Discovering Guitarist Adrian Bellue

Despite not really posting a ton, I still enjoy the use of Twitter as a means of gathering news and interesting links (and keeping on top of the latest animated GIFs and cat videos). I use TweetDeck to manage a lot of different accounts and views, which I vastly prefer over the traditional Twitter interface.

One column I maintain is a list of keywords that match various projects of mine, and I’m actively looking for uses of the word “underviewed.” Every once in a while I’ll see some mention of my underviewed.com site, but oftentimes it’s shout-outs of things that people wished were better known.

A recent post that showed up was this one, mentioning guitarist Adrian Bellue. A few seconds into the video, I began wondering how someone could make those kind of sounds come out of a guitar.

I feel like I’ve seen my fair share of finger and guitar tapping, and was thinking primarily of Erik Mongrain, someone I first learned about way back in 2006.

But Bellue’s style was a revelation. I think it’s the inclusion of the false harmonics that take it up a notch for me, as I simply couldn’t believe he’s making all of that happen at the same time.

I ended up searching for more videos of his, and wanted to listen to what he sounded like playing “live.” Here’s an example from 2016, and another from 2013.

This was a random encounter, and reminded me of the early Internet… when chance and serendipity seemed more frequent. And one would just stumble across neat content like this. Sharing this because it delighted me, and hoping it does the same for you.

Related:
Alexandr Misko: Billie Jean
Erik Mongrain: Amazing Guitar Tapping Videos
Adam Fulara, You Are a Badass