OK guys, cool down - don't shoot each other!!
First of all - i like his playing but i don't listen to his music, and he doesn't even hit my list of influences, so i don't know his style too much to make a lesson on it.
The fan is there not to make the hair go into your face and mouth while playing (in Marcel's case it's not a big deal - he almost has no hair left
). If you listen to DIRECTOR'S COMMENTS on LIVE AT THE ASTORIA DVD by Steve Vai you'll hear him explaining what fan is for. It has nothing to do with visual effects.
Andrew: Marcel has a custom made RG with TREE OF LIFE inlay - only built for Marcel, and he has a huge Ibanez collection including JEM's, UNIVERSE's and other stuff. Recently he had his signature guitar built by Bo-El Guitars - Dutch guitar builder, i already made a topic on it before.
And please let's not start talking about copying this or that because EVERYBODY is copying EVERYTHING. And honestly i don't care about copying as long as the song sounds good and it's not an obvious copy of a song. We all have our influences and we want to play like them so we can not avoid some parts being too similar to their's and there is nothing bad in that. It's better than being a smart*** and saying: "You copy this, you copy that!" and you yourself can't write sh*** yourself. I know some of my compositions sound like somebody's else, like for example that Power metal piece i wrote and uploaded last week -> Rhapsody influence, some of my solo stuff which you haven't heard yet -> it's all instrumental metal/rock and if it's the style, you can not play jazz over a metal riffage. You know what i mean?
If i am heavily influenced by Vai and Rusty, you sure will find some parts in my songs where you will recognize their playing. Also i have one song which is in progress of arranging which is turning out to be a Mozart song -> it's not - but is definitely sounds in his "style", all i did is i added electric guitar to that orchestration, althought the composition is totally mine, it just sounds like Mozart piece -> i love classical music.
You think Malmsteen is genius? He is openly copying classical pieces and adds guitar to it! Is it bad? No! He likes it, he lives with it and i am sure he doesn't care about anything else!
We can go further in this discussion and i will give another example: Kai and i were watching and talking about some metal riffs and stuff and some people say: "Oh man, this black metal band is awesome, bla, bla..." -> 10 minutes later Kai gives me a link to some metal band which had an album around '90s, and their riffs were the same riffs which were released 10 years later by some other band and hit the top 10 black metal songs!
Nobody cares about it - but those riffs were written 10 years earlier and back than nobody cared about them so this "new" band can pump his popularity and money on stolen riffs 10 years later. Fair? No! But nobody cares! I won't put any names not to start a fight but it's really TRUE and you can ask Kai about it if you don't believe me.
So, Marcel is almost as old as Vai is so i honestly doubt that he's copying his style. When one metal bands pops up, there is another metal band just like that in another country in 2 weeks playing same music. Cool, ha?
Rhapsody hit the world with FilmScore metal and 2 years later we have 30 bands claiming to be FilmScore metal bands.
To copy somebody's music it means to play his exact notes, if you make the music in same style - it's not copying. Did i copy Rhapsody in those 2 IN STYLE OF lessons? NO! I pay you 10000$ if you find a song of Rhapsody which has those riffs. Does it sound like Rhapsody? Yes it does! IT'S THE SAME STYLE!
Marcel and Vai play the same style in their solo CD's. Marcel is also an awesome progressive metal guitarist with really catchy compositions so he's a REALLY REALLY accomplished musician.
Sorry for making this long, and maybe going off-topic but i find this "copying" thing really annoying. People like Matt Rach on YouTube is a copy-cat because he's stealing pieces of song from Vai and Satch. But playing the same style is nothing bad.
Maybe we just started a great discussion, ha?