit more rigid feeling of the standard tense when it comes to that, and that's what I feel the most comfortable with. Still, I don't go thicker than that because I think that only makes sense

if you would drop a little bit and play with a lot of picking attack. I feel like you need a thicker string gauge if you dig in super hard when you kind of bend the string out of pitch just with your picking attack but with me

it's mostly light and coming from the wrist so it works pretty well with that kind of gauge so I would only go thicker if you of course if you tune lower and makes a lot of sense

but if you're in standard tuning and you feel like you dig in super hard and sometimes bend the string out of pitch a bit Yeah. Maybe a lower gauge would help with that. Okay. But I'm, yeah, I tried and I literally went back to the absolute basics because those are the basics for a reason, I guess. Yeah, sometimes you just go, sometimes you do like a full circle.

So I just went back to what I fuck. Yep. You want to, because, yeah, I mean, we're, we're just wired that way. It's always like, the new thing is always better. Like the grass is greener. This is how we're fucking wired, dude. But then you do a full circle sometimes. But it's good to try because you might find something that you might buy some.

You might find a little some, some, some. Yeah, because there are some players that love the thinner strings because they do a lot of bending. So if you're playing is all bending. Yeah. It's horny. Yeah. That could work out for you. So it also always depends on what you actually want to get out of the instrument and what you're playing.

So it's always a little bit hard because when we do the like the VIP clinics before the shows, when we go on tour, We don't want to just do like a photo session with everyone that gets a VIP ticket. We do like a two-hour full-on clinic where people can ask stuff most of the time. That's sick. And that's a very common question. Like what pick do you use? What kind of strings? What kind of this and that?

And you can always only mention the stuff that works best for you. Like this is the pick that I've been using for quite a long time. You mean with doing the Jazz 3s, right? Yes, exactly. Nice. Because it gives me the most amount of control. like when I'm switching between different strings I'm doing all of the alternate picking stuff

that I was doing I'm just not getting stuck in between the strings or grazing the strings that way and they also have a bit of a grip surface so that even when you sweat on stage you don't just kind of drop them even if you're hammered it's fine yeah hell yeah

hey Jay pull up a pull up the most recent record the end came out in 2024 right Mine? Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, it came out last year.

Yeah. Last year, so fucking weird, dude. It was... I don't know. If we could get like a record. A good old... A good old disco. Was the elemental one?

Mm-hmm. That was a fun one. Dude, that, uh... There's two songs. Uh, not, I'm lost. Uh, where am I? Uh, for farewell and water. works.

Both of those intros are fucking nuts. That's pretty fun stuff because I usually don't play acoustic guitar that

much but for some reason people really love the acoustic stuff that I do. I'm like what is like what is he even,

oh it's good cover. Yeah. It's like what is he even doing? Yeah, that was fun because that's kind of

some experimental era record where I made those viral YouTube videos for the Waterworks one I was filling the guitar with water

and then I recorded the track. Yeah. That's why it sounds like it sounds. Yeah, it sounds awesome. And I'm doing some fun stuff there because I'm, I tried, I was literally just sitting sitting like this in my room and I was just hitting some harmonics, not really thinking

about it. And I thought it would be kind of cool to do something with harmonics, like not just play some notes and then a natural harmonic, but to just only work with harmonics. So it was kind of trying to look for some shapes that I, I could follow and that I could play with all harmonics. And the obvious one, of course, is when you do something like this, where you have all of the harmonics in the row, like on the seventh thread. I'm getting harmonic out of every single string.

And I just kept searching for shapes, almost like an arpeggio, that I could play with harmonics only. And I was kind of thinking, what if I... I don't know what the best sound for that is. If I almost try to follow the strings like this with a sweep picking arpeggia and then do something like accent it like that. So I was just trying to almost see a scale made out of harmonics and only play like that.

Just to do stuff like this, which is, I don't know, I think live I might do it with a sound like this. So there are multiple cool things you can do. When you only look at harmonics on the neck and it also sounds... really fun with acoustic guitar. So, and for the other track for Farewell, that's the one I use this patch for, where it's actually in... Oh yeah.

It just sounds a little bit more sad. Yeah. It's tuned down. Yeah. So that's why I use that. And that one also has some harmonics in there, some fun stuff. I also often use like... tapping harmonics.

It's another thing I often do for these songs, where you can... Just get the notes to ring out one octave higher by just gently tapping on the strings. It's also much easier than it looks, just takes a little bit of coordination in order to see the same shape, one octave higher. You get those nice kind of overtones when you do that. So I like to do that but there are also some more heavy songs on there and the track list is a little bit special for me because my audience decided on it because I was just releasing for a very long time one song every single week.

So I had a ton of songs and I simply chose the ones that people like the most. Oh, wow. Nice. That's cool. I feel like most of the times artists are like, I like this song, so you have to like it now as well. I mean, it's always the other way around like, okay, they actually like this one a lot. I don't know why. This is the big song or the best performing song. Yeah. But I'm going with that because it seems to be. some truth to that.

So for most of the songs, I just took the ones that performed the best out of those weekly ones, and I just added a couple of collaborational efforts as well. Like the seventh track, I don't know if you know, Icicamito, he's a really, really great guitar player. There's a lot of technical, cool, clean, thin stuff,

sounds like anime stuff a lot of times. Nice. He's really, really good. so I got some of those awesome players to collaborate in songs with me. Yeah, a lot of cool collabs. Yeah.

What kind of guitar is that? That's also an Iverness. Is it? It is, yeah. It's his Iviness signature. Oh, shit. That's crazy. Oh, okay.

Oh, my goodness. That's really cool. No matter how much I practice, I'll never be able to do that. I mean, if you really love it, you would, for sure. It's always a matter of, I don't think you look at this

and it's like, I have to learn. Is this the greatest thing I've ever heard? So I also have some people saying that at some, some clings that they will never like get this alternate picking to this level or the sweep picking technique or the speed on everything. But I think most of the time you just don't really meet or want it that much. You're just like, ah, that would be kind of cool. Yeah.

So I think it's mostly, if you really like something and you feel like this is what I want to do, you will get good at it for sure because you will figure it out. Yes, for sure. That's true. You don't need, I mean, you're, you're touring the world for so many years and have so many successful songs out. I don't think it would have a big impact on, like, if you have eight finger tapping in the next song, that's what will change everything.

I wonder, huh? I don't think so. Yeah, that song might flop. Bad thumbnail and a bad, yeah. The thumbnail, yeah. A bad, a meat tapping bad. If they see this on the thumbnail. it's over.

Or people might watch just to see me fail at it. It's always that, right? No, I think you'll do great. Four out. So, Berndt, you actually, and then, I've been trying to wrap it up. It just keeps going. It's nice. I'm sorry.

So what I've been hearing, what's different about music now is that people are coming out of high school or even junior high, you know, what do you want to be? And I mean, for us, like the term might be dirty for us, but I guess what it is? Like people say, oh, they want to be an influencer or they want to be a YouTuber. Like, what do you even, I mean, what do you even start people that watch you? So I want to do that. Like, how do you even like begin that? Because it's still a very new thing. Yeah.

How do you even kind of start that? I think the hardest thing for most people that I talk to. is simply starting because most people think you need like a multi-camera setup and what stuff that we have right here, like an expensive microphone and great lighting and everything. And that's nice to have for sure. And I also like to put work into my videos when it comes to that, try to make them look really cool.

Yeah. But people ultimately don't really care about that at all. And I have some videos on my channel that look really, really bad where the audio is kind of bad and the editing, but it's just a good video that people like to watch where they get something out of it, either through the music or through what I say, or explain or talk about.

So I feel like the first thing is not being afraid to just put up a smartphone and maybe buy like a $5 to $10 clip-on microphone that goes into the smartphone and just let that be the setup when you start. Yeah. Because no one cares that much, especially if you're starting out,

it won't make the big difference. you can always add stuff as you're moving. But I feel like some people always kind of delayed at the point of starting because they're like, I want to start, but I want to do it properly. So I need to save up for that camera and I need to save up for that lighting. So the biggest thing is just starting. And I feel like right now content in general is moving into a direction where it's less about the polished stuff.

People don't even like that. Like when you're browsing through a feed and a really polished super high quality. that the video comes up, it looks like an ad. And you're more likely to skip it. And we're like, eh, don't want to see that. Like, every time I clip something out of the big budget music videos, people don't care because it looks like it's just trying to sell me something, like a car ad, like that's super nice and polished.

And people really prefer that authenticity where it looks like, even when you put that phone down and you press record and then you do your thing. Yeah. That often does much, much better because people are like, oh, that's a real person doing something and not just someone trying to sell me something. What the heck? Yeah. It's changing.

It's always changing. A couple of years ago, it was the high energy screaming like Mr. Beast style. Today we're looking at the first. We're doing this. And cuts every second. Oh, yeah, yeah. That was the trend on YouTube. Now people are really sick of that and they gravitate towards people that, like stuff

that you are doing where it's pretty much an uncut video that's, I mean, you do have some in there of course, but it's not like we're recording for six hours and then you trim it to 10 minutes. Yeah. Oh, wow. So I feel like people want that really. And the other thing is, the only other big tip is something we also already talked about. That consistency is the most important thing. Oh, it's literally one of the most important thing.

Consistency, dude. Everyone just tends to stop after a week or after two weeks or if it not working. And in reality, I talked to Charles Pett, too, who was like 2 million subscribers, the bass player, today. Yeah. And we were talking about our beginnings a bit. And he said for the first seven years he barely got any views. Wow. Seven years.

Seven years. That means us look like nothing. Yep. Seven years, nothing. No. Just maybe a couple thousand here and there. And he also wasn't uploading every week. But sometimes he had like six month periods where he was uploading every month.

month at least so some kind of consistency so this went on for years and years and years and years and now he's the biggest base player on on youtube and we're going on all these awesome tours together but I feel like most people think when they see a big channel they're like ah they got really lucky with like one video or they got a shout out from a huge channel but they don't really they should always do what what you did earlier go to oldest videos and then check out oh. Oh yeah. When you see like the fucking, yeah.

Yeah. Also, once again, if you don't get, when you don't get any views at the start, you should be really happy about that because you will hate those videos later on. And if you don't, that's actually a really bad sign because I also hate my videos from a year ago where I'm like, I could have done that better and that sucks. Yeah. I will hate this podcast in a year because I'm like, I sound it like an idiot. And I said all this stupid things.

I have to redo it. I still do that. Probably tomorrow when the podcast is out like, oh my God. No, it's going. It's good. Yeah, they kind of, I mean, they kind of mean you're doing something, right? When you look back, which I personally got from a podcast. I was consuming a Mr. Beas.

He said he would cringe at his old videos. I'm like, oh, shit, I look, I would go on older podcasts of mine. Like, oh, who is that person? But you're just starting or you're starting or you're constantly learning. And so we look back, you're like a, you're still the same person, but not, right? It's still, like, you're still you now. But when you look back like a year ago or two, I'm like, man, what, we were doing that. I thought that was really good when that came out.

Exactly. So it's kind of like you're, it's kind of like you're raising your own bar without knowing, right? So, but you don't really know until you actually look back and have something to like, something to, uh, compare it to, I guess. right? For sure. For me, it was mostly kind of trying to fake some kind of personality where it was always afraid of losing the interest of the viewer. So I was talking really fast and I was cutting it a lot and

speaking very energetically so that I get people hooked and excited about what I'm talking. And now watching that, it's just feels so weird because it looks like I'm, I don't know, like the big eyes and I'm like, I'm shocked. Yeah. I'm Austrian. I'm shredding.

Yeah. Listen to me. Yeah. Please. And you're still learning, dude. Yeah. I'm still learning. So, uh, so you're, yeah, so Charles, I was basically not posting consistently until for, for seven years.

And I'm going on, uh, over four, I hit over four and a half years being, being, consistency. Like, I can, come out of the gate pretty like, okay, every week. Nice. But, uh, it doesn't even, it, that, those four years. years this flew by. Yeah, I mean, I could see the, like, the changes in the setup, which was pretty fun. Yeah. We had an oven in here or something like that at one point. Or was it a different room? Yeah, I tried a bunch of stuff and some work, some didn't, you know. You have good ones.

You have good podcasts. You have ones that you're just, for some reason, you're just off. Could be what I have for breakfast. I don't know. Sometimes you're just mentally on it. Sometimes you're not. I don't know. But yeah, just changing the sets, see what work. The 20 is about this. We've had this curtains for it forever. Remember this one time where we took down the curtains because you wanted, you're trying, shit, you're experimenting. And it ended up just going back.

Because it looks great. Put up these, these are Amazon curtains. Nice. And I guess that kind of like became a thing. I don't know without even trying. So shit, I just went back. Then one day I put the curtains back up. I was like, oh shit, I felt good.

Like a weird, like warm feeling. I was like, oh shit, why did I take the curtains down like a fucking idiot? Full circle. A lot of things I've done in my life, I've done full circle. Came right back to where, but with a new perspective, I guess. Nice.

Yeah. Some words of wisdom. Oh, no, I feel dumb. No. Yeah, you're like the first person I ever got to talk to, Berndtler, where they've lived it. I was able to kind of hang out on somebody or get like some,

like you've been giving me some very helpful, tips and feedback so that that that that that's been very helpful i never talk to anybody ever because no one's no one's no one's in this so it's really nice and you were very gracious with their time so i thank you for that for sure um i literally love talking about all of this stuff and i hate some of the mentality that you see it doesn't matter if it's in music or in the youtube field where you feel like people don't want to tell you the secrets like ah this is something that i know yeah i have to protect it yeah um so that people don't figure it out. I think that's that has always been the worst way of handling all this. Because whenever you open yourself up and share everything, like I shared literally everything

about my technique or my exercises, either on Patreon or on YouTube or everywhere, I give out everything because I talk to some people actually and encourage them to do that and they were like, no, but then they know how to play like me and why would I do? That's the most stupid thing I ever heard. Yeah. For me, it's the exact opposite. I think it's awesome just to see people getting better. And you're like, wow, I could actually help this person. Holy crap.

Wow. Okay. That's just so much more important for me than keeping all of my secrets. And it will never be as good as me because I never practice actually. I just was born like this. And it's so easy for me. So some people like to give off this vibe. Like they're kind of, it's actually a German word that's used, Wunderkind.

I don't know if it's. Like a literal translation would be wonder child. Like you're just born and then you're shredding. That's you. No, definitely not. You're a wonder kid. No, I had to work really, really hard for everything and sucked for a long time, all of this stuff. So.

It still sucks sometimes. Yeah, definitely. It's still kind of like, what the fuck? It never ends. And it's also one of the things that makes me happy because the most depressing thought ever. just completing this instrument at one point and then you're like, okay, I can now play everything

and I know everything and I completed it and then you put it down and you're done. So it also doesn't sound great. No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't, man. I've been trying to walk away from this thing forever, but it keeps coming back. Berndt, did we

miss anything? Anything about you that you want out there or anything that I might have missed I think it was really great I think we were going on two hours and 15 minutes

oh wow so that was that that's one last thing I can show you actually okay let's do it might make for a nice clip so one thing I've been doing with picking technique

is kind of experimenting with Like I always played chords in a way where I like to arpeggiate them. So you're not playing all the notes at the same time. You're apatiorate the chord like this. I always thought that sounded relatively nice. Yeah. And I also always like the sound of sweep picking.

So at one point I kind of thought, what if you combine that kind of arpeggiating of chords with the sweep picking approach where you want this to be in time? So most of the time when you do something like this, you're not thinking about am i playing 30 second notes or 16th note triplets when i do this you're just doing this but it would be kind of cool if you would be very conscious about the rhythm of that so just started experimenting with it with that i started experimenting with it with uh three string shapes where i was really trying to so to really kind of hit the

kind of consistent tempo with that and that sounds pretty trippy because as opposed to sweep picking where you really want the notes to be separated you let them overlap like this Oh that's cool Oh that's cool

That's pretty fun and you can even do that with distortion where you Where depends on the pickup I think maybe you hear it a little bit better with move it around and so not just for solos you could also

like if I switch to a clean tone for something like this where you have this really kind of percussive, wavy sound and it's one thing that maybe you want to try because it's really cool and I don't hear it that much out there

and some people think well this is just strumming what you're doing is strumming But it's not dead. So it doesn't sound like this. We're just raking up and down. The challenge is to really... So you're... You can pick any shape.

You can just bar, for example, if you want to. Oh, nice. And the challenge would kind of be to get those even. Nice. That was actually perfect. The only tricky thing is that you don't want to pick them individually, the strings like this. You actually want that kind of fluid, almost sweep picking.

So that you can actually speed it up. Yes. Right? Nice. That's great. You know what, dude? I'm sweeping right now. Yeah, you are.

I'm just, I'm sweeping. Awesome. That sounds great. Is that it? That's it. Awesome. Fucking sweeping. You picked it up really fast.

So that's it? Yeah. Oh, sure. Okay. And then, but then you're just like, slowly picking up speed. Yes, for sure. And it gets quite hard when you...

When you speed it up like this, because you still kind of have to hear and feel the note values because you don't want it to turn into complete chaos. You really want that... That kind of triple... like that. Like that. Nice.

Nice, the door sounds really great. Yeah. Nice. I think that sounds, I think that's just a, not bad. A really cool sound that you don't hear that much. Not bad. Because you're always trying to separate the notes like this, when you hear a note after note.

Yeah. But I feel like it's a really cool kind of versatile thing. You could either do with a clean tone or even with chords, anything like that. And most people, when they don't see what. you're doing, I end up being very confused. Because I actually recorded a solo for Charles. That had a lot of those... It was really fast.

Fast picking in there and he thought I was individually picking all the notes. Yeah, yeah. And it said, this is the craziest thing I've ever heard. You have to show me how you're doing this. And I did this. And he was like, okay, I thought your fingers looked like... Oh, yeah. Like that.

But it's actually just getting... If you get the timing perfectly, it just sounds like... crazy wave of notes. That's a cool thing. I just wanted to show you at the end. Hope to hear it on the next record. It's coming on the next record. Mark, step aside.

Let me show you. I like to call this modular picking, but I guess everyone has a different term for me that made the most amount of sense. Because I think of it in modules of up and down, because you always have those repeating notes. So it's always the lowest and highest node repeating. so I always kind of imagine it as those two modules

that I kind of put together in different ways shapes or forms. That's pretty cool. But I will shut up about obscure guitar techniques. It can just go on forever. Well, Bernd, thank you for sharing your knowledge and your history, man. Thank you for having me.

Appreciate that. What do you have coming up and then where can people find you? Yes. So the most exciting thing that's coming up is in October already, October, early November, going on tour with Charles in China. So we're doing two weeks of China. Then we're playing one festival in South Korea. And then three shows in Australia at the end of August and early, at the end of October. It's not that early. At the end of October, early November.

and maybe I can send you a link for that would be great if people come to this shows it's our first time in all of these countries and we want to come back at one point and that's the most exciting thing happening on tour concerning my guitar playing

if you liked some of the stuff that I played you can listen to it either on Spotify I try to put out almost weekly new music from crazy metal stuff all the way to acoustic guitar something different every time to keep it interesting. And of course, I have two YouTube channels.

The main one is the one where I'm mostly just playing and talking about some broader stuff. And I have a Guitar Academy channel as well because I still want to keep helping people. It just didn't work on the main channel anymore because the topics got so obscure, like the modular picking stuff that we just did. If you posted on a 1.4 million subscriber channel,

it's like, what is he talking about? I have a channel to nerd out as well. It's called Burnt Guitar Academy. And of course a Patreon community in case people want to check it out. And they should also join your Patreon community. Yes. Because I want to give you the sounds.

Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, we're trying to figure it a way to get the tone and then able to put it. So yeah, I'll hit you up about that. Yes. So is there like a website you really want people just a go-to? Don't really have a straight...

I mean, I do have a website, but... We'll just put everything then. Yeah. I think... Link tree? I think the link tree is just... Oh, yeah. That's actually some stuff, yeah.

That's your link tree, you know that, right? Yeah. I almost forgot about that. Yeah. Because people don't really... I mostly direct people to one source because they... If they're like me, they don't like that kind of...

Here are seven links. I know not from you. Yeah. You choose where you want to go to. It's usually like if I have something very specific. Like if I'm playing a song, you can listen to that song here. If I'm showing some technique, you can find the exercise there. So it's not just here are all of my links.

Yeah. Here's everything. Yeah. But I do have that. And you just came out with like a EP? Yeah. I do tend to. Whenever I put a new song.

I put the... Say less. Yeah. That's 25. Two songs. Yes. So whenever I put out a new song, I try to find a song that I previously released and added on there. So it's always kind of an EP. I'm not always coming up with four songs every week. I just kind of try to bundle them together in a way that makes sense. That's how eventually I released my album. Great. So yeah. Great. Thanks everyone who checks me out from this. Thank you again, man. Appreciate it. All right, everyone. That's it. Later. That's the fucking riff. Yeah.