Dweezil Zappa has come to the defense of finger-blurring shredders, believing they’ve earned the right to set alight their fretboards.
In a new interview with Masters of Shred, Zappa has hailed the time, dedication, and talent players must exercise to pull off Ywngie Malmsteen-sized fretboard feats.
"The attention to detail of what it takes to actually be able to do those things, whether somebody likes the music or not, you can't deny that somebody has built incredible talent,” he says [transcribed by Ultimate Guitar]. “You can't just be a guy that can play Yngwie Malmsteen stuff. You have to do that for, like, 15 years to be able to get to the point where you could play one of his songs.”
For a man who grew up obsessing over Eddie Van Halen guitar work — and then had Ed visit his house (“It was like having your own toy Eddie Van Halen,” he remembers) — Dweezil knows that paying attention to detail is an important skill to develop.
“The ones that like the solo style of guitar,” he says, “they are detail-oriented, and they're willing to put the time in to actually acquire the skill. If you have it in your head that you can visualize it and you say, 'I'm going to do this,' whatever it is, it's great when somebody just says, 'Olay, I'm going to go fully into this.'”
Indeed, for some, shred for shred’s sake does the reputation of lead guitar no good. Dweezil is far less concerned about how it may be perceived.
“Some people look at it like, 'Oh, that's lame. Who cares about what that skill is.' But you've got to put the time in to do it. There's going to be somebody that likes what that thing is. It might not always be the thing that makes you have a comfortable financial lifestyle, but if you go full forward into the thing that you love, I'm all for it.”
Talking to Rick Beato about the fateful night his guitar hero appeared at his front door, Dweezil explained how crucial Eddie Van Halen’s atypical techniques — and that all-important attention to detail — were to creating his iconic sound.
This included how Eddie would flick his tapping finger upward, rather than with the usual downward motion that most players prefer.
After starting his guitar playing days as a pupil of Eddie’s, Dweezil later found himself teaching the late virtuoso how to play some of his father, Frank’s, most difficult riffs.
“In that moment, it was a total role reversal,” he reflects, “because as a 12-year-old, I was saying, ‘Play "Eruption," play "Mean Street," ’ thinking I could never play that. So I had this complete oddball experience. It was like the Jedi mind trick or something. It was very strange.”
Speaking to GP at the start of the year, Dweezil discussed his father's idiosyncratic lead style, saying that Frank “was a drummer who became a guitar player, so the rhythmic element within his soloing is ridiculously strong.
“He didn’t necessarily have the chops to where every single note was executed perfectly, but the charm of his playing is that he’s going for things that he might not be able execute.”
Dweezil Zappa released his brand-new signature Shabat guitar earlier this year, and it’s a quirky-looking electric guitar with a host of tricks up its sleeve.
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