New fan-shot footage of Yngwie Malmsteen's recent concert at the Harrisburg Midtown Arts Center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania has emerged on YouTube.
The show – one of the first on Malmsteen's current month-long fall US tour – saw the guitar wizard blaze through a selection of cuts from his discography, including Wolves at the Door and Relentless Fury from his latest album, Parabellum, some of his biggest hits like Rising Force and Black Star, and a cover of Deep Purple's legendary Smoke on the Water.
After working with a series of singers over the course of his decades-spanning career, the guitarist now handles lead vocal duties himself – as seen during the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania performance.
Malmsteen's backing band for the tour includes bassist Emilio Martinez, keyboardist Nick Marino and drummer Brian Wilson.
Despite Yngwie's enviable guitar chops, he revealed in a Guitar World interview earlier this month that he has “never practiced in the true meaning of the word”.
“Practicing is taking something and repeating it over and over,” he said. “But from day one, the first time I picked up a guitar when I was seven, in my head I thought I was a performer. I never, ever, ever felt like, ‘Oh yeah, let me play this repetitiously until it's right.’
He did concede though that he plays, expectedly, “quite a lot”. “If I'm watching TV, I play guitar,” he continued. “And looking back, most of the time I'm touring or recording, so it's like I'm never not doing it. It's always active somehow. And if I don't play for a little bit, I notice.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Malmsteen discussed recording every single instrument – and vocal line – on his latest album Parabellum himself, apart from drums.
“It's a very bizarre thing to try to explain, because in rock 'n' roll it's embedded in people's minds that it has to be a band playing everything,” he explained. “And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that – I love the Rolling Stones and Deep Purple and so many bands.
“And 99.9 percent of the songs in those bands usually come about when the guitar player comes up with a riff, the drummer starts playing along with it and finally the singer comes in and starts singing over that. Which is great. But for some reason I tend to approach things more like a writer or a painter would.
“Like, the painter paints the foreground, he paints the background… he doesn’t go, 'Oh, can you do this part for me?' It’s the same with a classical composer, for that matter. And that’s just the way I approach it. Even when I was a little kid, if the drummer wasn’t in the rehearsal room I’d just put the record button on. Like, the demo tape version of Black Star that I did in 1982, that’s me playing drums, bass, keyboards and guitar. So this is nothing new for me.”
