Browsing around the web this morning, I performed my monthly scan of the Vai.com news page. Hidden under August 5th is a small section titled “One of the Coolest Sites We’ve Seen” pointing to a site called The Guitar Shred Show, a Flash based site in which your guide, Mr. Fastfinger teaches you to shred on guitar.

The first place you have to go is “The Exploding Guitar – Show Off Solo”. The playing in the show off solo sounds suspiciously like Mr. Vai, and I’m curious as to whether he is actually involved in this project. If he isn’t, whoever is playing has his sound and style down.

Since writing this, I found the credits area of the site, which credits the site and all of the guitar playing to Mika Tyyskä. No Steve Vai on the site, but damn, this guy can play!

The first installment of lessons is called “The Mountain of the Tapping Dwarves”. This lesson allows you to press and hold down keys on the keyboard to hear different phrases, accompanied with the tabulature to play them. The things covered are tapping, fast picking and legato runs to name a few.

At the end of everything, you get to participate in a “head cutting” (a la Crossroads) against the Demon Accordian player. As he plays his accordian, you tie together the different phrases by pressing and holding the keyboard keys. An excellent addition to an excellent site.

This is a hard site to describe. You have to see it to believe it. I do agree with the folks at Vai.com though — this is probably the coolest site I’ve ever seen.