What do we know about the astonishing chops of Stephen Taranto?

Playing Technique
#21

Going to put this in bold because I’m not accusing this guy of anything. I heard his name once in passing and looked into his Instagram this morning. I then made the mistake of reading a thread on some “metal” website where people are doing, at present, a 20+ page thread of accusations on fake shredding. Not linking it, it’s easy enough to find.

Hey Troy,

In general I’m skeptical of all Instagram guitar players doing this sort of stuff. Even if you’re not “faking” takes through MIDI or whatever, here’s my question:

Should you consider a person’s playing legitimate if they do 50 shitty takes in a row, and on the 51st they nail it? At what point do you cross the line?

I’m reluctant to get inspired by players whose level of playing I can’t verify. An Instagram video isn’t enough confidence for me to sit down and learn a complicated pattern in the off chance the person who wrote it can’t reliably reproduce it. That would still fall under “faking” in my book.

Hence “Idk what to think”. I’ll leave it at that because I literally wrote just that and I can already feel a keyboard war coming. Not willing to go there. Idk anything beyond 15 minutes of research about Stephen, half of which comes from guys on a hipster metal forum who are really invested in this topic.

#22

I’ve only really become aware of Stephen recently when Chris Buono tagged him to us in an Instagram comment, and then a week later he popped up in Jared’s video. This clip here was one of the ones Jared highlighted and honestly it’s the sum total of knowledge of his playing. I haven’t dropped the needle on a ton of his other clips.

In Jared’s video, the regular speed version of this immediately struck me as strange-sounding. I’m looking at it now in Final Cut in slow motion and the hand motions look realistic, including a few small timing flubs that seem realistic. Interestingly, in slow motion the guitar tones sound more “normal” and less computerized too. Speeding up a well-played take can have this effect of rounding over the pick attack transients and making the notes all sound synth-ish. So what I’m hearing here would be, let’s be diplomatic, “consistent” with a slightly sped-up video. Maybe 10-15%, something like that.

How can you check this? Well, you can set the video to 80% speed and see what it sounds like. And to my ears, things sounds a lot more “normal” in that range. Like a good player playing the line with normal tone and articulation.

So it’s possible that this is what we’re seeing here.

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#23

I think this is the crux of it. You want to learn — we all want to learn. It’s misrepresentation if the learning opportunity isn’t real, and especially if you’re paying for that learning opportunity. I mean, you might get lucky and be able to do the thing the player couldn’t do. But that’s not really fair.

1 Like
#24

Yeah, in a strange way it’s analogous to Instagram’s ugly problem in the fitness world where there are some guys who are clearly, clearly on steroids and then other guys where you could never actually know short of following them around every day for a year.

Having a realistic baseline is super important and to that end I like the live seminars that you guys at CtC do, the ones Marshall Harrison does, John Taylor, and so on.

I still don’t know what to think. All anyone can aspire to do is learn from verified sources.

#25

I’m very familiar with the Mike O’Hearns of the world. Most of bodybuilding itself is quite level-headed about drug use. It’s one of the pillars of the whole damn sport, and no sane fan would think otherwise. Half the best dudes from the '90s are dead now. I think this makes the “fitness” world worse by a mile in terms of the way it represents itself.

If you as a consumer are saying that you can no longer trust guitar instructional material, that’s a truly sad place we’ve arrived at. But there’s still a way to deliver quality information that can really help people, we just have to try harder to break through.

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#26

@Troy: Stephen is legit.

He made tours with Plini, Helix Nebula, etc.

He also did a lot of clinics.

Dweezil Zappa, Jason Richardson, Tosin Abasi, etc. all have seen this guy play live, including last year at NAMM.

He’s actually a good friend of Plini and Jake Howsam. They all vouch for him.

Fun fact: after Stephen’s last show last year at NAMM, companies were fighting to see why would endorse him. You can actually hear Abasi and Ola Englund joke about it in a “Coffee with Ola” segment.

Stephen is legit. Even Rick Beato did a video to squash the fake rumours. Problem is, Stephen is so good some people can’t deal with it lol.

Don’t trust me, go to NAMM. Stephen did a one man show last year. He’ll do one again this year.

There’s raw iPhone footage of Stephen noodling with someone else’s guitar at NAMM last year. It’s on YouTube and it’s from an unbiased source.

1 Like
#27

None of this really address what I wrote, which is that the audio in the video sounds weird in a way that is similar to what happens when you speed up audio using time-stretching algorithms, and that the weirdness goes away when the video is slowed down slightly. Are you not hearing that?

#28

I don’t hear anything weird on the clip you sent, as well as any other clip he has on Instagram, or his solo records. Maybe I’m deaf, I don’t know. His sound aesthetic is like that, as is in most modern progressive metal or djent players. Take a listen at this fantastic album:

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#29

…only thing I’ll say, is that the “modern progressive metal” production style IS incredibly un-natural, and often times what you’re hearing are DI performances cut and quantized or in some cases comped together note by note, often at a lower speed than the final performance, sometimes as a production choice to produce hyper-polished, intentionally inhumanly clean performances, but also sometimes because the players can’t actually play the music they’re writing (The HAARP Machine is the classic example of this, as is the guy from Rings Of Saturn who kinda blew his cover in a ridiculous Kickstarter campaign for a solo album where he was clearly miming to a MIDI track).

So, if you’re hearing this andf thinking, “no, it just is a sound aesthetic, common in djent and modern progressive metal,” that’s pretty much what Troy is getting at.

I’m familiar with the board guitarenthusiast is talking about, way back in the day used to mod there, and still post in the recording section fairly frequently, and the times I’ve had to tell djent players just getting started on recording that no, they DON’T have to record a performance one note at a time, and yes, I agree that that’s a maddening process no one in their right mind should do, over the years is something that blows my mind.

This is the blessing and the curse of digital recording. Paraphrasing Jurassic Park a bit, your engineers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

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#30

I know what you mean and I’m aware of that and the bands that do it. Once they get on stage they get exposed, either by playing backing tracks, either by being very very sloppy. Stephen isn’t on that category, I’ve seen him with my own eyes. You can take a look here for more proof, the guy can definitely play.

How can you cheat at NAMM?

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#31

…but that has a much less processed, much more fluid and organic sound to it that’s missing from the first clip. Not saying he can’t play at all, just that the “edited audio” and “talented player” camps aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

#32

Just to be totally clear, someone can be a great player and also speed up a video. Modern pop singers are all autotuned for pitch and vocaligned for doubles, even when they are also great singers. If the singer can’t sing at all, like Britney really couldn’t, it draws criticism and more than a little schadenfreude, the way her leaked live vocals did. If the singer is great like Ariana Grande, the typical listener would probably be more likely to give it a pass, even if the end result is still something that the singer can’t reproduce.

If the singer came out and said they did it as a stylistic effect, the way T-Pain does, we’d probably be cool with it. Ironically, the face of Autotune is actually a pretty good singer!

If the singer’s producer came out and said they goosed the tracks to create the impression of even crazier levels of technical ability, even for a singer who already has top-level skills, we’d probably be somewhat less cool with it. So I think this issue is actually pretty complicated and depends as much on intent as it does the end result.

It’s clear that Stephen can play very well. But my intial reaction, was hey that other clip sounds weird. And this clip you’re posting here does not sound weird. One thing that just occurred to me is there could be webcam compression on the first one. The Logitech cameras have that it and can’t be disabled. Makes everything sound underwater except the louder notes that pop above the threshold setting. But that’s just a guess.

Or I’m imagining things and it sounds fine. Or there is something there. The more I listen to this, the more I don’t know what I’m hearing! So there you have it, first impressions. From someone who films guitarists all day. Take that for what it’s worth.

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#33

Exactly what I’m getting at. Both things can be true.

#34

I started cracking up the first time I saw that T-Pain video, by the way. And it really is a really, really, really unexpectedly good performance!

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#35

I see where both of you are coming from and I didn’t want to sound or come up as agressive at all.

I’m just really frustrated with the whole thing that has happened the past few days, because good people are getting accussed of cheating, even though they’ve spent thousands of hours mastering the instruments.

I’ve been to studios with bands that couldn’t play what they wrote at all and the producers had to midi program drums, or record guitar solos note for note. This is happening, we’re all aware of it. All I’m saying is that these people are being exposed one way or another some day.

I hope you get Stephen in your studio Troy, he’s a fantastic player.

1 Like
#36

@Troy Apologies, I was pressed for time and could not address your points.

Stephen is using his iPhone to both film and pick up the audio from his amp.

  1. Audio

iOS codecs do “mono summing” of video audio. This can cause compression and other audio artefacts related to their algorithm for transposing an audio signal from stereo to mono (e.g. weird clipping).

This is a known problem, artists have talked about it for a while, including Plini who asked fans how to upload stereo on IG in a recent post.

I attribute the weird audio to that.

  1. Video

Having worked on various video compression and camera algorithms, I tend not to base my judgement on video quality.

Camera settings as well as lighting can cause weird blurriness or “teleportation effects” (i.e. a subject seemingly moving very quickly).

All this to say that I base my analysis of “fakers” solely on audio. When I do so I use an approach similar to Levy Clay’s (slow down the clip, look for editing artefacts like disappearing revel, etc.).

  1. Incentive

Stephen has absolutely no incentive to speed up his track.

He started as a live and studio guitarist who made his mark by touring Australia and doing clinics. A friend of mine saw him play 3 feet in front of him with only an amp and a guitar.

His IG and YT following grew rapidly because guys like Jason Richardson, Dweezil, Abasi, Plini, etc. were already praising Stephen based on his live shows.

In other words, he had not incentive to speed up videos in order to gain followers. Other guitarists (Plini, Jake Howsam Lowe, etc) have come to Stephen’s defense.

Given all that, I see absolutely no logical reason for him to speed up anything, especially because he has on multiple occasions shown live that he can reproduce such crazy licks.

I hope this clarifies my argument.

P.S.: watch the whole video of him shredding at NAMM. Does it sound weird or sped up to you ?

#37

There are hundreds of clips on Taranto’s instagram with an in-room mic, playing things more ridiculous than that clip. In my view he stands completely clear of this whole controversy, and signals the opposite type of instagram guitarist: ridiculously good, filmed unedited on a phone camera.

3 Likes
#38

Nor do I really feel like you’re coming across as aggressive or hostile. :+1:

Idunno. I have pretty mixed feelings about the whole thing which I’m going to try to distill down to a few observations, rather than the veritable book I could probably write.

  1. Clearly, guitar performance is something we all care very greatly about here. That’s a good thing.
  2. This is a backlash that, IMO, is a LONG time overdue. Digital maipulation has come so mainstream that it’s now a “legitimate production choice” and “as long as it serves the song, the ends justify the means.” It’s not new, but it’s become something that people increasingly are not ashamed about.
  3. This is troubling for a whole slew of reasons, but not the least of which is it creates an unrealistic standard for up and coming players. Sort of akin to models and eating disorders, or MLB sluggers or pro cyclists and PEDs, or something like that - it causes real harm, on one hand, but also sets unreallistic standards of what you SHOULD be able to accomplish.
  4. I’m sure some innocent people are going to get caught in the crossfire. I’m just as sure that there will be very, very, very few people being widely accused of editing or speeding up their tracks and miming to them, who weren’t doing this, even if they’re excellent players in their own right. It sucks that a few innocent guys are going to get accused, but that’s probably unavoidable at this point that this has gotten so out of hand.
  5. At the end of the day, though… I don’t think any of this is going to matter. That 20+ page thread mentioned above is mostly about how MUCH cheating is ok, and when it becomes too much. Is it speeding up audio 10% but not 5%? Is it comping a performance together at tempo, but then miming to it to make it look like it was a single live take? Is a note-by-note DI comp ok if you can play it live? At this point, as they say, the devil is in the details… And if we’re arguing about the details, we’re already all damned.

Personally, I think the imperfectsions of a talented but live performance sound way better than a robotic inhuman artificial one. I LIKE my players to sound like living, breathing humans.

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#39

The debate seems to be going like this:

[EXPERT WHO FILMS GUITAR ALL DAY]: This sounds and looks manipulated

[PERSON WHO DOESN’T FILM GUITAR ALL DAY]: But this other video doesn’t seem sped up. Ergo, none of them are sped up

[EXPERT]: Yes, but the first one looks odd and has tonal artifacts…

[NON EXPERT]: But some guy saw him play live once and my cousin bob knows him and says he wouldn’t do that.

1 Like
#40

It’s precisely because Troy’s word carries so much weight here that I think it’s worth correcting him, because so many people seem to believe him at face value, despite his heavy caveats thst he is missing context and only responding to one clip.

Same picking pattern, same speed, obviously a room mic that isn’t sped up:



It only took a few moments for me to find these, while navigating a train station. Let’s slow down a bit

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