Joe Satriani called her version of Always With Me, Always With You “the most impressive” he’s ever seen. Meet Andrea Krakovská, the “aerial guitarist” combining fretboard acrobatics with real acrobatics

Debate has raged across the internet about “social media guitarists” – internet-savvy whipper-snappers engaged (or so the critics say) in what amounts to a fretboard acrobatics arms race.

Then there’s Australian guitarist Andrea Krakovská, who sets herself head and shoulders above the pack by combining fretboard acrobatics with, well, literal acrobatics.

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Satch’s verdict? “This just might be the most impressive (in)version of Always With Me, Always With You I’ve ever seen,” he wrote on Instagram last November. “Bravo.”

“When I had the idea to record and release my own version of Always With Me, Always With You it was of course a bit nerve-wracking,” Krakovská tells Guitar World. “I had never released a proper full cover like that before and I know how brutal guitarists on social media can be, especially when you do something differently than the original artist.

“It was always my dream for Satriani to hear the track, but of course thousands of guitarists have covered his music. I thought there’s no way it would even be on his radar.”

“When I found out that he had seen my video I was over the moon – it was all worth it for the master himself to hear it,” she continues. “When he shared the video on his social media pages a few days later it was beyond my wildest dreams.”

So, how does one even think to apply aerial arts, which have been growing in popularity, to the guitar? The Sydney, Australia-based player tells us it was a faster jump than you might think.

“It wasn’t until after high school that I stumbled across aerial arts,” Krakovská tells us. “I still remember after my very first aerial class walking away thinking, ‘I am going to do that with a guitar one day.’ I then trained in aerial arts for over five years before I ever took a guitar up with me.”

Other than the leg muscles required to, you know, do the whole ‘playing upside-down while dangling in mid-air’ thing, Krakovská found that tackling complex pieces – playing for any extended time at all really – ended up being almost as challenging on the arms.

“Aside from all the obvious [challenges] like the strength required, one thing that I remember when I was starting out was the arm fatigue from having to hold my arms up while I play upside down,” she tells us.

“I hadn’t thought about it before, but when you play guitar either standing up or sitting down, gravity holds your arms down by your sides naturally, so it’s not much effort. When you flip upside-down, suddenly you have to physically hold your arms up, and I wasn’t used to that fatigue in the triceps/biceps. I used to practice at home by hanging off the edge off my bed and trying to play upside-down that way!”

Krakovská’s six-string weapons of choice have long been ESPs. The first guitar she used for her routines was an LTD Horizon that she received as a joint 18th birthday gift from her school friends, who all pitched in for it. She’s also partial to Eclipses, mentioning that she bought her first while on a long hunt for a new guitar – with a “shopping list” of desired specs – in Canberra.

The Eclipse was over her budget, and, ironically, didn’t have any of the specs she’d originally been looking for, but once she picked it up, everything clicked.

Down the line, Krakovská’s got some more covers up her sleeve. While grounded, she recently tipped her cap to one of her other major influences, Nita Strauss, with a sharply arranged version of the latter’s Summer Storm, and showed her versatility by blending funk attitude and ’80s-style shred heroics in a cover of, of all things, the dancefloor-pleaser, Funkytown.

Unsurprisingly, she’s also a Vai acolyte, recently posting a soulful take on the master shredder’s guitar-final-boss composition, Teeth of the Hydra.

Mind you, Krakovská’s repertoire doesn’t consist solely of covers.

“I’m actually working on my debut instrumental guitar EP,” she says. “I have two singles out already and am hoping to release the rest later this year so keep an eye out!”

• Follow Andrea Krakovská on Instagram.

Jackson is an Associate Editor at GuitarWorld.com. He’s been writing and editing stories about new gear, technique and guitar-driven music both old and new since 2014, and has also written extensively on the same topics for Guitar Player. Elsewhere, his album reviews and essays have appeared in Louder and Unrecorded. Though open to music of all kinds, his greatest love has always been indie, and everything that falls under its massive umbrella. To that end, you can find him on Twitter crowing about whatever great new guitar band you need to drop everything to hear right now.