I speak from a place of experience when I say that creating instrumental guitar music at this day and age is not an easy task. It’s very hard to come up with fresh and interesting ideas in a market that’s saturated by heavily creative and iconic figures such as Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Yngwie Malmsteen, and more recently Guthrie Govans and many others of that same school.
RYS challenges this with his music. RYS is Rhys Bird, a Preston native who plays the guitar, like, really good. You can easily spot the passion in his playing. The ideas aren’t exactly novel or groundbreaking. Yet, they are executed with a nimble hand and sound fun and dynamic. Totally not like an artist who’s even aware of the challenges their music is going to face before gaining any reasonable traction and listening time. More like a boy in love with his craft and would happily spend days locked in his bedroom working on his next hit.
Also, not totally devoid of original and exciting parts here and there. A certain strength going for Mr.Bird is his beautiful choice of guitar tone, which I’m sure was a product of, at least, hours of fiddling around with knobs and parameters until a certain unknown sweetspot has been achieved, and achieved it was.
Armed with quick hands, confident playing, and unique character to the lead lines and the melodies, RYS manages to capture the essence of making guitar instrumentals for 2022. It’s a shame that this type of music only ever gains so much attention, but I guess Rhys Bird is aware of this. He’s having fun doing what he does, and in anyone’s book, that alone is cause for an ovation.
