In this latest episode of Loudwire’s Gear Factor, Fernando Ufret (who you’ve probably seen playing song parodies as South Park’s Eric Cartman) plays his favorite riffs.
Armed with an acoustic guitar, Ufret has been entertaining and amusing us all for years with those clever cover parodies as well as original music and non-Cartman related videos. They’ve been a source of joy amid social media feeds overrun by negative content, demonstrating the timeless, healing power of laughter.
On Gear Factor, Ufret takes us back to when he was nine years old. “I wanted to be Slash,” he recalls, “I wanted to look like Slash, play a Les Paul. He just looked cool and it was the whole thing — running around with a guitar… the whole package.”
He credits, really, “anything from Appetite for Destruction” for making him want to play guitar. When it comes to the earliest riffs he learned, however, it was Danzig’s “Mother,” Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that got him started.
Around 1991, Ufret’s neighborhood brother friends in Puerto Rico helped him learn other riffs by Green Day, Iron Maiden and Guns N’ Roses.
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“Then I discovered Dream Theater through a friend of mine and that was it for me,” he says, getting turned on to another one of his lifelong favorite bands.
He runs through some other techniques that gave him difficulty (some still do) and his favorite acoustic guitar intros. And then we get the story behind what made Ufret want to adopt the Eric Cartman voice. While watching the South Park movie Bigger, Longer and Uncut with some friends, he said a word in the Cartman voice and it all unraveled from there. He began sneaking the voice into cover songs for fun, which led to requests from streaming supporters for more.
Watch Fernando Ufret play all of his favorite riffs (and sing some like Cartman) in the Gear Factor episode directly below.
Follow Fernando Ufret on Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. And check out ‘Cartman Sings: A Parody Impression Album’ here.
Fernando Ufret Plays His Favorite Riffs
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