Sick Riffs #16: In today's episode, Christian 'Dushi' Douscha, guitarist of international symphonic metal quintet Visions of Atlantis is here to teach you A Journey to Remember, taken from the band's latest album, Wanderers.
This riff will give your palm-muting chops a workout, and while Douscha plays it on a Schecter C7 SLS Evil Twin 7-string, you can simply tune your six-string a whole step down (D-G-C-F-A-D), as the line doesn't involve the seven-string's extra string. The tones you hear in the video come courtesy of a Kemper Profiler amp modeler.
"[The Coronavirus impact] happened during our US Tour with DragonForce and Unleash the Archers," Douscha recalls.
This really endangered our band life and all our future touring plans
"We already knew about the crisis going on in Europe and especially Italy since our singer is from there. Everyday, we heard messages of it getting worse and worse. But the US seemed unaffected by this, so we were in a good mood. Then things went downwards very fast. We heard the tour would probably need to stop halfway and we’d only have three shows left from that point.
"The next day, we arrived in Minneapolis and weren’t allowed to enter the venue because they were waiting for an official announcement about the crisis. Two hours later, we got the news: no more gatherings of large crowds, tour cancelled. From there on, everything was a big struggle - rearranging everything in a very short time. It suddenly went from 'we are having a great time here' to 'can we even get home?'
"In the end, everything worked out more or less, but with a huge financial loss and 10 shows cancelled. We also needed to postpone our European tour dates for April and May to autumn. This really endangered our band life and all our future touring plans, so we decided to reach out to our fans and started a fundraiser, selling tour shirts and other merchandise.
"The response was overwhelming, thanks to everyone who took part in this! That said, it's still running at GoFundMe. If you want to support us, it would mean the world to us! Together we can make it through this crisis! Let's stay strong and healthy!"
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Sick Riffs is a Guitar World video series designed to help guitarists affected by the coronavirus. Self-isolating players around the world have each filmed a lesson where they teach you one of their own guitar riffs, up close and personal. If you dig the lesson, we encourage you to buy music and merch from the artist or stream their music.
Sam was Staff Writer at GuitarWorld.com from 2019 to 2023, and also created content for Total Guitar, Guitarist and Guitar Player. He has well over 15 years of guitar playing under his belt, as well as a degree in Music Technology (Mixing and Mastering). He's a metalhead through and through, but has a thorough appreciation for all genres of music. In his spare time, Sam creates point-of-view guitar lesson videos on YouTube under the name Sightline Guitar.
