I’m Tim “The Six String General” Granlund and I’m showing you how to Air Guitar.

Now, we’re going to talk about my favorite part of the whole thing, the competitions. They started over a decade ago in Finland at the Oulu Music Video Festival. They wanted to celebrate world peace and emphasize that, celebrate rock and roll, and they felt the best way to do that was Air Guitar. As they say, if everybody is holding an Air Guitar, they can hold a gun.

Now, the US, they’ve jump into the ring about six years ago. They started with a couple of competitions, one in New York, one in L.A, and it’s grown to its current form in its 6th year over 25 cities. The regional competitions and the winners of each of those get to go to the National Championship at the end. The winner of Nationals gets to go on to the Air Guitar World Championships at that Oulu Music Video Festival. It’s usually held in October of every year.

Air Guitar Competitions are an interesting thing. The way they work is you get a field of contestants. Each contestant is going to get 60 seconds in the first round to play whatever song they like. This is something they’ve worked on at home that they’ve practiced on, but you get 60 seconds, no more, no less. And we have a panel of judges, maybe three or four of them. They’re going to judge you on three things: your technical ability, your stage presence, and your airness.

Technical ability, this is clearly the least important of the categories but they’re looking to see. Alright, you have your left hand making different notes up here because your right hand is roughly corresponding to the music playing the notes and the chords.

The next category is your stage presence. You own the stage. You own that crowd. You put on a show, make it fun.

The last aspect of your performance that they’re judging is your airness. Airness is a bit hard to describe. You’ll know it when you see it, but it’s about how do you really transcend what you’re doing, the lack of a guitar to create a unique piece of performance art. It kind of has a very elusive quality.

For the most part, either you’ve got it or you don’t. I think one of the contestants in Philadelphia put it best, that rock isn’t just about the music itself; it’s about the posture and the attitude, you know, sex, drugs and rock and roll. It’s about all of that. And that’s really what Air Guitar is celebrating and that’s what airness really captures. It’s just sort of that extra ‘umph’ that makes rock and roll rock and roll.

Now, you’ve got all these three categories. And you’re going to get a numeral score. They’re going to judge you on the skill, like figure skating from 4.0 to 6.0. You have your panel of judges to give your scores. At the end of that first round, the top five scorers are going to move on. They’ll get their cumulative score and they’ll move on to the second round.

Now, the second round is really what switches things up on you. This time, everybody is playing the same song and nobody knows what it is. The competition body is going to pick a song and they’re going to play it, and everybody is going to get to hear it once, and then it’s time to go out in reverse order from 5th place to 1st place and you just got to improvise and bring out your true airness, your true rocking skills, and bust out a performance to that song. You’ll get scored again, 4.0 to 6.0. They’re going to sum those totals together and there you’ve got your winner.

That’s kind of how the competitions work and the competitions are great because you get a chance to go to big cities all around the country, play some of the biggest and best clubs in the country, sold out audiences, you get to be a rock star for 60 seconds at a time, and just see what it’s like to be Axl Rose, to be Jon Bon Jovi, to be someone—you know, to be Aerosmith, to be Molly Crew and that’s what’s really great.

At the end of the day, they’re a celebration of rock and roll. It’s all about having fun. So that’s how the competitions work. And now, I’m going to go ahead and show you how it’s all done with an actual performance.