Percussive fingerstyle performances of Take on Me and Billie Jean

Alexandr Misko is a 20-year-old musician and composer from Russia whose percussive fingerstyle guitar performances have gone viral on YouTube and Facebook. In the video above, he performs A-ha’s Take on Me while tapping the guitar as he plays. Note how Misko twists the tuning pegs to quickly tune the guitar for different parts of the song. Via Wikipedia:

Music arranged for fingerstyle playing can include chords, arpeggios (the notes of a chord played one after the other, as opposed to simultaneously) and other elements such as artificial harmonics, hammering on and pulling off notes with the fretting hand, using the body of the guitar percussively (by tapping rhythms on the body), and many other techniques. Often, the guitarist will play the melody notes, interspersed with the melody’s accompanying chords and the deep bassline (or bass notes) simultaneously. Some fingerpicking guitarists also intersperse percussive tapping along with the melody, chords and bassline. This enables a single guitarist to provide all of these important song elements.

Misko released his debut album Beyond the Box in 2017. Get another look at his percussive technique in his arrangement of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean:

Thanks, Joyce.