Marty Friedman (ex-Megadeth) likens guitar playing to sex: “If you practise at home, you’re going to get good at practising at home. If you go out and do the real thing, you’re going to get good at doing the real thing.”

Marty Friedman playing guitar onstage — (Image credit: Jun Sato/WireImage)

Former Megadeth member Marty Friedman offers guitar tips with a sensual twist in a new interview.

Talking to Ultimate Guitar, the famed thrash metal player, who left Megadeth in 2000 and has since pursued a successful multimedia career in Japan, likens mastering the instrument to getting better at sex, in that practising alone doesn’t necessarily correlate to improving at “the real thing”.

“Everything that I always say about this can be related to sex in some way,” Friedman says before offering some sage advice on the six-string. “If you practise at home, you’re going to get good at practising at home. If you go out and do the real thing [performing onstage], you’re going to get good at doing the real thing.”

Elsewhere in the conversation, Friedman admits that he hasn’t practised guitar playing at home in “probably three decades”. “I’m playing guitar so incredibly much, all of the time: either performing, writing, rehearsing, recording,” he explains.

He later adds that playing his instrument for live crowds since his mid-teens has been extremely helpful for his development.

“I’ve been very lucky that I’ve been playing live since I was 14, 15, so all I’ve been doing since then is creating music and performing it, and oftentimes having to explain it, whether it be guitar seminars or music videos for instructional things. So, I have to know exactly what it is I’m doing.”

Friedman released his memoir, Dreaming Japanese, on January 2 via Permuted Press. In it, he reflects on his 2000 Megadeth exit, revealing that his departure from the band was hastened by a panic attack he suffered on Christmas Day 1999.

“I was in too much pain to think,” he writes. “I fell off the couch and couldn’t move. My heart was racing like a coke fiend about to go into cardiac arrest, and the palpitations were so strong they hurt the muscles in my chest. Fucking hell, could this be a heart attack?”

He also looks back on an aborted reunion of Megadeth’s ‘classic’ lineup – himself, frontman Dave Mustaine, bassist David Ellefson and drummer Nick Menza – in 2015, saying that he declined to participate due to a low financial offer.

“Had I taken that offer, I would have been paid less in a week than I made in a normal day in Japan,” he remembers. “I was stunned and angry and told them I couldn’t even consider it. I made a counteroffer, which was the bare minimum I could accept, and far less than I have received from any of the artists I’ve toured with in Japan.”

Friedman eventually did reunite with Megadeth, but only for one night, playing two songs with the thrashers during their 2023 show at the Budokan venue in Tokyo.

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Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Metal Hammer and Prog, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, NME and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.