One of the joys of working as a guitar journalist in 2023 is bearing witness to how the ‘Spotify effect’ shapes the future of the instrument. In a world where everyone has access to pretty much all the music ever recorded, we’ve seen genre boundaries broken down and a wealth of production approaches that keep the electric guitar sounding fresh.
The posterboys of this six-string boundary-smashing are undoubtedly Polyphia, and trap and lo-fi beats continue to be a muse for cutting-edge players.
But there are plenty of combinations that remain unexplored, and one of the more unlikely pairings – ’70s disco and ’80s virtuosity – is the subject of a new kind of fusion: nu-disco shred.
At the helm of the radical mashup is Dre DiMura, a session player who stays hip to musical trends via TikTok, where he has over a quarter-of-a-million followers. DiMura previously explored hip-hop shred on last year’s polyjuice potion, but took a different tack for his latest single, crisis fatigue.
“I definitely wanted to do something different,” he tells Guitar World. “My roots are in metal and prog. However, I also love pop music. I noticed this big disco/dance revival happening in music right now with artists like Dua Lipa, Miley Cyrus, and Sam Smith. It’s rooted in the ’70s, so I saw a golden opportunity to do it with guitar.
“I was also revisiting bands like Polyphia, who obviously do an amazing job of genre-bending and adapting our instrument to other genres like trap, but I wanted to try something new, and nu-disco was wide open.”
Crisis fatigue is, put simply, a disco-shred banger, built around a two-hand tapping sliding riff that has echoes of Giorgio Moroder’s classic ’70s sequencer lines. And it was inspired, in part, by one of today’s foremost tapping proponents.
“I’m always watching players like Tim Henson, Ichika, Manuel Gardner Fernandes, and Yvette Young,” DiMura explains. “My friend Brandon Dove is in Covet, and I actually had just gone to see them when I was workshopping what would become crisis fatigue. I had gotten really sick of my own playing, so it was a welcome jolt of inspiration seeing Yvette and the band play.
“Those players often approach playing the guitar like a keyboard or synthesizer, so my idea was to combine that sound with the swagger of the players I grew up emulating. I’m always searching for the middle ground between technique and listenability.”
I got stumped while recording the solos, and my fiancée came into my studio and told me to stand up and jump around while I improvised – it got me out of my head and into my body
The track’s angular hook is followed by a Malmsteen-esque harmonic minor run and skyrocketing sweeps that hint towards DiMura’s formative influences, which also include Eric Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, Paul Gilbert and Marty Friedman.
The guitarist notes that he “relied on a lot of compression, and the individual tones are actually much cleaner than you’d imagine,” which means the delivery on his Schecter Nick Johnston Signature had to be razor-sharp.
Accordingly, there were some elements of the track that presented a few technical difficulties.
“The main hook is challenging to play consistently,” DiMura notes (and you can test that for yourself with free tabs available from his website).
“If you don’t fret hard enough, the high, tapped notes will fret out and ring. Technically speaking, though, the most challenging section for me is the polyphonic tapping riff near the end of the second solo.”
This ambitious section wasn’t composed in the conventional sense, he explains – it was born of frustration, and then, later, of joy.
“I got stumped while recording the solos, and my fiancée came into my studio and told me to stand up and jump around while I improvised,” DiMura explains. “It got me out of my head and into my body.
“I loop-recorded while I danced and played for about five minutes. That part was in one of the improv takes. I loved it so much I kept that original take without polishing it up later.”
Tradition can be a prison. There are no rules when it comes to how you want to express yourself with the instrument
Given how unintuitive the phrasing and timing were, this stream-of-consciousness playing tested the virtuoso’s abilities when it came time to film the song’s mirrorballer music video. But that’s nothing out of the ordinary for DiMura. After all, this is a guy who once played Cliffs of Dover blindfolded – and he’s intent to keep pushing the boundaries of what we expect from the instrument, all while nodding to the past masters.
“My goal is to continue surprising myself,” he says. “Tradition can be a prison. There are no rules when it comes to how you want to express yourself with the instrument.
“Metal, rock, and prog are inescapable elements of my style, so I’ll continue fusing those influences with new genres I’m inspired by to create space for the unexpected. That’s what excites me about the future of guitar. I’m never afraid to open new doors or spark a conversation with my music.”
