Nine-year-old music protege Maya Neelakantan was gifted a signature Gibson Les Paul by Adam Jones and promptly put it to use, recording a 15-song Tool medley.
Not unlike Nandi Bushell, Neelakantan has become a YouTube phenom thanks to her gifted guitar skills. You may remember her 15-minute playthrough of Tool’s “7empest” earlier this year — a feat so impressive, it apparently caught the attention of Adam Jones himself.
A couple months ago, the Tool guitarist bequeathed one of his prized signature model Gibson Les Paul guitars to Neelakantan, who shared the surprise moment in a heartwarming unboxing video. The gift must have inspired the young virtuoso to learn even more Tool songs.
Earlier this week, Neelakantan uploaded the aforementioned 15-song Tool medley played with the same Les Paul gifted to her by Jones. Neelakantan sticks to clean, non-distorted riffs in this clip, running through parts of “Intension,” “Vicarious,” “7empest” (she has this one down), “Right in Two,” “Invincible,” “Lost Keys,” “The Patient,” “Pneuma,” “Descending,” “Pushit,” “Eon Blue Apocalypse,” “Third Eye,” “Wings for Marie,” and lastly “Parabol/Parabola.”
The full clip clocks in at 10-plus minutes. And if playing the individual parts wasn’t impressive enough, Maya plays them all sequentially, creating an unabridged mashup of the various riffs.
“What I like the most in this is how each song connects nicely to the next one and it’s not random!” Maya wrote in the video description. “This is a completely thought out video and I had such a blast with it! … I just love everything that Adam Jones does! This video only explored the clean (without distortion) melodies that he created and I can’t wait to explore everything else even more!”
Below you can watch Maya run through the 15-song Tool medley, as well as the clip of her receiving the guitar in the mail.