Teemu is in town — wrapping up Wintersun’s Fall 2018 North American tour this Sunday at Irving Plaza in NYC (tickets here if you’re in the area!)
And on Monday, we’re hosting him at the Cracking the Code Studio for a live workshop and Q&A session.
Who is Teemu?
Teemu is the lead guitarist of Finnish power metal band Wintersun. He’s well versed in weaving punishing rhythms and intricate dual-lead flights of fantasy into epic power metal soundscapes.
Our interview with Teemu is one of our most watched ever, and for good reason — Teemu is a rare combination of ferocious player and masterful teacher. Specifically, he’s watched a lot of our stuff, and has extensive experience teaching pickslanting mechanics to guitarists of all levels.
Here’s a good clip of his scary arpeggio playing:
Event Details
We’re excited to catch up with Teemu and talk technique, teaching, and more. And we look forward to taking some viewer questions!
The event is free for everyone to watch, and will be live on YouTube.
If you have an account on the Cracking the Code Platform, you can tune in via our Live Studio and submit questions for Teemu once the event starts.
We’ll get an edited version uploaded to the site later, with clips and tablature for Masters in Mechanics members.
Tune in to watch the event live: Monday, Oct. 15th at 4pm ET / 8pm UTC
I’ll have to catch up on this one asap! I just managed to connect at the end to listen to the ending solo, incredible how he could play like that all by himself in front of a camera - with no backing track - and knowing he only had one shot!
PS: for the longest time I was convinced that our @hamsterman was Teemu
I love that he mentioned that a too small picking motion makes string changes hard as this is something I recently noticed in my playing. When you have motion mechanic that achieves no distance from the string you can pickslant as much as you want without ever really escaping. This made ascending runs in dwps and descending runs in uwps especially hard as there the escape and the string change happen in opposing directions (in dwps you escape after the upstroke but when the lick is ascending the string change is happening towards the floor). Also small picking motions don’t have that nice attack you get from big motions with edge picking so I have to practice picking big, in contrast to every youtube tutorial on this subject
You’re close. I am Teemu’s pet hamster.
Thanks! Agreed — we actually just uploaded an edited version…higher quality video + a bit brighter
That’s on YouTube now; we’ll get it on our site soon too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4obP_K546IHe’s playing our Hellcat and we didn’t change the settings at all. It’s just a solid high gain lead tone, with no bass issues and no treble fizz, and everybody sounds good through it.