Plini turned a photo of birds into a guitar melody - and the results are breathtaking
“Please don’t judge my total inability to write sheet music,” the Australian instrumental guitarist jokes
Australian prog-rock ace (and Guitar World columnist) Plini has demonstrated in the past how to build a complex riff from a simple melody.
Now the electric guitar player has taken things a step further, building a stunning instrumental piece out of, well, a photograph.
The guitarist recently took to Instagram to post a pic of birds in flight, over which he superimposed a music staff. He then interpreted the birds as notes, added a characteristically ethereal backing track and, well, the results are rather stunning, as you can see and hear.
A photo posted by @plini on Mar 30, 2020 at 5:11am PDT
Plini fans will also, um, note that this is not the first time the guitarist has attempted something of this nature. A few months back, he shared a photo of surfers in an ocean, which first inspired his “melody generation” idea.
At that time, Plini wrote:
“I posted this photo the other day and someone commented that the surfers looked like notation. So I put a stave over them, approximated the notes, sight-read an interpretation of the rhythm and added some other shit on top.”
As for the new "birds” melody, Plini says there’s more to come.
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“I think I shall put it up on Bandcamp or something soon,” he writes, adding, “Please don’t judge my total inability to write sheet music.”
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Rich is the co-author of the best-selling Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion. He is also a recording and performing musician, and a former editor of Guitar World magazine and executive editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine. He has authored several additional books, among them Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the companion to the documentary of the same name.