15th May 2008
Zack Kim, boy guitar genius
This shit is insane. By random JukeTube surfing, I stumbled upon Zack Kim, a Korean kid is so inanely talented on the guitar it’s mind boggling. Here’s his blog. Here’s a bunch of his stuff on YouTube. According to his blog, he’s in the army, having recently completed basic training, until December 2009! And he says he has almost no time to practice guitar, which is criminal when you see the amazing music he makes.
He’s got this technique I’ve never seen before, where he plays two guitars, one mounted on a clamp, and the other slung around his neck almost like a normal guitar, except that he plays them simultaneously almost like a keyboard, tapping out two parallel melody lines and chords, like two people playing together from the same mind. I showed a few of these to a guitarist/composer/professor friend of mine, who was blown away, saying what this kid is doing is fantastically difficult.
Yet he does it effortlessly. I honestly think he’s the best guitarist I’ve ever seen. It’s like he’s separated the two hemispheres of his brain to play two independent melody lines ambidextrously.
He specializes in classical (e.g., Beethoven’s Fur Elise, Mozart’s Sonata in Cmajor K545, Bach’s Goldberg Variation 1), jazz (e.g., Take Five, Fly Me to the Moon and Autumn Leaves), and TV and video game themes (e.g., Super Mario, Tetris and The Simpsons, below).
Tags: genius, jazz, music, youtube
just to let you know, I’m half korean and I watch the korean channels on direct tv. and there’s a show called Star King: star search, it’s pretty much like our old star search but it’s pretty laid back and fun and it has a variety of different types of people with different skills. I have seen Zack Kim on there twice and he won BOTH TIMES! He even made a band while he was in the army! They came with him the second time he was on the show.
So yeah, he still is playing and still amazes people but now he’s on tv even when he’s in the army~