Five Minutes Alone Yngwie Malmsteen

Returning this year with Blue Lightning, the shred lord ponders breakthroughs and misunderstandings

I got my first real six-string…

“It was a cheap steel-string acoustic that I got for my fifth birthday. I don’t know the brand but I started modifying it – putting a pickup in there, a whammy bar and all this shit that totally ruined it. Then a little later, my older brother realised I was getting pretty good and started getting jealous, so he bought a Strat copy… But he was never home, so I got to play the guitar all the time, through his wah pedal and all his gear… I was only seven or eight years old! My mum saw this and decided to buy me the guitar from my brother and he got a Les Paul. Eventually I started to own good guitars, but those were my first.”

Say what you want