Is this hit guitarist faking it? No, but he’s so good you might think so

When Polish guitar prodigy Marcin Patrzalek – known simply as Marcin – appeared on America’s Got Talent in 2019, he had already won two major European TV talent shows. But this time, there was a problem: the absence of a tragic backstory.

“The producers were rubbing their heads,” recalls the 24-year-old, speaking via Zoom from a recording studio in New York. “They were all saying, ‘Where’s the B-roll video for him?’ They had a big problem with it.”

Marcin, however, refused to play the troubled artist.

“There’s a belief that good art comes from a place of worry, sadness, pain, drug addiction and bad relationships,” he says. “But these are all bad things, and romanticising them isn’t good for anyone. Of course, everyone draws on their experiences when they’re creating something, but I truly believe you can’t create unless you’re healthy. If someone is addicted to something or working in a job they hate, they don’t have the time or the space to create anything.”

Since winning a Polish talent show at 15, Marcin – who tours Australia for the first time in October – has become a viral sensation. His videos have accumulated hundreds of millions of views, giving him the biggest online following of any young guitarist in the world. His admirers include internationally renowned artists such as Madonna, Paul Stanley and Australia’s Tommy Emmanuel. And in 2020, he signed a global contract with Sony, making him the first solo percussive guitarist to secure a deal with a major label.

But his unique style has prompted some purists to accuse him of destroying the guitar’s legacy, while internet conspiracists claim his performances are simply too good to be real.

When Marcin plays guitar, he does more than pluck its strings. As Guitar World put it, he also “strums, picks, taps and slaps” the body of his instrument with his knuckles, palms and gel-fortified fingernails, effectively treating it like a drum set. These “strenuous gymnastics” are so demanding, they necessitate warm-up exercises to avoid injury.

To his millions of fans, his flamboyant performances are a delight. To a small band of traditionalists, they’re sacrilege.

“But why is it a bad thing for the guitar to evolve?” Marcin asks. “The only direction you can go is forward, and I’m lucky enough to be one of the people who is in a place to try to push it forward. If you look at the guitar scene today, we’re at a very interesting point; it feels like we’re starting to return to the golden age of guitar.”

Marcin’s first full-length album, Dragon in Harmony, was released in 2024.

Between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, the guitar was the pinnacle of cool.

“All the kids, especially the boys, wanted to play guitar,” Marcin says. “They wanted to be like Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton or Steve Vai; like all of those guys who had fans blowing their big hair back on stage.” (Vai, his friend and mentor, insists the fans were simply meant to keep him cool. “But I don’t believe that for a second!” Marcin says.)

By the mid-1990s, pop had reclaimed its dominance, with electronic music, rap and R&B also surging in popularity.

“Guitar just doesn’t really exist [in those genres],” Marcin says. “But over the past five years, it’s started to shift. Guitar has always been cool, but it’s becoming cooler for the masses again, even for rappers like Playboi Carti. I hope that within the next five or six years, guitar is back at the centre of popular music. That would be amazing.”

Earlier this year, during a concert in Korea, Marcin stopped mid-song to demonstrate there is nothing fake about his astonishing performances.

“I was being facetious,” he says. “I don’t really care enough [about the trolls] to prove that I’m not fake. I think it’s the novelty of what I’m doing that makes people think I’m fake. But if no one thought that what I was doing was weird or fake, then something would be wrong. I actually take it as a compliment.”

Born in the south-central Polish city of Kielce, Marcin first picked up a guitar aged 10, when his father enrolled him in a class.

“Before guitar, my parents sent me to a lot of activities,” Marcin told a fan on the social media platform Reddit. “Football, swimming, gymnastics and eventually guitar. My dad wanted to find me a passion which I could carry through my youth. That’s it – no strings attached. He succeeded.”

At what point did he fall in love with the guitar?

“When I first realised I was good at it,” he says. “My teacher gave me a book of sheet music, but he didn’t tell me to do anything with it. I practiced all throughout the summer holidays and when I returned to my lessons, my teacher never actually told me he was impressed, but I could see a sparkle in his eye – and my parents saw it, too. After all the practice I’d done, it just felt very natural.”

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Two years later, Marcin began studying flamenco guitar under the tutelage of Spaniard Carlos Pinana. By 14, he was teaching himself the percussive techniques that would make him famous.

“It was an advantage being young, because I didn’t have any responsibility,” he explains. “Now, I have people who rely on me financially but back then, I could try whatever I felt like, so that’s what I did. It wasn’t forced; I just developed a style that played to my strengths.”

Not surprisingly, percussive guitarist Tommy Emmanuel was a major influence.

“I thought he was the coolest person on the planet,” Marcin says. “I must have been about 12 or 13 when I saw him on YouTube just shredding Classical Gas. His guitar was falling apart, the polish was worn off and I don’t even think he was wearing a strap. When you live your life watching classical players just sitting on a chair with a little foot stool, not moving an inch, and then you see something like this, you’re like, ‘OK, I’m going to be that guy’.”

At 16, Marcin released his independent debut EP, HUSH, which included an arrangement of the 19th century Spanish work Asturias. Before long, the video had exceeded 10 million views – a feat made even more impressive by the fact he was just 14 when he recorded it.

More recently, Marcin has released arrangements of Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir, Bill Withers’ Ain’t No Sunshine and Mozart’s Requiem. He also writes his own songs and in July, he collaborated with RJ Pasin on a track called Art of Guitar, which has already notched up several million streams.

Generally, he avoids covering new music.

“I want songs that will be evergreen, not songs that might stop existing in the zeitgeist after one year,” he says. “That’s why I don’t cover songs by Dua Lipa or whoever. It’s not that I don’t like them; it’s just that you can’t bank on a song being a hit for a century. That’s why I choose works of art that are always going to exist in the public consciousness, or I’ll choose rock or pop or even rap pieces that have already proven to be so iconic that they’re going to stay.”

When I ask what advice he’d give to aspiring young guitarists, he laughs.

“Steve Vai’s advice to me was, ‘Don’t give advice’, but I’m going to disrespect that advice,” he says. “One thing I would say is that you must practice with a metronome. If you don’t do that, you’re not a serious person.

“I’d also say that originality is more important than any other quality, including your technique, your look, or anything else. When you’re being original, what you’re actually doing is building a fan base of people who like you for being you, which is the best feeling in the world.”