I’m Tim “The Six String General” Granlund and I’m showing you how to Air Guitar.
Alright, now we’re going to talk about song selection. Now, first of all, sometimes you can’t select your songs. Sometimes you’re walking to the grocery store, you’re driving in your car and you just hear this awesome badass song that you just totally love and you can’t help yourself. You just got to start air guitaring, and that’s totally fine. Sometimes, you’re putting on a show, whether it’s competition or just you’re at karaoke and you want to bust up some air guitar there.
Now, what you want to remember is when you’re picking your song, don’t just think of yourself. Think of everybody around you. Think of the crowd, think of the audience. What are they going to like? What’s going to get their hearts raised and what’s going to get their heads bobbing up and down? Most of the time, it’s going to be some killer rock song.
Now, when you’re doing air guitar, it’s obviously a bit of a ridiculous practice as is. So you kind of want to have a ridiculous song to go with it. Hair metal and all those glam rock bands of the 80s, those are perfect candidates, things like Poison and Skid Row, those kinds of guys. These guys are a blast, the Scorpions, use them, too.
Another thing you want to remember is obviously, you want to make sure you’ve got some good guitar solos and see if you can really take a minute to show off and show off your true air guitar virtuosity. You just want to make sure that your song can tell a story. Now, when you’re in a competition, you’ve got 60 seconds. You’ve got to edit that song down. So you want to make sure that you use those 60 seconds as best as possible into a medley of songs or you can have just one song, but you want it to kind of tell a story. So you want to be able to kind of start off something a little bit small that kind of signals people, “Hey, this is the song about the play.” “Oh yeah!” They hear these chords and like, yes. I love this song and it’s coming up. I can’t wait for my face to get noted. And you want to build it up.
Maybe a good idea is to kind of get going, get the audience still adopting—whoa! Let’s pull it back for a second, hold it back. You’re like, “What’s going on?” And then boom! A smashing at the end, it’s just some killer finish, the final solo.
And of course, there are different genres of music and different styles, too. It depends on the occasion. First of all, you’ve got your hard rock songs. You’re probably going to want something that’s like—just really crazy and rocking hard that gets them good crunch of guitars. [Music Playing]
Okay, now sometimes, maybe it’s a more occasion. You’re romancing your lady. You want to pick something a little gentle or a little softer. So you’re going to bust out your Air acoustic Guitar. So let me grab that one, alright? You may do something like this. [Guitar Playing] There’s your softer side. And maybe even you want to switch it up on people. You’re going to start with something a little softer like that and say, “Wait a minute, no. This is f---n Air Guitar. It’s time to rock!” And then you just stop it and then boom! Break out the craziness again, bring out the hard rock in your song.
So those are some things you can think of when you’re picking your song. Most importantly, you got to make sure that you like it and it’s something that you can totally get into and rock out with.
So that’s song selection. And next up, we’re going to talk about the fun part, the costumes.
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