WINNING LAP

Having mastered Guitar Hero, Yasmin Williams turned her attention to the real deal and became a lap-tapping superhero in her own right for a new generation of players.

- JIMMY LESLIE

MANY GUITARISTS WONDERED if the Guitar Hero video game craze would spawn a new generation of bona fide guitar heroes. We now have our answer: Yasmin Williams. After mastering Guitar Hero 2 as a youngster, she transferred her finger dexterity into a lap-style tapping technique that is nothing short of extraordinary. Williams is quite capable of playing traditional upright fingerstyle too, and she alternates between the two positions, sometimes flipping her guitar approach mid-song. Like Kaki King, Williams has a highly inquisitive mind that leads her to try everything from playing with hammers and bows to exploring harp guitar and kora and experimenting with an arsenal of effects. Since she sits down and often has the acoustic on her lap like a steel player, her percussive approach is distinctive, and she’ll even use the instrument as a table, setting her kalimba on it and playing it when she’s not plucking guitar strings.

When her hands are fully occupied, Williams makes use of her feet by donning tap shoes and tapping on a board to add more percussion to her mix. In addition, the creative lady has a pedalboard full of gadgets to conjure wild reverbs, delays, loops, synth sounds and backing tracks, but none of this would mean anything if the result wasn’t wonderfully musical. As impressive as it is to watch Williams, her highly rhythmic and atmospheric audio stands on its own. Both 2018’s Unwind and 2021’s Urban Driftwood (Spinster) are very easy on the ears. Her compositions are interlaced with lovely ebbs and flows and sound as natural as water cascading along a mountainside. Both albums are excellent acoustic chill mood plays.

Williams is a Virginia native who went on to become the grand prize winner of New York University’s UltraViolet Live talent show, the gold prize winner in the instrumental category of the Mid-Atlantic Song Contest, and a finalist in the Rolling