Earlier this year, Giacomo Turra – best known for his funk-infused guitar covers on social media – was embroiled in scandal after guitarists and influential figures in the guitar space accused him of stealing their work, monetizing it, and not crediting them.
Now, the guitar and bass players who have been wronged by Turra, spearheaded by bassist and YouTuber Charles Berthoud, have teamed up to deliver a mind-bending funk shred track, Slapocalypse Reborn.
The title calls back to Berthoud’s own collaboration with Turra on his original composition, Slapocalypsewhich he released around a year ago.
In a separate video detailing his experience with Turra, Berthoud claims he had “no idea about any of this madness before I agreed to collab with him”, stating that he had never seen anything “even remotely resembling this in my 10-year career as a professional musician”.
“At this point, Giacomo has done tons of collabs with really awesome musicians like Vincen García, Guy Bernfeld, Marcin, and he even opened for George Benson at the Blue Note in Napa,” Berthoud said of his initial collaboration Turra.
“I can pretty much guarantee that none of these guys knew about Giacomo’s antics before agreeing to a collab.
“So I wrote the main elements of this song [Slapocalypse] about three years ago and put it in a video called: ‘Slap bass with wah sounds dangerously funky.’ At some point shortly after that, Giacomo covered it on his Instagram, and he did actually tag me.
“I thought it was pretty cool that a guitarist was slapping my riff on guitar, and he actually sent me a message on Instagram asking if I wanted to collab. And I thought, ‘Yeah, why not?’”
Berthoud explains the two went back and forth with ideas, with Turra eventually sending him his guitar parts (Berthoud does say, though, he’s not sure whether the guitarist actually wrote those parts or not).
The two were even booked to shoot a video at a professional studio. However, the night before the shoot, Turra sent his collaborator a message on Instagram saying that “he got really sick at NAMM and he’s not gonna be able to make it to the video shoot”.
Keen-eyed Berthoud notes that, later that day, Turra “literally posted some stories on his Instagram where he was playing at NAMM and looking completely healthy and fine”.
“To me, it was quite clear that he had just chosen to play at NAMM instead of doing our video,” Berthoud added. “This obviously caused me to lose money. It meant that we had to go through the hassle of rescheduling the shoot and paying twice as much money for it as we had originally planned.”
As a creator with a big following, the bassist felt he had to do right by the players whose compositions and arrangements were stolen and deleted his original collaboration with Turra from all his channels – and he re-recorded it with them all involved.
In fact, the “diss track” sees Berthoud team up with a veritable list of talent – Jack Gardiner, Alex Hutchings, Belltone Guitars, Danny Sapko, Jones Basses, Kahil Ferraris, Marco Baldi, Ben Romano, Tom Quayle, and Peter Luha – for a masterclass in shredding, slapping, and pure funk revelry, arguably the perfect response to the scandal that has left the guitar community reeling.
Following the controversy, players who have been wronged have spoken out, brands who were aligned to Turra – including D’Angelico and Laney – have distanced themselves from him, while Rick Beato revealed the pair had collaborated on a video that never saw the light of day due to Turra allegedly not playing “well enough to put the video out”.
