The weekRuben Wanmoved to Los Angeles, in 2015, he slept on a hard floor, didn’t know how to pay the security deposit on his room, and got food poisoning from a Chinese restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard.
The Panamanian was 18 at the time, and had arrived in the City of Angels with a single guitar to start university at the Musician’s Institute, a college he chose solely because it was easy to get into. Wan wanted to escape Panama at all costs, and saw career opportunities as a K-Pop soloist. He was otherwise completely naïve.
“I was the crappiest guitarist in my class. I was at the bottom, I could not read [music]. I only knew pentatonic scales when I came here, my arpeggios were crap. Everything was crap about my playing,” Wan recalls.
But in the same course, six months ahead of him, was伴侣。这位拉丁美洲的移民同胞开始了非凡的职业生涯，即将被约翰·梅耶（John Mayer）称为世界上最好的吉他手之一，这在很大程度上是通过在Instagram上发布了他的播放视频。188金博提现
“I looked up to him,” Wan says. “I told him, ‘Wow, you’re killing it’. And I’m like, I need to practice as well. Being in that environment is what made me whatever I am right now.”
Whatever he is now, six years later, Wan has joined Asato’s ranks as part of a new vanguard of digital guitar heroes –with 250,000 Instagram followers of his own，无数品牌交易，现在，他的首张EP第一章：吉他。His story is a lesson in how to make that happen.
Speaking toGuitar.com, Wan is dressed in the saleable cool of a bleached denim jacket, sitting in a room painted taxi cab yellow. Guitars are hung neatly on every wall. He’s articulate, almost to a fault – when prompted, his narrative comes at you like a sales pitch. Though Wan makes art, by his own admission he is in thebusinessof making art.
“After music school, I went to business school as well and got a Masters degree in business. A lot of the things I do come from a very entrepreneurial side, because my whole family is filled with entrepreneurs,” he explains.
正是这种方法使Wan与Asato区分开，他认为他是“真正的艺术家”。Wan说：“从整体上讲，他是一位真正的艺术家。”“伴侣感到继续前进的压力。他是一个革命者，他正在推动乐器的界限。
“I’m not a boundary pusher. I’m not at the forefront of the genre or the instrument. I’m on my own path, my own journey.”
That’s not to say Wan is a generic player – quite the opposite. His chops are influenced by the acoustic fingerstyle ofTommy Emmanueland Andy McKee, smashed against the virtuosic fusion of players likeGuthrie Govan;他的作品到达了新苏尔和福音和弦。Wan不介意被称为“ Instagram吉他手”，因为他知道自己有排骨。
“我的职业生涯很大一部分都归功于社交媒体。我所能做的一切都是因为我能够利用社交媒体游戏。”他说。“我第一次意识到它具有负面的含义……我和一位艺术家一起参加了这次小型巡回演出，在演出之后，鼓手告诉我，‘哇，你真的可以玩’。我想，‘你是什么意思？’他的感觉，“好吧，我认为Instagram音乐家只能为相机演奏。”
The occasional old-school dismissal aside, Wan’s journey is the envy of many. He began using Instagram in a utilitarian manner – arriving home from his classes, Wan would turn on his phone camera to record and post himself playing exercises from the day. But in 2014, a breakup motivated him to write songs for the first time.
Wan decided to invest in better video and recording equipment, and shared his micro-compositions (“They were literally 15 seconds long, because Instagram [videos] was [at the time] limited to 15 seconds”). Coincidentally, both of his breakthrough videos were linked to the act of seeking comfort in the feeling of instrumental music.
“有史以来第一个很好的视频叫做Zelda的熊猫。Pandas are a recurring theme in my videos, and that was the one to kick-start it,” Wan says. “When you’re sad, you find ways to cope with the sadness. And for me, that was playingThe Legend of Zelda。I just decided to write a little guitar piece with someZeldathemes.”
The next day, after the video was reposted by bigger pages, Wan notched his first 1,000 followers. It would be chump change compared to his second hit ‘Rain’ in 2017, which in its various uploads, racked up over a million streams.
“I think it was raining in LA,” Wan recalls. “I was just noodling guitar, practising like every other day and I started playing something that went along with the rain sound from outside and I’m like, ‘Oh, let’s expand on this idea’.
”这不是因为一个快乐或悲伤的时刻。只是因为天气。”
On the track, Wan’s clean, chiming guitar has the lyrical expression of early-70s George Benson. Accordingly,Rainbroke through to a new audience: Wan notes it lives on at yoga studios around the world, and as a comfort piece without context to many more.
Wan说：“我写了一些事情，以后会影响我的情绪。”“当我编写它时，它没有目的或任何东西，但是现在当我真正听到它时，有时它可以帮助我感受到不同的情绪，激励我做其他事情。”
It would be a distortion to put Wan’s increasing online success down merely to improved playing and videography. In the beginning, he says his audience was filled with “male guitarists who just wanted to emulate what I did”.
“Later on, I started to reevaluate everything that is Ruben. I’m more than just guitar. So I started to speak Spanish to my audience. I started to communicate in Chinese to my audience. I started to embrace my nerdy side, like anime and all these different loves I had in life. That’s when my audience started to broaden up as well,” Wan explains.
“So nowadays, I can confidently say even though a solid 30 to 40 per cent are still those male guitarists, now there’s a good chunk there just to follow me. They just want to know what Ruben is up to.”
Ruben’s own journey to LA would make for a good Instagram-ready narrative alone. Wan was born in Panama to small business owners, selling wholesale goods from Asia to the local population. His parents immigrated from China to Panama in their mid-20s, on the offer of Wan’s great uncle – he’d moved there many decades prior, during the building of the Panama Canal, which employed many Chinese workers.
Wan’s first hands-on musical experience was two years of learning piano at age eight, but it wasn’t until he needed something to do over a summer school holiday that he picked up the guitar at 14. Wan enrolled as the only student in a “Guitar Camp” – he stresses the inverted commas with his fingers – and learned four chords.
“I sat down for five hours a day as a 14-year-old kid learning those four chords. They just filled out my entire three months with joy,” Wan recalls.
A Christian background meant his musical role models at the time were largely YouTube singer-songwriters and Hillsong Church. But by algorithmic chance, when Wan was 17, he stumbled upon a video of Guthrie Govan.
“I see this random recommendation, this guy that looks like Jesus playing guitar. It was Guthrie Govan playing in the style ofLarry Carltonand I was blown away. I’m like, ‘Wow, you can do that with the guitar? What the heck is this?’” he says.
从那时起，Wan的吉他命运就开始了。但是他的企业家本能使他首先绕道。高中直接从高中毕业后，在会计师事务所毕马威（KPMG）走进了一次灵魂的实习。他决心做任何相反的事情，他加入了威廉·米纳（Wilhelmina）建模机构的巴拿马分公司（“当时我更苗条，更敏锐”，Wan Winks）。该分支的负责人使用年轻的模特才能将50年代覆盖的男孩乐队聚集在一起，名为Retz - Wan骑吉他。
“他知道这在巴拿马会很好，因为威廉娜的客户都是有钱的老人。他们喜欢Beatles。They likeElvis Presley。They like Frankie Valli,” he recalls. “I loved the attention. Like we got makeup stylists, riders and we’re playing these fancy locations, fancy bars. I was enamoured with the whole ego thing.”
Wan只会在雷茨（Retz）中持续一年，然后才决定搬到洛杉矶，但这种经历显然使他成为社交媒体的名声。他的处女作EP第一章：吉他might foreshadow another extreme career pivot.
The six tracks on the release are purist by nature. They were recorded using only guitar sounds, and one entry-level Donner chorus pedal ordered from Amazon.
“这是第一章。我想正确关闭本章，不希望它对其他任何东西污染。我众所周知，我会扮演硬拍打，对歌手进行协调。我用吉他做了很多事情。但是，释放全吉他的全部EP对我来说很重要，因为吉他使我在洛杉矶经历了整整七年的经历。我和我的乐器是定义我的成年的原因。” Wan解释说。
Across the dreamy instrumentals, you’ll mainly hear Wan play twoIbanez近年来已成为他主要六弦的吉他：AZ2204N-PBM和AZ2204B。WAN由于他们的Gotoh Vibrato系统而偏爱这对夫妇 - “这已成为我的标志性的东西，我用它来引导我Jeff Beck和Guthrie Govan的影响”。明亮的粉红色FenderPawn Shop Offset Special appears briefly on ‘Happy Sad’. His whole rig is run throughNeural DSPplug-ins, thanks to a relationship with the company.
Wan的数字哲学来自对可访问性的信念。“当有人问你时，‘哦，你如何达到这种基调？’ - 我每天都会问一个百万次的问题 - 我的歌曲中最简单的答案。我只需要一个界面，计算机和吉他，就可以创造出您非常喜欢的声音，” Wan说。
But whileChapter One也许是原始的记录，他正在研究的第二章将放弃这一点。
“这是我的歌手兼作词人的成长经历和男孩乐队时代的鲁宾与我在洛杉矶的七年音乐家一起担任会议音乐家的混合体。我将两个世界融合在一起，” Wan兴奋地说道。“它们不仅代表着我的吉他一面：我的歌声，视觉方面。我正在计划一些音乐视频。”188金博提现
It might have taken seven years, but Ruben Wan is finally at home in LA.
鲁本·万（Ruben Wan）的首张EP第一章：吉他is out now。