Short And Sweet: Freaking Awesome Guitarist Breaks Bumblebee Record

I can't even imagine hands this fast. That slow-motion had to get involved should say enough. The world's fastest guitarist has set a new record, and we have video goodness courtesy of Wired.com.

Thrashers, shredders, and heshers, lend me your tinnitus-damaged ears! The Great Question has been settled. The fastest guitar player alive is not Eddie Van Halen nor Yngwie Malmsteen nor that guy from Morbid Angel. Nope, it’s John Taylor, a 28-year-old music teacher in Westminster, Colorado, who last spring claimed the official Guinness-certified title by blazing through Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Flight of the Bumblebee” at a fret-melting 600 beats per minute.

At that velocity, the famously complex century-old composition is more like a videogame sound effect than music. Taylor filmed himself performing the feat (in front of witnesses), and the Guinness judges verified his musicianship using slo-mo. The fastest-guitarist record used to be based on the simpler criterion of notes played per second, but Guinness officials lost patience with wannabes trilling away on a single note, so they changed the standard to “Bumblebee” a few years ago.