As you may remember, last year I uploaded a video on my official facebook page of me practicing Jason Becker's "Perpetual Burn". This piece is one of the greatest guitar challenges and a milestone for every melodic shred guitarist since 1988, when the "Perpetual Burn" album was released. So, this video of mine was shot for personal intends in order to check where I am in the process of learning and polishing the piece. Due to my practice to upload such videos to my facebook page, I decided to upload and this one and five minutes later, Jason Becker himself posted it on his page, which left me with my jaw dropped... Honestly, I didn't expect such thing, at least because this so-called cover that I did, wasn't the full track - it stopped somewhere around 2/3 of the length, also it was captured by the built-in microphone of my laptop and the sound quality was pretty bad. Nevertheless, I gained a serious amount of views and popularity, which was, according to my own beliefs, an undeserved fame, especially when later the same year Jason Becker mentioned my cover in the October edition of Guitar Player Magazine along with Jeff Loomis (whom I would like to thank a lot for the great backing track of "Perpetual Burn"). I felt both proud and bit ashamed, because it's a great thing for someone to be aknowledged by their idols, but at the same time I still didn't think I should get such credits for just a practice video with a poor quality. This, though, motivated me to sit down on my butt and practice "Perpetual Burn" until I get it right - it was a long and difficult road to walk on, because I learnt this piece by ear, which is a serious challenge, considering the speed of certain phrases, also every month I was discovering, that I play something wrong and I needed to fix my mistakes. Finally, I reached some point, where I think I played the piece at an acceptably high level, so I decided to shoot a decent video of it and put in on YouTube. This, of course, led to issues that every musican is pretty familiar with - the sudden drop of the playing abilities when recording, which combined with my "recording apnea", causing constant hiccups, forced me to play this piece about 30 times in a row to get it right on the video. As a result, my hands got very tired and a bit aching at the end, but I think the result is somewhat good, so enjoy and feel free to share:
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMVn1cvgGrQ[/embed]