Yngwie Malmsteen paradox

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Guitar World: What happens in the case of a chord like G13?

TUFNEL: Okay. This is my other theory:

If you're playing that type of music, you shouldn't be doing it.

GW: Shouldn't be doing the Nigel Tufnel Theory of Music?

TUFNEL: No — you shouldn't be playing

music.

Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel, interviewed by Guitar World Magazine, April 1992

Also known as the Jazz paradox, the Yngwie Malmsteen paradox addresses this irony: the power technology has to make our lives easier which, when we deploy it, winds up making them harder.

Modern information technology allows us to freely manipulate, desiccate, desecrate, defibrillate and duplicate data. A good enough algorithm can, in theory, handle any kind of syntactical complexity, costlessly ingesting and processing the densest textual construction. With a simple cut-and-paste we can replicate, vary and augment at will. But this generates what we call the “Yngwie Malmsteen paradox”: Just because guitar technology means you can play 64th note flattened mixolydian arpeggios at 200 bpm doesn’t mean you should.

See also

• Reg tech and why it is so disappointing — due in part, by analogy, to Yngwie Malmsteen.