Acoustic guitar meets heavy metal for Rodrigo y Gabriela
By Michael Machosky, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Mar. 2–The stunningly talented acoustic guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela came by their musical prowess the old-fashioned way — by playing heavy metal.
“Honestly, we obviously didn’t make it with our Mexican metal band,” says lead guitarist Rodrigo Sanchez. “We wanted to travel. For us, it was just the end of a relationship with the music industry, so we sold all our instruments and all the gear we had, and bought two cheap acoustic guitars to travel with and play on the street. Then we just stayed with them.”
After eight years of playing amplified, distorted guitars in a heavy metal band, Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero decided to start over. Their journey started ignominiously — an offer for a place to stay in Dublin, Ireland, fell through, and they ended up busking on Irish boulevards for change.
Now, they’re headlining concert halls — like the Byham Theater on Tuesday — as an all-instrumental, acoustic duo. Along the way, they developed and honed a sound all their own.
“We don’t really fall into a normal category or style of music,” explains Sanchez, from his studio in Ixtapa, Mexico. “Basically, it’s rock, it’s acoustic, but it has a lot of influences — from Latin music to thrash metal. You can call it whatever you like — just don’t call it flamenco. Some people do that, and we’re far from it. I understand why some people confuse our music with flamenco — two acoustic, nylon-stringed guitars — but it’s not. Not at all.”
OK, so they’re a little tired of being lumped in with flamenco guitarists, though they do love the style. It’s just that Metallica and Hendrix are much bigger influences.
In fact, each song on their latest album “11:11″ is dedicated to a particular band or artist that has influenced them. It’s a vision broad enough to include artists as different as Pink Floyd, Argentine tango composer Astor Piazzolla, and the late heavy metal guitarist Dimebag Darrell, of Pantera.
The songs are all originals, and all sound much more like Rodrigo y Gabriela than the artists they’re paying tribute to.
“Some of the tracks do have small references to the artists,” Sanchez says. “Some of the tracks don’t really have anything to do with them. Others, we did write while thinking about them.”
Without much formal training, the two guitarists have absorbed a dizzying array of musical styles — yet everything they do sounds like Rodrigo y Gabriela, and nobody else.
“We don’t have any knowledge, musically speaking,” Sanchez says. “We learned on the streets, playing rock and roll. It’s the way we developed a technique. In my case, it’s more using the pick all the time — it comes from the rock area. In Gab’s side, she uses a lot of right-hand technique, which hits pretty much the whole body of the guitar. It’s just something she came up with traveling around Europe — it’s pretty intense music, and very rhythmic. Lots of riffs that we play on acoustic would sound like metal riffs if we played them on electric guitar. Of course, we don’t have the elements of distortion and drums and all that.”
That’s led to some rather unusual crowds. World music fans, hippies, lots of Metallica t-shirts — crowds that don’t usually mix.
“What’s interesting is that you can see whole families going to the show,” Sanchez says. “We believe these people (our fans) are very open to new kinds of music, and don’t like to be told what to listen to.”
Michael Machosky is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review staff writer.
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