Luftgitarrenwettbewerb (Air Guitar Competition)

Saturday we visited the Rock Cafe in St Pauli to see the Hamburg State Air Guitar competition. The Air Guitar World Championships are held in North Finland every year, and this was one of the qualifying rounds.

Last year's competition was won by Chicagoan Justin "Nordic Thunder" Howard, with Matt "Airistotle" Burns of New York coming in second.

 

I was actually a little disappointed by the choices in music, nothing was really very guitar driven (Metallica's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and Ozzy Osbourne's "Mr Crowley" were chosen for example) and I was expecting songs more like "Rock You Like a Hurricane" because of the distinct guitar melody and shear ridiculousness.

Many of the contestants spend most of the time just rocking out on stage, which was fun, but there wasn't a whole lot of correlation with the actual music (with exception of stripey-shirt-long-hair-tight-pants guy and this guy below, who began his set by pretending to tune his guitar). There was also a little less guitar face and general cheese than I would have expected.

Contestants chose to play their guitars high on their body, despite not choosing particularly technical music.

Each contestant got to pick on song or medley of songs before hand, and then they had to air guitar to a song picked by the venue, which was "Through the Fire and Flames" by Dragonforce, a band known for having fast though not very technically difficult guitar. A lot of the audience started singing along though, which was fun and sort of cute.

Finally, I would like to offer my apologies for sounding way too pretentious in this post, especially since I don't actually play guitar!