ARTIST FEATURE: We are joined this week by fingerstyle guitar phenom Thomas Leeb. Thomas is faculty at California Institute of the Arts and a wildly...
Fingerstyle guitarist Thomas Leeb shares insights on the importance of rhythm and practicing with the metronome
Words by Thomas Leeb
ARTIST FEATURE
ARTIST FEATURE: We are joined this week by fingerstyle guitar phenom Thomas Leeb. Thomas is faculty at California Institute of the Arts and a wildly...
Thomas Leeb
Thomas Leeb played his first solo concert at the age of fifteen and released his first acoustic guitar album at seventeen. Leeb is a frequent performer at concerts and festivals in Asia, the Americas, Europe and Africa and has been featured in guitar magazines all over the world. Every year, he teaches workshops and master classes in universities and colleges and his album “Desert Pirate” was voted one of the essential albums of the last twenty years by Acoustic Guitar.
His peculiar guitar style owes as much to percussive techniques as traditional fingerstyle guitar. What sets Thomas Leeb apart from some of his contemporaries is his ability to make pyrotechnics serve the music. Three years studying West African traditional music give him a sense of timing and groove that is unusual in a guitarist. All this has earned him a loyal world-wide following and influential fans such as Eric Roche who was his guitar teacher, “for about five minutes and then I heard him play”, Jon Gomm awarded him “ten out of ten Gomms”, Guthrie Govan (Official) who thinks that “what Thomas does on an acoustic guitar probably shouldn’t be legal.”