Reginald Guillaume aka Guitaro5000 was already years deep into a music career when he started hauling his guitar into New York City subway stations just to pay rent. What he discovered down there, on the days when a stranger would drift over mid-song and start singing along, changed everything about what he thought performing could be. Those accidental duets were so alive, so different from anything a regular gig offered, that he eventually built an entire operation around chasing that feeling deliberately, approaching strangers on the street and asking them to sing with him. Three thousand people have said yes so far, and a world tour across 30 countries is now underway.
From subway singles to a global stage
The name came in layers. A classmate started calling him ‘guitar’ as a taunt in high school, but Gong liked it, introduced himself as Guitaro for years, and eventually made it official when he registered a MySpace account and found the plain version already taken. The 5000 arrived separately: nursing school cost $5,000 in tuition, so he planted himself in the subway with a handwritten sign reading ‘I need $5,000 for college’ and started collecting what he needed in small bills. Regulars started calling him ‘that 5,000 guy,’ the two halves clicked together, and Guitaro 5000 was born.
The nursing plan quietly fell apart. Halfway to the goal he realized he was already making a living through music. He kept taking classes sporadically, got an A in microbiology, and then simply never went back. His last song-for-tuition shift was also his last shift as a would-be nurse.
The YouTube pivot nearly collapsed before it started. His first street-singing video was, in his own words, the worst-performing video on his entire channel. He made more anyway, because a handful of commenters kept saying the strangers on screen looked genuinely transformed. Then June 2020 arrived and everyone was locked indoors and hungry for something warm. A video he had uploaded the previous September started pulling 100,000 views a day, and the comments were not just enthusiasm: people were writing about the last time they had sung with somebody, about how long ago that felt.
The sardine can that became a snare drum
The gear setup is almost entirely self-invented. Playing the Ovation guitar he won in a competition after his previous guitar was stolen, Gong developed a simultaneous finger-percussion and strumming technique that evolved out of being the designated beat-maker for classmates who wanted to rap during school. The problem was that the snare hits were slowly chipping away at the guitar’s soundboard. He tried taping a CVS loyalty card over the impact zone. No good. Then CDs. Worse. A salmon can had too much of an indent and kept popping out. A sardine can, with its slight ridges and elliptical shape, turned out to be almost exactly right: flat enough to stay put, just textured enough to catch the soundboard and produce a clean crack that reads as a snare hit. It rides on a binder clip. He runs two completely independent signals out of the guitar, one capturing strings through a Seymour Duncan pickup for effects and distortion, one capturing the full acoustic mix through the Ovation’s built-in pickup. A Boss GT1 processor handles the chain. For muting during solos, he improvised a sliding piece of fabric cut from pantyhose.
He does not use a looper, by design. When a stranger steps up who has never rehearsed the song, who may be singing slower than expected or in a slightly different key from memory, a locked loop becomes a cage. Staying fully live means he can slow down with them, adjust tempo, meet them exactly where they are.
His collaborator Daniel, who runs camera, mixes live audio, manages the monitor feed, and handles much of the post-production, described what it feels like to watch from behind the gear: ‘It gives you the hairs stand up on your arms, whether they’re a pro or not.’ In Montreal, a boy named Edward stepped up in front of a crowd looking visibly nervous. He sang with Gong, the crowd came around, and when it was over Edward walked off to the side and kept singing and dancing to himself. His mother told the crew afterward that Edward has autism and that she had not expected him to do it. She was proud that he did.
Rich, wherever you are
A man named Rich once stood at the edge of a performance, inching away but not quite leaving, still looking back. Gong asked him to name a favorite artist. Rich said Ed Sheeran. Gong started playing one, left the door open, and Rich eventually sang exactly one line: ‘Shape of you.’ His whole posture changed the moment he did. He said he actually felt better. Gong has not seen Rich since, but the comments on that video kept pointing at him, strangers writing that Rich reminded them of themselves.
Gong’s standing offer to him, across whatever platform Rich might eventually see it: ‘This time he’ll sing the whole song rather than just that one line.’
The Sing with Me Live World Tour launches late this year, with 30 countries mapped across three years, Australia already confirmed, and the Philippines in active discussion. Every stop is its own negotiation of permits, weather, sprinkler systems that turn on at midnight, and the question of which five feet of sidewalk gives the camera a better background. The sardine can stays binder-clipped to the guitar through all of it.
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