Welcome to my first master class review! On our very first day at Guitar-X we were
fortunate enough to be visited by the amazing Adrian Legg.

Well I walked into the room and saw Adrian sitting there with his guitar, so to call it, and first
impressions were, “Oh it’s some old guy on a guitar” but I was proven wrong, very wrong!
This “old guy” could play some of the best playing that I have ever seen, even better than
what I’ve seen on YouTube. Adrian’s style is so unique as well as his guitar. As Adrian got
older he started to have problems with his acoustic guitar affecting his back, so he asked a
company to build him a guitar but they couldn’t build it within his time limit. He got a friend
to build him a guitar called ‘the Bill’. Adrian also has banjo tuners on there to allow him to
change tunings mid way through the song. He was asked what gave him the idea of putting
banjo tuners on his guitar and if I remember correctly, his words were “Sometimes during a
song that I write, I feel that it needs a fresh sound, basically new DNA, and having the banjo
tuners allows me to do so”.

Adrian’s Modern Inspirations are quite surprising as he looks to Eric Johnson, Joe Satriani
and Steve Vai as some kind of influence. He opened G3 for them when the tour came over
here. As a Genre of inspiration he looks at the Romantic period, because as he said you
can listen to a track and nick a part that appeals to you and you can work it into something
of your own.

America is his favourite place to gig so he has got some influences from there as well but
as for his Master Class, it was absolutely amazing to see someone of his ability play
literally 5 metres away, and his music is absolutely fantastic. It’s not something that I’d
chose to listen to every day but it’s definitely worth a listen as his style is incredible. He also
finger picks like a typical banjo player and all I can say is I was astounded and so were the
other students sitting around me.

Until next time…

Thanks,

Bradley Beets (2008 Marshall Scholarhip winner)