Top5 guitar players
- Thread starter Thorondorito
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Svartmetall
Great Unclean One
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2004
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- 2,467
I have pretty strong opinions on guitar paying, being a player myself for 24 years and having taught guitar for 14 of those. In no particular order (there comes a point past which trying to have a 'best' player just becomes infantile), these are the guys who come to mind straight away:
Steve Vai - a great mix of out-there weirdness and yet also capable of utterly beautiful, expressive playing as well; people tend to pigeonhole Vai as 'alien stunt guitar from Mars' but he's actually a tremendously well-rounded composer and musician, as well as a very dynamic live performer. He's played with so many different people in so many different situations (Frank Zappa, Public Image Ltd, Dave Lee Roth, Alcatrazz, Whitesnake, Alice Cooper, plus of course his extensive solo career), it's hard to imagine a more widely-travelled - in the musical sense - player out there at the moment. Complete technical command of his instrument, great compositional ability, consummate live performer, and these days he's become quite a passable singer, too. It doesn't get much better than this man.
Recommended Steve Vai:
With other people:
Frank Zappa: 'The Jazz Discharge Party Hats' - Vai took one of Zappa's spoken-word routines and transcribed his speech onto guitar, every pitch, nuance and inflection. You see why he credited Vai with 'stunt guitar' on his albums.
Public Image Ltd.: 'Ease' - an amazing angular solo.
Dave Lee Roth: 'Big Trouble' - likewise
"Crossroads" soundtrack: 'Eugene's Trick Bag' - required learning for any guitarist looking to show off in the second half of 80s, just as EVH's 'Eruption' was in the first half. Watch the film for an incredible physical performance; Ralph Macchio is miming, but Vai isn't.
Solo:
'Call It Sleep' - the first Steve Vai I heard; beautifully phrased quiet playing as well as the more obvious distorted solo.
The entire "Passion And Warfare" album, which I had to teach to people over and over while I was a guitar teacher because just about everyone wanted to learn 'The Audience Is Listening' and of course 'For The Love Of God'. None more guitar.
'Kill The Guy With The Ball' - goes from intense heaviness to spaced-out weirdness without ever losing the flow. Brilliant composition.
'The Boy From Seattle' - a tremendous piece of Hendrix-y chord-melody playing.
'Whispering A Prayer' - just one of the most stunningly beautiful, expressive pieces of playing I have ever heard.
I'd also recommend Mike Keneally's 'Piano Reductions' CD of solo pianio transcriptions of Vai's music; with just one piano it strips the compositions down to their basics and lets you see just how good a writer the man is.
-----
Buckethead - real name Brian Carroll, he's got some of the most out-there and distinctive playing you'll ever hear; like the great Allan Holdsworth, I don't think I've ever heard Buckethead play a 'normal' guitar lick. He's worked with a lot of different people, too; he's good mates with Primus and funk legend Bootsy Collins, he's worked a lot with dub psycho Bill Laswell's Praxis project, and even tours with Guns'n'Roses. Buck has the most insane 8-fingered (i.e. using all his right-hand fingers to tap) licks and patterns you will ever hear, they're bizarre atonal things that are often damn near impossible to play. His short-lived column in Guitar Player magazine inspired the most extreme reactions of anybody's; he wrote the whole thing in-character and that wound up a lot of GP's more conservative readers. I loved it
.
Recommended Buckethead:
Everything he did with Praxis, the albums are a crazed melting pot of dub, thrash metal, sampled weirdness and ambient chillout, with Buck's psycho-killer-with-a-guitar lunacy sprayed all over them. Particularly good tracks for an intro to Buck's playing are 'Blast/War Machine Dub', 'Dead Man Walking' and 'Stronghold'.
The 'Giant Robot' and 'Bucketheadland' albums.
'The Ballad Of Buckethead' - Google Video this one, it's a collaboration with the almost-as-mad-as-Buckethead Les Claypool of Primus and is very fun.
Actually, a bit of Google Videoing finds quite a lot of amazing live Buckethead performances, so it's worth trawling a bit.
-----
Stevie Ray Vaughan (R.I.P.) - Blues playing doesn't get better than this man. BB King has great vibrato, Albert Collins and Albert King have the tone and showmanship, Buddy Guy has the licks; but Stevie Ray had it all. Tragically died in a helicopter crash just after he managed to clean up from a major drug'n'drink problem and was getting his life back on line. The blues is a vital ingredient in a huge amount of contemporary music and culture, and this man was one of its greatest ever exponents. Possibly had the greatest blues tone anyone ever got out of a Strat. If you don't think you've heard this man, you have - he played the guitar licks on Bowie's 'Let's Dance' hit.
Recommended listening (all solo):
'Riviera Paradise' - incredible piece of mellow blues. Imagine the perfect warm, hazy summer evening, with a cold beer in your hand watching the sun go down. This is what that sounds like; I heard this in a record store and just stood listening the whole way through and bought the CD on the spot. Absolutely jaw-dropping, classy, tasteful playing.
'Testify' - high-energy blues doesn't get any better than this.
'Scuttle Buttin'' - likewise
-----
Also great players I'd recommend:
Uli Jon Roth - imagine Yngwie Malsteen with better tone, vastly better phrasing, less chins, and no ego...and you get Uli. Hard to imagine anyone doing classical stuff on guitar better than this man; listen to some of the stuff on his 'Transcendental Sky Guitar' CD for proof. He's written but not yet recorded a full concerto for electric guitar and orchestra, which I'd love to hear - Yngwie's was good but very predictable Baroque-by-numbers, while I suspect Uli would pull something sublime out of his compositional bag. He has a piece called 'Pegasus' that gives an idea of what this cold be like; I think this piece is one of the most amazing bits of playing you'll hear, it's like a great late-romantic violin concerto but on distorted electric guitar. His work with the Scorpions in the 70s was also great - he's regarded as maybe the first player to work harmonic minor and diminished stuff into rock songs, 'Sails Of Charon' being a great example; check out the 'Tokyo Tapes' CD for a great document of his 70s playing. The noise/feedback workout at the end of 'Fly To The Rainbow' is very fun.
Eric Johnson - hasn't recorded much, but he has quite possibly the greatest guitar tone you'll ever hear, and amazing phrasing too. Listen to 'Cliffs Of Dover' and 'Desert Rose' for proof; I think the latter has one of the greatest guitar solos I have ever heard, it's just incredible.
Jeff Beck - seems to spend more time driving hot-rods than playing guitar, but when he does, he's about as good as it gets. Listen to 'Where Were You' for a gorgeous piece of emotive playing that gives Vai's 'Whispering A Prayer' a run for its money. The 'Guitar Shop' album is a good thing to own.
Yngwie Malmsteen - OK, he's got an ego the size of a planet and writes lyrics Manowar would turn their nose up at, but he's still a very important player and for a few years in the 80s was about as good as it got. I drove myself crazy learning the stuff off his first solo album when it came out - I had just reached the point where I could play all the Van Halen/Randy Rhoads stuff and thought I was hot shit, then I heard the 'Rising Force' album and I was like 'shit, back to practising then'. That album blew a lot of people away, and is still worth getting now. Uli Roth and Blackmore had made a lot of classical references in their playing, but Yngwie was the first guy to come out and really go "BACH! IN YOUR FUCKING FACE! AT 120 DECIBELS!" at people, and it turned a lot of heads. Listen to 'Black Star' and 'Far Beyond The Sun' and tell me they don't still sound cool as fuck.
Shawn Lane (R.I.P.) - the fastest human guitarist, ever. He could play at quite literally blur speed, it's incredible, but also has a great ear for melody and composition. This man may be guitar's best-kept secret; the biggest drawback is that a lot of his playing is on very obscure and hard-to-find albums. Grab his 'Powers Of Ten: Live' album and /boggle.
John McLaughlin - picked at Mach 10 in 1970, worked with the legendary Miles Davis on 'Bitches Brew' and has for a long time been about as good as it gets in jazz-rock guitar. He plays machine-gun picking stuff on acoustic that rivals what Petrucci et al do on electric. His 'Live At The Royal Festival Hall' album is one of my favourite chillout albums.
Anders Miolin - this guy is a classical guitarist. Now I'm not by any means a big fan of classical guitar (I think for the most part it's self-referential, tedious, limited in compositional scope by the limitations of the instrument itself and just flat out boring), but Miolin plays an 11-string alto guitar and does transcriptions of piano music by people like Erik Satie and Debussy that are incredible - it's hard to believe just one guitar is doing all this at once.
Marty Friedman - played with Megadeth for several albums, and also had a decent solo career for a while. His 'Dragon's Kiss' solo debut is possibly the best of the Shrapnel label's 80s "shred" albums, and his soloing on Megadeth's 'Hangar 18' and 'Holy Wars' is just sublime. Very odd phrasing and great, wide vibrato.
Joe Pass (R.I.P.) - pure jazz guitar doesn't get any better than this.
Paul Gilbert - some of the most energised and energetic speed-picking you'll ever hear; the solo at the beginning of his first instructional video is incredible. If you ever want to work on your picking, you could do a lot worse than learning some of this man's stuff. Listen to 'Scarified', 'Hammer Away' and in fact most of his playing.
John Petrucci - Dream Theater just flat out fucking own, but you should also check out his playing on the Liquid Tension Experiment albums. And if you're a Dream Theater fan, you shoudl get the Transatlantic albums, featuring Mike Portnoy playing epic New Prog (TM) with guys from a couple of other pog bands. Great unashamedly self-indulgent fun.
Allan Holdsworth - mention his name to any big-name guitarist and they do the /worship emote. Nobody has ever played legato solos, or wild jazzed-out chord stuff like Holdsworth; the only thing that's stopped Holdsworth becoming one of the biggest players ever is that his music is just too jazzy for most people, often sounding a bit "elavator muzak" to ears accustomed to the verse-chorus-verse inanity of most popular music. Listen to the solos in 'Devil Take The Hindmost' or 'Low Levels High Stakes' and tell me this isn't a genius at work. And his chord playing is the most distinctive I have ever heard; whenever I want to really test myself, I grab a book of Holdsworth transcriptions and torture myself trying to reach his insane stretches and changes. For a good illustration of his chord playing, check out 'Home'; just amazing, and quite unlike any other guitarist.
-----
Obvious big names that should need no further introduction:
Eddie Van Halen (duh)
John Petrucci
Ritchie Blackmore
I actually think Hendrix is the most over-rated player ever (with Clapton a close second) but his 'Star Spangled Banner' from Woodstock is a truly historic moment in eletric guitar playing; a sign that times were indeed a-changing.
Michael Schenker
Gary Moore
Randy Rhoads
Steve Vai - a great mix of out-there weirdness and yet also capable of utterly beautiful, expressive playing as well; people tend to pigeonhole Vai as 'alien stunt guitar from Mars' but he's actually a tremendously well-rounded composer and musician, as well as a very dynamic live performer. He's played with so many different people in so many different situations (Frank Zappa, Public Image Ltd, Dave Lee Roth, Alcatrazz, Whitesnake, Alice Cooper, plus of course his extensive solo career), it's hard to imagine a more widely-travelled - in the musical sense - player out there at the moment. Complete technical command of his instrument, great compositional ability, consummate live performer, and these days he's become quite a passable singer, too. It doesn't get much better than this man.
Recommended Steve Vai:
With other people:
Frank Zappa: 'The Jazz Discharge Party Hats' - Vai took one of Zappa's spoken-word routines and transcribed his speech onto guitar, every pitch, nuance and inflection. You see why he credited Vai with 'stunt guitar' on his albums.
Public Image Ltd.: 'Ease' - an amazing angular solo.
Dave Lee Roth: 'Big Trouble' - likewise
"Crossroads" soundtrack: 'Eugene's Trick Bag' - required learning for any guitarist looking to show off in the second half of 80s, just as EVH's 'Eruption' was in the first half. Watch the film for an incredible physical performance; Ralph Macchio is miming, but Vai isn't.
Solo:
'Call It Sleep' - the first Steve Vai I heard; beautifully phrased quiet playing as well as the more obvious distorted solo.
The entire "Passion And Warfare" album, which I had to teach to people over and over while I was a guitar teacher because just about everyone wanted to learn 'The Audience Is Listening' and of course 'For The Love Of God'. None more guitar.
'Kill The Guy With The Ball' - goes from intense heaviness to spaced-out weirdness without ever losing the flow. Brilliant composition.
'The Boy From Seattle' - a tremendous piece of Hendrix-y chord-melody playing.
'Whispering A Prayer' - just one of the most stunningly beautiful, expressive pieces of playing I have ever heard.
I'd also recommend Mike Keneally's 'Piano Reductions' CD of solo pianio transcriptions of Vai's music; with just one piano it strips the compositions down to their basics and lets you see just how good a writer the man is.
-----
Buckethead - real name Brian Carroll, he's got some of the most out-there and distinctive playing you'll ever hear; like the great Allan Holdsworth, I don't think I've ever heard Buckethead play a 'normal' guitar lick. He's worked with a lot of different people, too; he's good mates with Primus and funk legend Bootsy Collins, he's worked a lot with dub psycho Bill Laswell's Praxis project, and even tours with Guns'n'Roses. Buck has the most insane 8-fingered (i.e. using all his right-hand fingers to tap) licks and patterns you will ever hear, they're bizarre atonal things that are often damn near impossible to play. His short-lived column in Guitar Player magazine inspired the most extreme reactions of anybody's; he wrote the whole thing in-character and that wound up a lot of GP's more conservative readers. I loved it
.Recommended Buckethead:
Everything he did with Praxis, the albums are a crazed melting pot of dub, thrash metal, sampled weirdness and ambient chillout, with Buck's psycho-killer-with-a-guitar lunacy sprayed all over them. Particularly good tracks for an intro to Buck's playing are 'Blast/War Machine Dub', 'Dead Man Walking' and 'Stronghold'.
The 'Giant Robot' and 'Bucketheadland' albums.
'The Ballad Of Buckethead' - Google Video this one, it's a collaboration with the almost-as-mad-as-Buckethead Les Claypool of Primus and is very fun.
Actually, a bit of Google Videoing finds quite a lot of amazing live Buckethead performances, so it's worth trawling a bit.
-----
Stevie Ray Vaughan (R.I.P.) - Blues playing doesn't get better than this man. BB King has great vibrato, Albert Collins and Albert King have the tone and showmanship, Buddy Guy has the licks; but Stevie Ray had it all. Tragically died in a helicopter crash just after he managed to clean up from a major drug'n'drink problem and was getting his life back on line. The blues is a vital ingredient in a huge amount of contemporary music and culture, and this man was one of its greatest ever exponents. Possibly had the greatest blues tone anyone ever got out of a Strat. If you don't think you've heard this man, you have - he played the guitar licks on Bowie's 'Let's Dance' hit.
Recommended listening (all solo):
'Riviera Paradise' - incredible piece of mellow blues. Imagine the perfect warm, hazy summer evening, with a cold beer in your hand watching the sun go down. This is what that sounds like; I heard this in a record store and just stood listening the whole way through and bought the CD on the spot. Absolutely jaw-dropping, classy, tasteful playing.
'Testify' - high-energy blues doesn't get any better than this.
'Scuttle Buttin'' - likewise
-----
Also great players I'd recommend:
Uli Jon Roth - imagine Yngwie Malsteen with better tone, vastly better phrasing, less chins, and no ego...and you get Uli. Hard to imagine anyone doing classical stuff on guitar better than this man; listen to some of the stuff on his 'Transcendental Sky Guitar' CD for proof. He's written but not yet recorded a full concerto for electric guitar and orchestra, which I'd love to hear - Yngwie's was good but very predictable Baroque-by-numbers, while I suspect Uli would pull something sublime out of his compositional bag. He has a piece called 'Pegasus' that gives an idea of what this cold be like; I think this piece is one of the most amazing bits of playing you'll hear, it's like a great late-romantic violin concerto but on distorted electric guitar. His work with the Scorpions in the 70s was also great - he's regarded as maybe the first player to work harmonic minor and diminished stuff into rock songs, 'Sails Of Charon' being a great example; check out the 'Tokyo Tapes' CD for a great document of his 70s playing. The noise/feedback workout at the end of 'Fly To The Rainbow' is very fun.
Eric Johnson - hasn't recorded much, but he has quite possibly the greatest guitar tone you'll ever hear, and amazing phrasing too. Listen to 'Cliffs Of Dover' and 'Desert Rose' for proof; I think the latter has one of the greatest guitar solos I have ever heard, it's just incredible.
Jeff Beck - seems to spend more time driving hot-rods than playing guitar, but when he does, he's about as good as it gets. Listen to 'Where Were You' for a gorgeous piece of emotive playing that gives Vai's 'Whispering A Prayer' a run for its money. The 'Guitar Shop' album is a good thing to own.
Yngwie Malmsteen - OK, he's got an ego the size of a planet and writes lyrics Manowar would turn their nose up at, but he's still a very important player and for a few years in the 80s was about as good as it got. I drove myself crazy learning the stuff off his first solo album when it came out - I had just reached the point where I could play all the Van Halen/Randy Rhoads stuff and thought I was hot shit, then I heard the 'Rising Force' album and I was like 'shit, back to practising then'. That album blew a lot of people away, and is still worth getting now. Uli Roth and Blackmore had made a lot of classical references in their playing, but Yngwie was the first guy to come out and really go "BACH! IN YOUR FUCKING FACE! AT 120 DECIBELS!" at people, and it turned a lot of heads. Listen to 'Black Star' and 'Far Beyond The Sun' and tell me they don't still sound cool as fuck.
Shawn Lane (R.I.P.) - the fastest human guitarist, ever. He could play at quite literally blur speed, it's incredible, but also has a great ear for melody and composition. This man may be guitar's best-kept secret; the biggest drawback is that a lot of his playing is on very obscure and hard-to-find albums. Grab his 'Powers Of Ten: Live' album and /boggle.
John McLaughlin - picked at Mach 10 in 1970, worked with the legendary Miles Davis on 'Bitches Brew' and has for a long time been about as good as it gets in jazz-rock guitar. He plays machine-gun picking stuff on acoustic that rivals what Petrucci et al do on electric. His 'Live At The Royal Festival Hall' album is one of my favourite chillout albums.
Anders Miolin - this guy is a classical guitarist. Now I'm not by any means a big fan of classical guitar (I think for the most part it's self-referential, tedious, limited in compositional scope by the limitations of the instrument itself and just flat out boring), but Miolin plays an 11-string alto guitar and does transcriptions of piano music by people like Erik Satie and Debussy that are incredible - it's hard to believe just one guitar is doing all this at once.
Marty Friedman - played with Megadeth for several albums, and also had a decent solo career for a while. His 'Dragon's Kiss' solo debut is possibly the best of the Shrapnel label's 80s "shred" albums, and his soloing on Megadeth's 'Hangar 18' and 'Holy Wars' is just sublime. Very odd phrasing and great, wide vibrato.
Joe Pass (R.I.P.) - pure jazz guitar doesn't get any better than this.
Paul Gilbert - some of the most energised and energetic speed-picking you'll ever hear; the solo at the beginning of his first instructional video is incredible. If you ever want to work on your picking, you could do a lot worse than learning some of this man's stuff. Listen to 'Scarified', 'Hammer Away' and in fact most of his playing.
John Petrucci - Dream Theater just flat out fucking own, but you should also check out his playing on the Liquid Tension Experiment albums. And if you're a Dream Theater fan, you shoudl get the Transatlantic albums, featuring Mike Portnoy playing epic New Prog (TM) with guys from a couple of other pog bands. Great unashamedly self-indulgent fun.
Allan Holdsworth - mention his name to any big-name guitarist and they do the /worship emote. Nobody has ever played legato solos, or wild jazzed-out chord stuff like Holdsworth; the only thing that's stopped Holdsworth becoming one of the biggest players ever is that his music is just too jazzy for most people, often sounding a bit "elavator muzak" to ears accustomed to the verse-chorus-verse inanity of most popular music. Listen to the solos in 'Devil Take The Hindmost' or 'Low Levels High Stakes' and tell me this isn't a genius at work. And his chord playing is the most distinctive I have ever heard; whenever I want to really test myself, I grab a book of Holdsworth transcriptions and torture myself trying to reach his insane stretches and changes. For a good illustration of his chord playing, check out 'Home'; just amazing, and quite unlike any other guitarist.
-----
Obvious big names that should need no further introduction:
Eddie Van Halen (duh)
John Petrucci
Ritchie Blackmore
I actually think Hendrix is the most over-rated player ever (with Clapton a close second) but his 'Star Spangled Banner' from Woodstock is a truly historic moment in eletric guitar playing; a sign that times were indeed a-changing.
Michael Schenker
Gary Moore
Randy Rhoads
Svartmetall
Great Unclean One
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2004
- Messages
- 2,467
One more thing I would say to any of you that play guitar: probably the biggest trap guitar players, especially self-taught ones, fall into is that they tend to listen only to other guitar players, and you end up recycling and re-recycling the same licks over and over. God knows I was as guilty of this as much as anyone else; I think I only really started to grow and mature in my own musicianship - as opposed to purely technical growth, which is a different thing - once I started listening to more than just the guitar itself.
Think outside the box. Listen to every kind of music you can get your hands on, every instrument, every player, see what you find in other disciplines and styles that catches your ear and inspires you. Marty Friedman has some of the best vibrato and phrasing out there...why? Because he heard a bunch of Japanese opera at his girlfriend's place, thought the singers' phrasing and vibrato was kind of cool, and basically nicked it to apply to his own guitar playing. The result? He got a very distinctive and cool-sounding thing to add to his own playing - listen to Friedman's soloing, it's actually those sweeping bends (from notes outside the scale of the key of the song he's playing over) and that wide, slow vibrato that leap out.
Myself, I like listening to good drummers (check out drummerworld.com for clips of some of the greatest drummers ever) and pianists in particular. Most guitarists' chord playing, to be frank, fucking sucks. We're playing the second-greatest chord instrument in the world (after the piano of course) and what are we doing? The same old yawnsome Bob Dylan G/C/D shit and a bunch of two-fingered monkey power chords. Pah! We can do much better than that. I like a lot of 20th century clasical music, the weird-assed modern stuff that's just completely out there tonally, and it was very inspiring for me to break out of normal (boring) music patterns. The music of composers like Xenakis, Messiaen, Ligeti, Penderecki, Boulez etc was a great eye-opener for me. And a great drummer can kick your rhythmic sense into gear and get you thinking of new grooves and patterns you might not otherwise have discovered; I love listening to drummers like Buddy Rich (so much energy in his playing), Pete Sandoval (Morbid Angel's drummer, completely inhuman), Mike Mangini, the great Neil Peart of Rush...a truly great player of almost any instrument is worth watching for all-round inspirational purposes. I once got utterly entranced watching the virtuoso Russian viola player, Yuri Bashmet, playing Schnittke's Viola Concerto live on TV on the Proms on BBC2. Incredible to watch such a great musician at work, and left me feeling inspired on the guitar myself.
Explore. There's a huge world of music out there. Dig around a bit and see what you find - you might hear something that adds a new element into your own playing you would probably never have found otherwise.
Think outside the box. Listen to every kind of music you can get your hands on, every instrument, every player, see what you find in other disciplines and styles that catches your ear and inspires you. Marty Friedman has some of the best vibrato and phrasing out there...why? Because he heard a bunch of Japanese opera at his girlfriend's place, thought the singers' phrasing and vibrato was kind of cool, and basically nicked it to apply to his own guitar playing. The result? He got a very distinctive and cool-sounding thing to add to his own playing - listen to Friedman's soloing, it's actually those sweeping bends (from notes outside the scale of the key of the song he's playing over) and that wide, slow vibrato that leap out.
Myself, I like listening to good drummers (check out drummerworld.com for clips of some of the greatest drummers ever) and pianists in particular. Most guitarists' chord playing, to be frank, fucking sucks. We're playing the second-greatest chord instrument in the world (after the piano of course) and what are we doing? The same old yawnsome Bob Dylan G/C/D shit and a bunch of two-fingered monkey power chords. Pah! We can do much better than that. I like a lot of 20th century clasical music, the weird-assed modern stuff that's just completely out there tonally, and it was very inspiring for me to break out of normal (boring) music patterns. The music of composers like Xenakis, Messiaen, Ligeti, Penderecki, Boulez etc was a great eye-opener for me. And a great drummer can kick your rhythmic sense into gear and get you thinking of new grooves and patterns you might not otherwise have discovered; I love listening to drummers like Buddy Rich (so much energy in his playing), Pete Sandoval (Morbid Angel's drummer, completely inhuman), Mike Mangini, the great Neil Peart of Rush...a truly great player of almost any instrument is worth watching for all-round inspirational purposes. I once got utterly entranced watching the virtuoso Russian viola player, Yuri Bashmet, playing Schnittke's Viola Concerto live on TV on the Proms on BBC2. Incredible to watch such a great musician at work, and left me feeling inspired on the guitar myself.
Explore. There's a huge world of music out there. Dig around a bit and see what you find - you might hear something that adds a new element into your own playing you would probably never have found otherwise.
Svartmetall
Great Unclean One
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2004
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SMELLY CAT!AngelHeal said:but but what about phoeby from friends?
To get an impression about Shawn Lane .http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1938099378022643751&q=shawn+lane
Cemeterygates
Can't get enough of FH
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lol...dude...he strung it the other way ffs...so makes next to no difference.leviathane said:
it really is simple man hendrix has been blown out of the water totaly....
cHodAX
I am a FH squatter
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St.Anger said:I just keep wondering why about ALL top guitar players mentioned in this topic are naming Jimmy as their main influence. Maybe coz he made a difference somewhere ?
Jimmy innovated, there isn't a guitarist around who can say that he wasn't an influence in some way shape or form. You are totally correct, he made a difference and he created a sound that is still being copied by other so called 'legends' to this day.
cHodAX
I am a FH squatter
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Lamp said:LOL at the Slash vote !
Slash was good - but not one of the best. He could barely play live he was always so drunk or stoned. James Hetfield and Dave Mustaine are both better guitarists than Slash. So's Eric Clapton.
Slash has a lovely sweet but dirty sound that made him distinctive in a time when everyone else was shredding and double tapping instead of playing solos that complimented songs. Technically he isn't great, at times he is very sloppy live but I still love his stuff non the less.
pjuppe
Fledgling Freddie
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- May 31, 2004
- Messages
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i'm not a big fan of guitarplayers in that way but i would guess my favourite would be jonny greenwood from radiohead. for the rest of the list i would have to say kevin shields and bilinda butcher for the My bloody valentine-albums and eps and Jim and William Reid for "Psycho Candy" by The Jesus and Mary Chain. i'm also quite fond of the guitarplaying found in Yeah Yeah Yeah's songs (don't know what the guitarrists name is though).
