“Every time I pick up a guitar, it gives me such physical satisfaction. Playing funk is a direct exchange of good vibes”: Giacomo Turra’s energetic guitar skills evolved from his love of dance – and his self-taught style might just be the future of funk
That Turra is self-taught and oblivious to theory is one of the biggest guitar flexes in history – but as he explains, playing funk is all about connecting with an audience
(Image credit: Alec Strickland)
Giacomo Turra is so goddamn funky he should come with a government health warning. Take some gentle stretches before listening. Apply Deep Heat to core muscle groups.
Those insufficiently warmed up are liable to do themselves an injury when pressing play on his cover of Stevie Wonder’s I Wish or Michael Jackson’s Rock With You, two highlights from his from his 2021 covers collection The Groove Sessions. The rhythm is gonna to get you.
But under the glitter ball, on Friday nights illuminated by neon and enlivened by something shaken over ice, the Italian funk guitar phenom is just what the doctor ordered to help us reconnect with our physical relationship with music, with dance.
Dance classes are how it all started for Turra. Born in Milan, his funk guitar sensibility can be traced back to the dance studio where his mother taught, and the tunes he heard blasting out of her boombox.
“I like to experiment with a lot of genres, but the really interesting thing for me is I really grew up on funk, and a little bit of jazz and fusion music,” he says.
“My mum used to be a dance teacher and she had this little stereo that she used to bring for her lessons, and sometimes I would go with her and she had this tape cassette made, and it was Stevie Wonder and all these ’90s breakbeat James Brown remixes.”
His father’s record collection introduced him to Weather Report, Herbie Hancock and Curtis Mayfield. Even if the electric energy of the indie-rock scene circa 2010 was hard to resist – it was funk that had the greater gravitational pull.
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“For me, it is all about the energy,” he says. “I found that that music for me, playing it on guitar, it was giving me such a physical satisfaction. Every time I pick up a guitar, it gives me such physical satisfaction to play funk riffs, funk rhythms. I feel like there is a very direct connection with the audience. Playing funk is a direct exchange of good vibes.”
The Groove Sessions welcomed an array of guests to reimagine tracks by the likes of Bruno Mars and Jamiroquai, and the aforementioned Wonder and Jackson. Giacomo deliberately chose standards – songs the world knows. When everyone was wanting to be the next John Mayer, he looked to Bobby Hebb and Boney M instead, and the people were ready for it.
More than 675,000 people follow him on Instagram. He pulls ridiculous numbers on YouTube, too. That sort of reach comes with pressures on an artist’s time. Joining us in a bar in Camden, London, he’ll soon make a quick dash to the Midlands to see Laney about a tube amp.
He is working with Supro on something big, which he can’t talk about too much (it’ll involve six strings and gold-foil pickups). A new, self-titled EP of original material has just been released, and he plays dates in Europe before a US tour.
We would just follow the first verse/chorus of the song and then take the chord progression of the song and loop it, and when you play above it you can hear how amazing it is
But there’s a sense that this has all just been one long introduction. Giacomo’s career thus far is a little like The Rolling Stones, cutting his teeth on covers and testing the waters for original material. Thereafter he’ll know where he wants to take his sound.
His approach to The Groove Sessions was mandated by circumstances. This was tracked when we were all collaborating remotely or not at all.
“The cool thing about that is that you don’t know how the track is going to sound because you are not playing together in the same room,” he says. “The end result was way different from how I imagined it sound-wise.”
Way different, indeed. These tracks may change your appreciation of the originals. It is one of the great tricks of pop composition that oftentimes so much musical information is presented to the audience in a way that is so digestible they don’t hear just how clever it is. His cover of x brings Bruno Mars’ talents into sharp focus.
“I love Bruno Mars,” Giacomo says. “Even if he is a very mainstream pop artist, sometimes, you break it down – like Rick Beato does – even just the chord progression in a Bruno Mars song, the chords, and the progression, and the bassline, it is so interesting but most of the time it gets overlooked.”
Giacomo’s process involves looping grooves, climbing inside the rhythm. It’s wholly instinctual. He does it all by ear, or by watching videos of the material being performed.
“We would just follow the first verse/chorus of the song and then take the chord progression of the song and loop it, and when you play above it you can hear how amazing it is,” he says. “Most mainstream pop artists today have such amazing music behind them.”
Virtual Insanity (feat. Phoebe Katis & Alex Castro) - YouTube
It allowed him to present his sound and get recognised on social media. It was a tool for deconstructing songs, and for establishing the building blocks of groove.
“It is really fascinating to see how the groove builds. Prince was amazing at doing this,” he says. “He was one of my favourite artists because when you break down the Prince concept of groove you can see that the deconstructed elements don’t even make sense, but when you put them together it is so beautiful.”
Giacomo can’t tell you the names of the scales he is playing. Speed is not the goal either. If there’s a conscious effort for his lead guitar it is to make the guitar sound less like a guitar. That informs his tone. Giacomo will mostly send his signal direct via a preamp and some compression, always blended so there is some unprocessed guitar to maintain the attack.
It’s the same approach when he uses his SolidGoldFX Supa Funk envelope filter. Other things you’ll find in his chain are a UAFX Teletronix compressor pedal, Strymon BlueSky reverb, and Cornerstone overdrive pedal.
“I’ll use just overdrive, like very transparent, big-headroom overdrive, with the gain that is as never up over halfway,” he says.
He uses an Electro-Harmonix POG for leads, with plenty of dry signal. “I love putting a little bit of that into my solos,” he says. “When you are playing a line, it will sound a little bit like a synth or a horn section. I have the octave up and the octave down, with a very small mix, like 20 per cent.”
He has used D’Angelico guitars before and is recently favouring custom Mayones electric guitars with Mama gold-foil pickups – again, because the tone is fast and direct. If you want to practise like Giacomo, stick on a drum loop or metronome, mute everything on the fingerboard and focus on the picking-hand rhythm.
Better still, don’t bother with the amp. “Most of the time, when composing, I don’t even plug in the guitar,” he says. “I just literally try to hear the sound of the strings, like an acoustic guitar, because it is really the tightest and most direct that it gets.”
Giacomo Turra - Get Into The Groove (Official Audio) - YouTube
And the logic here says: if you’re happy with your playing under those conditions, nothing can stop you. There’s a freedom to limitations, Giacomo says. There’s a freedom to not knowing what is technically correct. Listen to his original compositions, such as Callisto, and you’ll hear prog. Anything goes.
That’s part of the appeal, too. “Funk allows me to put so many different influences in, like South American music, Brazilian music, jazz,” he says. “Not having those boxes in my mind really helped me a lot to be more free on the instrument.”
As a wise man once said: “Free your mind and your ass will follow.” We don’t know exactly what Giacomo Turra has coming up next, but we’d best limber up…
Jonathan Horsley has been writing about guitars since 2005, playing them since 1990, and regularly contributes to publications including Guitar World, MusicRadar and Total Guitar. He uses Jazz III nylon picks, 10s during the week, 9s at the weekend, and shamefully still struggles with rhythm figure one of Van Halen’s Panama.
