“I was like, ‘Oh, this playing sounds weirdly familiar.’ And then I found the video. It was lifted note for note”: The moment Jack Gardiner realized Giacomo Turra had lifted his licks

Jack Gardiner is one of today’s leading virtuosos. His dexterity on the instrument is jaw-dropping, refined over decades of graft and tuition at the hands of fusion masters Tom Quayle and Alex Hutchings.

It’s no wonder people want to play like him. But some guitarists can take their hero worship a little too far, as Gardiner discovered when he became the victim of serial lick thief Giacomo Turra.

It started in 2020 when Gardiner’s fans noticed a recent Turra video was awfully reminiscent of the Liverpudlian shredder. They began tagging him in comments. Then something weird happened. “Every time I’d go to click on it, they’d disappear; they were being deleted,” Gardiner says now.

“I listened to it, and I was like, ‘Oh, this playing sounds weirdly familiar.’ And then I found the video. It was an improv I made on YouTube back in 2013. I was 19. It was lifted note for note, no credit, no tag or anything.”

To add insult to injury, it was obvious that Turra was miming; Gardiner describes the clip as “edited to death”. Even so, he was willing to let it slide – at least his impersonator wasn’t making money off it.

“At first, it was just like, ‘Oh, well, that sucks. He’s got like half-a-million views and there’s no tag, but whatever. I thought, ‘It’s fine’… until I saw on his website that he was selling the transcription of it.”

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Gardiner got in touch with Turra to tell him that none of this was cool. The Italian lick-lifter panicked. He offered to send over all the cash he’d made, claiming he didn’t realize Gardiner was on Instagram.

“I was like, ‘Dude, don’t worry about it, like, I’m not bothered about that. Just in the future, can you make sure you tag people and give credits?’”

“No problem,” said Turra. A week later, he proceeded to share the video again with no tag. It got another half-a-million views.

Gardiner was one of many artists who had their licks pilfered. Alex Hutchings, Tom Quayle, Marco Baldi, Travis Dykes and even Jacob Collier were among his victims.

For Gardiner, the situation is worse than any fake guitar playing. It’s closer to AI in the way it scrapes and plagiarizes art.

“It’s just stealing. It’s screwing over a lot of musicians. He was doing it to so many creators that were very, very small. I was lucky enough that I had a small audience so that people could be vocal about it. A lot of these guys had a couple of 100 views – in some cases, a couple of likes on their videos.

“I felt awful seeing that their stuff is being nicked and they’re not getting the recognition for it being their playing, and their ideas. A lot of that stuff was improvisation. It’s very personal to them.”

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As for Turra, he released a non-apology, went dark for all of about two weeks, and then appeared again, releasing music and videos like nothing ever happened.

“I saw one video where he’s miming to a track that’s being played in the background, and he’s making out that it’s camera audio, but I can see that he’s not playing the right stuff. I can see that the pick attack’s not right.”

Six years on, Gardiner can see the funny side. Heck, he’s almost impressed by Turra’s audacity.

“Lessons have clearly not been learned. Hats off to him for sticking with that. It takes a lot of mental nous to do that!”

Gardiner, meanwhile, just released his debut solo album Kintsugi, an unapologetically ’80s collection of jaw-dropping guitar playing, with guest stars including Matteo Mancuso, Andy Timmons, Cory Wong, Henrik Linder and many more.