The Portuguese Guitar

25Jun08

There’s no point in being encyclopedic about it, but this being a guitar blog and all, I wanted to post some music made with the portuguese guitar. This guitar has 12 steel strings, a funny tunning and it’s really hard to play. The virtuoso in the first movie, Carlos Paredes, was the 60s revolutionary (imprisioned for his connection to the Communist Party) that rescued the Portuguese Guitar from it’s fado role and gave it academic creed, studying it and developing a composition style. He also wrote some heartbreaking melodies later copied by Led Zeppelin in Stairway to Heaven (joke but true):

He could play it really really fast:

And this is how that sounds shredded \m/:

These days there’s a very nice guy from Lisbon called Norberto Lobo playing the acoustic guitar. He is equally influenced by Paredes and Fahey (and all the guitar dudes that have been playing Portugal regularly in the last decade: Jack Rose, James Blackshaw, Ben Chasny, Steffen Basho-Jungens, that japanese guy with the cowboy hat and the sword). Here you can find him perfmorming one of my favourite Paredes’ songs, but Norberto will get his own post sooner or later:

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Tags: carlos, led zeppelin, norberto lobo, paredes, portugal, portuguese guitar