Electric guitar wizards are no strangers to TV talent show stages, but 19-year-old Silas Luke Jones has demonstrated that acoustic guitar players can also make an impact. Channeling the spirit of Jon Gomm and fellow talent show graduate Marcin, the Alaskan native brought the house down on America's Got Talent.
There’s little in the way of banter between Jones and the judges before his performance. Rather, he simply states that he’s never played a stage as big as AGT's before, and lets his music do the talking.
Though an acoustic player, he's armed with quite the rig, with a Kemper floor modeller, expression pedal, a Boss RC-500 loop pedal, and a Boss OC-5 all making up his pedalboard. He first delivers some fuzz-ravaged, psychedelic lead lines before powering into some energetic, hand-blurring percussive playing that left judge Mel B bewildered as to how one person could make so much noise.
“If I turned away and I listened to what you were doing, I would’ve thought that was like five or six people on stage,” she bawked, before calling him “one of a kind.”
Already this year, the show has provided a platform for standout performances. We've seen Indian band Girish and the Chronicles deliver a hard-hitting take on an Adele classic, a 10-year-old nail a Lenny Kravitz cover on a PRS that's almost as tall as he is, and an 11-year-old meld together Eddie Van Halen and Brian May shred in one fiery audition.
That follows Maya Neelakantan's life-changing competition run last year, which has since seen her hang out with Jason Becker, jam with Testament, and receive a rare Jeff Hanneman signature guitar prototype.
The rise of Marcin, meanwhile, who stormed the show’s 14th season, shows how high Jones’ ceiling could be following this incendiary introduction. The percussive acoustic star is on a mission “to show the world that percussive acoustic guitar should be the next big thing”.
We won't get carried away at this point, but the 19-year-old’s talent is undeniable, and it’s refreshing to see a guitar played like this in front of a huge TV audience.
