MARTY FRIEDMAN On Developing His Own Style: 'When I Tried To Play Like My Favorite Guitar Players, It Just Never Really Worked Out'

TrueFire, the longest-serving online guitar lesson hub, has shared a new seven-and-a-half-minute video in which former MEGADETH guitarist Marty Friedman talks about how his own inability to faithfully emulate "guitar magicians" like Uli Jon Roth and Frank Marino led him to stop being a clone and start polishing his own touch. Marty said in part (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "When I tried to play like my favorite guitar players, it just never really worked out. It was kind of a bummer. I mean, when I was a kid, of course, when I started off, my favorite influences were the RAMONES and KISS. That really wasn't too terribly challenging to play like that. But then I started to hear guys doing a lot more challenging things. At the time it was my dear friends now — I'm so blessed to be friends with these people, Uli Jon Roth and Frank Marino, guys like that, Steve Lukather. These guys were just absolutely godlike and still are. But I would try to emulate them, and I found that I never even came close, no matter how hard I practiced. I tried to play along with what they did. I tried to emulate what they did. I tried to copy what they did. I tried to play the type of songs that they played. Whatever I did, it was just, like, 'Well, it's kind of like a very poor imitation.' And at some point, luckily, I realized that I liked making music much more than I liked feeling dejected about not being able to play music like my heroes did. And that forced me to look at what I was able to do and polish that, rather than trying to figure out what these magicians of guitar were doing, 'cause it was just out of this world. Like Uli Jon Roth, the stuff he was doing is really, really groundbreaking, especially at the time, and I'm, like, 'Why can't I even approach that?' It was just, like, impossible. The feeling of not being able to do something lost out to the joy of playing guitar, thankfully."

Marty continued: "I love to play guitar. So at some point I was just, like, 'You know what? I'm never gonna be that guy. Let's just see what I got myself. Let's see what I can do myself.' And I looked at what I had and tried to be as good at that as I possibly could. So when I was starting out, I was like a real punk rock dude. Everything was down strokes and all these kind of really basic rock and rolly type of stuff. And that's where my first band kind of took off with rock and roll stuff. And of course I admired my heroes, but I never really was able to copy them very faithfully. I spent the time that a lot of other guys were copying their favorite artists, I spent that time writing songs and trying to play my own kind of solos over those songs. Because of that, I grew up, and when people say, 'Well, who are your influences? I can't really give 'em a good answer. A lot of guys say, 'Well, I'm a combination of this guy, this guy, and a little bit of this guy.' And when you listen to the guy's playing, you hear, 'Oh, yeah, yeah. He sounds like Jeff Beck here, or he sounds like Ritchie Blackmore here,' or whatever. Which is fine. And that's what everyone else in my neighborhood was doing. I just didn't have that talent of copying. My ears worked and they worked very well, but it's, like, the touch and the feeling — it's really impossible to step into someone else's body and have the same touch, same feeling."

Founded in 1991, TrueFire has been described by Guitar World magazine as "something of a cornerstone of the online guitar tutorial world, often serving as the standard for what these types of platforms can and should deliver."

Friedman defined modern guitar playing with Jason Becker in CACOPHONY, was a key element in the wildly successful rise of thrash pioneers MEGADETH, and with his "Marty-esque" improvisations and exotic fusion of Eastern and Western music, has achieved global success with his 15 solo albums.

Friedman left MEGADETH in 2000 due to creative differences and pursued a solo career, having released his most recent album, "Drama", in 2024.

Friedman first visited Japan in the late 1980s with CACOPHONY, and came to Japan regularly with MEGADETH, all the while studying the Japanese language. After he quit the Dave Mustaine-fronted outfit, he moved to Tokyo.

Since also embracing Japanese music and eventually relocating to Japan, Friedman has cemented his image as a unique and unpredictable solo artist while further solidifying his celebrity rock star status. He has earned several top 10 spots on the Japanese charts and has performed in Japan's largest venues — from the Tokyo Dome to Budokan. He has also guested on over 700 television programs, acted in four motion pictures, and appeared in several commercials and TV ad campaigns. On November 4, 2016, the Japanese government named Friedman an "Ambassador Of Japanese Heritage."

Friedman's autobiography "Dreaming Japanese", was made available last December. Written with veteran music journalist Jon Wiederhorn ("Louder Than Hell", "Raising Hell"),"Dreaming Japanese" debuted at No. 1 on Amazon's Heavy Metal Books chart and has received praise from major outlets including Rolling Stone, Guitar World, Decibel and Publishers Marketplace. The autobiography shares Friedman's inspiring journey from landing a gig as the lead guitarist for legendary thrash metal outfit MEGADETH during their peak years to his emigration from the U.S. to Japan, where he became a prominent television figure and Japanese pop culture household name as well as being appointed an official "Ambassador Of Japan Heritage".