![]() Bundy never signed a record deal, but instead built his decidedly handmade and very personal musical industry. ![]() ![]() And if you enter his name on YouTube, you will see another phenomenon: hundreds of other young guitar players all over world playing Trace Bundy songs.Īnd so the tale of the Acoustic Ninja continues. Acoustic Guitar magazine in 2008 named him one of the most promising young guitar players on the planet, and his YouTube following continues to grow – more than 14 million people have viewed his videos. But having both of those sides, man, it’s been great as a musician, I guess.” “I am very mathematical in what I studied and everything, but I never know if I’m more right brained or left brained. “That is always my goal when I write is to keep some cool technique in there but also make it sound appealing to the ear so it’s not just pure technique and pure shredding or muscling through hard fast notes, you know what I mean?” Bundy said in an interview this week. But unusually for a virtuoso – even more so for an engineer – his playing transcends the cold mathematics that frequently enamors such gifted players. The albums were in keeping with his very first work, titled Adapt: Bundy could not sing, so he used what was available to him to make his guitar sing in a uniquely beautiful way. Bundy was so moved by the story he wrote not only the song “Missile Bell” but two entire albums, Missile Bell Vol. They found an old missile shell left over from the war – one of the very bombs that had destroyed their village - hoisted it up and made it their church bell. But they had no bell, so they used what was available. One of the first things the villagers had done was rebuild their beloved church. He played at a little village that had been destroyed during the civil war the villagers had actually been forced to flee their homes, and had returned 10 years later to find almost nothing intact. In this capacity – touring on behalf of a humanitarian group called Argos – he travelled to a war-ravaged part of Guatemala. He quit his academic job and became a musician. A writer in Colorado aptly described Bundy as the Acoustic Ninja. The fact that his legend spread this way made a certain sense: you have to see Bundy to actually believe what he is doing with a guitar. Hundreds of thousands of people tuned in to the YouTubes, and soon he had requests to come play all over the country, and later, all over the world. He began recording himself, both at a home studio and on videos that he’d upload onto YouTube. He may not have reinvented the guitar, exactly, but he definitely reengineered what the instrument could do. Trace Bundy began doing something that is very rarely done. It had implications, among which was that he realized he could play entire songs with a left-handed “tapping” technique, thus freeing up his right hand to do extremely unusual things. In his basement shop, he made his own set of capos – the clamps built for the neck of a guitar that allow players to globally change keys – and he began playing with as many as three of his handmade devices at once. So he did the practical thing, took an engineering scholarship to go to college, and eventually became Professor Bundy.īut a funny thing happened one day when he combined his engineering skills with his guitar playing. But musically Bundy felt like he had an inescapable limitation: he could not sing. He’d been playing guitar more or less as a hobby since he was 12-years-old and possessed a genuine gift for it. The story of how Trace Bundy built his very own music industry is somewhat analogous to the way the song “Missile Bell” came to him a few years ago while traveling in Central America.īundy was a recently liberated young engineering professor. So he did the practical thing, took an engineering scholarship to go to college, and eventually became Professor Bundy Bundy was a recently liberated young engineering professor.
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