This Young Man Sounds Like Three Guitarists in One

If you close your eyes and just listen to this acoustic fingerstyle guitar version of Michael Jackson's Rock With You - by young Japanese guitarist Kent Nishimura, you'll probably swear there are two or three people playing. There's a laid-back half-time beat, there are chords, there's melody, there's even a bit of a bass line.

So it's quite a shock when you realise there was no over-dubbing involved, this was all recorded live and performed by just one, very talented young man

Check out the Nails

Apart from the amazing musicianship and arrangement skills, two details stood out to us in this video. First was Kent's impressively long right hand fingernails. These are clearly a significant part of what makes an arrangement like this possible. Kent is able to pick out individual strings with any of his five fingers, making the contrapuntal textures possible.

The capo shift

The second, which you may not have noticed on first watch is the capo shift which allows Kent to modulate up a semi-tone mid-song. We're not sure we've ever seen someone do this in real time before. We've time stamped the video below so you should be able to see this brilliantly executed shift as it happens:

Check out the rest of Kent's channel where he has a whole range of similarly great arrangements, including other Michael Jackson tracks, some Beatles, Pink Floyd, and this stunning version of George Michael's Careless Whisper, complete with sax solo!