Anyone that can play 1,000 harmonics in 90 seconds or less is going so fast that it’s pretty natural for the resulting sound to come off as little more than noise. That seems to be the case with this as the finger movements of the person playing are genuine enough but the resulting sound is so disjointed to the untrained ear that it sounds like nothing more than random notes that don’t fit together at all. Many people would not call this music, some might call it a type of music, and those that are aware of what harmonics are might actually feel the need to be impressed since being able to move one’s fingers this fast seems to denote a level of skill that’s taken a while to accrue.
A harmonic is a multiple of a fundamental frequency. When that fundamental frequency is being played it gives off the pitch of the instrument. If one of the integer multiples are played without sounding the fundamental frequency then this is called playing a harmonic. It sounds more or less as though one leaves out the fundamental sound and plays instead the underlying, multiple sounds that are there as a result of the fundamental frequency. Any other explanation besides that one and this might become a math problem, which I am not fond of nor proficient at when it comes to music.
Talking about what it sounds like however is almost akin to something you might hear in a thriller or a horror movie when the moment has become rather tense and anything at all could happen in the next moment. I get the feeling that it’s supposed to be rather impressive, which it is, but the sound is something that is quite frantic and just a little but disturbing since it’s too many tones at once to be at all cohesive. I might have actually felt myself getting just a bit anxious at the sound of this one, though it was easy enough to stay under control as I focused on the player’s fingers. They were moving so fast that it was hard to believe that the clip hadn’t been sped up somehow or the sounds dubbed to make it look as though the guitar was being strummed this quickly.
That’s impressive though, and I can imagine it took a while to master in this manner. The guitar, whether acoustic or electric, is something that takes a lot of patience and time to really get right. Some people are naturals and can sit down with a guitar and go note by note until they find something that sounds right, but many others are those that really need to work at it and devote hour after hour after weekend after year to get it right. Watching something like this makes it seem so easy that you might think you’d be able to pick up a guitar and just start strumming without any difficulty.
Go ahead and try, but something like this had to have taken some serious time.
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