Paul Gilbert Plays "To Be With You" Fingerpicked, Tapping, Singing. All at Once.

There's a version of Paul Gilbert that most people know: the one with the drill, the three picks taped together, the alternate-picking runs that sound like a sewing machine doing 200 MPH. The Racer X Paul Gilbert. The "how is that physically possible" Paul Gilbert.

Then there's this.

At Guitar Wars — a 2003 concert event in Japan alongside Nuno Bettencourt, Steve Hackett, and John Paul Jones — Paul Gilbert sat down, picked up a guitar, and played "To Be With You" without a pick. Fingerstyle. Tapping. Singing at the same time. Calm, clean, controlled. The kind of performance where you watch the hands for two minutes straight and still can't fully diagram what's happening.

"To Be With You" is a strange song for Paul Gilbert to be associated with. Mr. Big wrote it for the 1991 album Lean into It (released February 1991, source: Atlantic Records), and it hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1992 — topping the charts in eleven countries. That was not what you expected from a band whose other guitarist could shred the finish off a Les Paul. It was a ballad. A proper one. And it worked because it was played like a ballad, not like a shred exercise wearing a ballad's clothes.

What he's doing in this performance isn't simple even though it sounds simple. Fingerpicking and two-hand tapping at the same time means one hand is fretting and plucking, the other is tapping notes on the upper register, and meanwhile he's singing the melody. Each of those three things is a separate task your brain has to manage independently. Most players at his level specialise — they pick or they tap or they sing. Gilbert does all three simultaneously, unhurried, like he's explaining something to a student who just needs to see it done slowly.

This is the part of Paul Gilbert that doesn't get nearly enough attention. The speed is impressive. The control is rarer. Anyone with enough practice hours can eventually play fast. Playing quietly, cleanly, with genuine dynamics, while also carrying a vocal line — that takes something different. Something that doesn't come from drilling scales in a bedroom.

I've watched this video more times than I should admit. There's a moment around the solo where his right hand does something and your eye can't quite follow it, and you think: I've been playing guitar for years and I don't understand what just happened. That's not a criticism. That's Paul Gilbert.

The Guitar Wars DVD was released in 2004. Worth tracking down if you haven't — and if you want to understand what actual picking control looks like before it becomes speed, it pairs well with a closer look at how pick choice shapes technique in the first place. Gilbert's approach to tone and attack is the kind of thing you start noticing once you've spent real time thinking about what a pick (or the absence of one) actually does.

And if the way he phrases here — the breathing, the space between notes — makes you think about your own playing, that's not an accident. It's what happens when someone has thought very hard about how fundamentals actually work under pressure. The quiet moments aren't the break from the technique. They are the technique.