“We wanted to carry the torch of the guitar duo – Friedman/Becker, Gilbert/Bouillet – and pay homage to the golden era of shred guitar”: YouTube virtuosos Pete & Vinnie Play started with Racer X covers – now they’ve released their own classic

If you regularly scroll through Instagram and YouTube (and you definitely do), you may already have already come across the Pete & Vinnie Play channels. The two London-based musicians – American Peter Napper and Brazilian Vinnie Minotto – have amassed over 150,000 followers between them thanks to their daredevil guitar heroics, harmonized covers and reaction videos.

“We met at The Institute of Contemporary Music Performance in London,” Napper says. “We were two of the few metalheads on the course, so we instantly bonded. The idea came about after we played our final performance assessment together at music university.

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Amit has been writing for titles like Total Guitar, MusicRadar and Guitar World for over a decade and counts Richie Kotzen, Guthrie Govan and Jeff Beck among his primary influences as a guitar player. He’s worked for magazines like Kerrang!, Metal Hammer, Classic Rock, Prog, Record Collector, Planet Rock, Rhythm and Bass Player, as well as newspapers like Metro and The Independent, interviewing everyone from Ozzy Osbourne and Lemmy to Slash and Jimmy Page, and once even traded solos with a member of Slayer on a track released internationally. As a session guitarist, he’s played alongside members of Judas Priest and Uriah Heep in London ensemble Metalworks, as well as handled lead guitars for legends like Glen Matlock (Sex Pistols, The Faces) and Stu Hamm (Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, G3).