Disclaimer: This is my personal tribute to Alexi Laiho. I only started making real progress on the guitar because of him and his music. This is not a competitive video or anything like that. When I was 18 years old I was the biggest Alexi Laiho fanboy. This is just my way of paying tribute to him with a personal challenge. I wanted to make this clear in case anyone is offended by this video. My description will be mostly about how his playing got me where I am now.

For this one I used the same tab I used back when I first learned it years ago. I'm not sure which one it is on ultimate-guitar since I got it from, I think it was the Children Of Bodom forums. Again, I was a huge fanboy, so I was on those a lot haha. The tab was from this guy who made all kinds of accurate Children of Bodom (and Sinergy) tabs. I think his name was Mitch DuCran if I remember correctly. Still super thankful for all those tabs! They helped me a lot back then. Thanks dude!

Link: [ Ссылка ]

The only changes are, that I don't have a tremolo and I play it on E Standard so I just play everything two frets lower. It's perfectly playable on E (except for one chord in the rhythm section where I play it an octave higher). I also changed one of the tapped sweeps in the first solo. I don't tap the highest note because moving my arm this far across the neck can introduce a lot of noise. That can be quite a deal-breaker for a video like this. I do however tap similiar sweeps later on. Other than that, everything's the same :)

Now on to the next links! I obsessively watched Alexi Laihos Young Guitar videos all the time when I was practicing in those early days. Though I don't recommend watching stuff while practicing, they were super motivating videos for me, which kept me going no matter how difficult something was. Those were the Reap'n Roll Licks, which is my favourite of those. His playing was superb there and it has really good exercises too! The Passage of the Reaper was also cool, and I did practice that vivaldi piece from it too and the last was one with his white ESP in front of a Marshall JCM 2000. Can't find the video anymore, only snippets in a young guitar compilation. Anyway, her are the links:

Reap'n Roll Licks:
[ Ссылка ]

Passage To The Reaper:
[ Ссылка ]

The compilation with those snippets:
[ Ссылка ]

And sorry for the sort of clickbait title. I'm not sure if Kissing The Shadows is still one of the hardest, if not hardest solos of Alexi Laiho. I kinda stopped listening to CoB after Are You Dead Yet. Back then, this was still considered the hardest solo by a lot of fans. A quick google search still got me the same results. But let me know in the comments which songs and solos I have to check out from the later albums :)

Now to Alexi. He was my biggest guitar hero! And probably the last one I had. Muhammed Suicmez, Christian Münzner and Necrophagist were a bigger influence on my playing and style but I never fanboyed over them too much. And it is also true that Alexi Laiho kicked off my journey of progress, which makes it more important.

Story time: before I discovered Children of Bodom I sucked at the guitar. Like big time. I only started learning the instrument because my older brother was learning it. You know, sibling stuff. I didn't really have my own motivation for it. I just tried to copy what my brother did. And I was bad at that too. I did have other idols like Mick Thomson of Slipknot and Jon Donais of Shadows Of Fall but it all really changed when I discovered Alexi Laiho. That's where I kind of found my own path for the instrument, instead of trying to follow the footsteps of my brother (who was and still is into the band Death).

Children of Bodom were also a very important band for my progress because they were the bridge between easier kinds of metal genres and more shreddy genres, in my case the later Tech Death. And I still think they are super band for that. I was lucky that my progress was very organic in that the music I was listening to and the stuff I was learning was always just a bit harder, but not too hard either. So from Nu Metal, to Metalcore, to Death Metal (starting with the more approachable style of Children Of Bodom) to Tech Death.

Those were my first 5 years of the guitar. Other influental people after that were Marc Okubo from Veil Of Maya, Tom "Fountainhead" Geldschläger who was not that much of an influence directly but everything I learned from his music still left a big mark, Aphex Twin, Noisia and Tigran Hamasyan. Of course, there's still Necrophagist and Defeated Sanity but I've mentioned them before.

I hope you enjoy the video! If you're interested how I approached practicing this song, let me know and I'll make a pinned comment :)

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