Gabriella Quevedo

The Youtube crowd-pleaser

With an undeniable ear for a hit and unfailing rhythmic accuracy, Gabriella delivers some of the most crowd-pleasing repertoire of any acoustic Youtuber.

Unsurprisingly for a Swede, she’s done a number of reworked ABBA tunes, but her arrangements of Nothing else matters, A not her brick in

Thewall, and Here Comes the sun have all done big numbers.

She got chosen to play on stage with Tommy Emmanuel when she was just 15, and was not upstaged. Like Emmanuel, she has a gift for sounding like several guitarists playing at once.

Although she’s famous for covers, her gift for interpretation makes her an artist in her own right, and she nails dynamics and nuances. Her timing is killer – metronomic without being robotic – but it’s the way she keeps focus on the melody that makes her so effective.

She’ll choose chord voicings that keep the melody note at the top, so it doesn’t get buried. Her talent for arrangement shows an original musical mind at work.

In late 2019, she released Remember and Last time, her first two original compositions. Although she’s been on the scene for 10 years, she’s still only 24, and she is still reaching her potential.

“Gabriella was chosen to play on stage with Tommy Emmanuel at just 15”

Molly Tuttle’s picking hand is terrifying. She’s mastered clawhammer technique, but it’s her flatpicking that leaves us most breathless. Her string crossing is effortless. Dizzying lines that would have anyone else stumbling for pace or catching unwanted strings escape Molly’s fingers easily and with great tone.

If she’d chosen a different direction she could’ve been a Steve Morse or an Yngwie Malmsteen. But where high-gain shred can scream lookatme in an off-putting way, Molly’s Americana and bluegrass stylings always sound inviting and musical. Yes, she’s phenomenal, but she always retains that campfire feeling that you’re being welcomed to join in.

Molly’s gift is making subtle rotations of her forearm to change the trajectory of her pick. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of footage of her doing this – although even when you see how it’s done, replicating it is another matter.

Where most of us would strike an unwanted open string, Molly’s pick dances over the strings like a gazelle. She delivers her melodies with dynamics and great rhythmic feel, and even playing blazing single-note lines she creates a full sound all by herself.

The fact she does it all while singing – and that her songwriting is so effective – is frankly unfair.

“If Molly had chosen a different path, she could’ve been a Malmsteen”

Clive Carroll is arguably the most accomplished finger stylist in the world today – not a statement we make lightly. Our pals on Guitar techniques magazine even call him the ‘acoustic Guthrie Govan’, which gives you some idea of the Essex-born virtuoso’s incredible skills.

Where countless acoustic players adopt a percussive approach, by eschewing tippy-tappy body-beating antics,

Clive is able to focus more on complex melodic lines throughout the bass, midrange and treble. Traditional Irish pieces, John Dowland compositions and the occasional blues tune all get the Carroll treatment, but the majority of his music is self-penned.

With such virtuosity on display, it ought to be impossible to distill Clive’s genius into practical, bite-sized advice, but there is a key fact you should know. Clive often writes straight to manuscript without a guitar in his hands. What sounds like a massive pain in the backside for most of us actually frees Clive from his own technical limitations (not that he has many!).

Write on paper first and figure out how to play it on guitar afterwards – that’s the idea. The culmination of this method came in 2016’s A winter carol – a truly unsettling track, comprising two melodies in different keys and tempos, but arranged for solo guitar. We can’t think of anyone else who could – or would – do this!