• Year of composition: 2007
  • Work category: 4 Instruments
  • First performed: 4 August, 2009 in the Berg 211 venue, Gothenburg
  • Duration: 9 min

Instrumentation

4 electric guitars

Examples of printed editions

BabelScores, Paris 2016

Description of work

One-movement work


Work comment

Speed Devils is a work dealing with so called tapping, a playing technique unique to the electric guitar and made famous by rock guitarists such as Eddie van Halen. Using tapping, neck-breakingly fast patterns can be played. Unlike in rock music, the focus in this piece is not on the solitary guitar hero, but on the interplay between three equally important guitarists, whose individual licks are woven together into a larger whole.

About halfway through the piece, a fourth electric guitar joins in, using an E-Bow to play a very slow melody, against the virtuosic high-speed music of the first three.