YouTube Spoofer Hits A Chord

Why is Slash playing so poorly in this clip? Because a Finnish media artist over-dubbed the audio track just well enough to make the Guns N’ Roses axeman sound believably awful. The YouTube user known as StSanders was inspired to bring guitar heroes down to earth when he saw a Steve Vai solo—on mute. Now YouTubers are soaking up his skewering of the greats.

The so-called “shreds” videos have quite the online following, Wired reports, with one Metallica clip viewed 140,000 times over a few months. The creator is a guitarist himself, and a good enough editor to fool fellow musicians. Some strummers who saw the laugh-out-loud StSanders clips couldn’t believe how “insanely bad” Clapton’s night had been. (More YouTube stories.)