This has been a long time coming but I knew I would do this for the blog at some point. I have an older guitar player friend of mine and we always chat about who's the best guitarist, its always great fun but there is a big difference between the likes of musicians now and musicians from the 60's, that's for sure. We both like blues and classic rock but he's not in the jazz and metal stuff that I'm into, stuff that I consider to be essential listening if you are a guitar player. Anyways, its going to be super difficult to keep this to a short list so I'll try to only write ten for now, and then write more if I feel more needs to be added and said.
First,
Jimi Hendrix. Jimi is just the guitar god that everyone loves. He's the greatest guitar player of all time, a black guy from the South, and made his fame in England in the swinging sixties. I think the things to be liked about Hendrix is that he's a black guy that made it in the white world, he plays a
Fender Stratocaster reverse headstock upside down, writes great rock songs, and plays the greatest guitar solos known to man. Nobody Black in rock got much of the hippies' affection, that level of fame, and was the greatest guitar player in the world. I would say that Hendrix invented the idea of the modern guitar solos. Before the solos on say the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were just short little melodic ideas, and often ended quickly and weren't flashy. There are only a few other guitarists that I can think up that can even come close to the level of musicality and emotion that Hendrix brought to the table. My favorite Hendrix tunes are
In From The Storm, Machine Gun, Voodoo Chile (Slight Return), Red House, and Spanish Castle Magic.
Second,
Jeff Beck. I would say Jeff Beck is the greatest guitarist alive. He's one of those guys who is super famous among guitarists but if you ask any non-musicians, he might be unknown to them. He's kind of like the guitarists' guitarist. Meaning every guitar player on the planet thinks Jeff is amazing. When Hendrix was playing in England,
Pete Townsend (The Who, Guitar Player) told Jeff Beck that he saw a black guy who was copying everything he was doing. I can say first of all that Hendrix might have learned a thing or two from
Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, but Hendrix did it better. Beck started off as blues-rocker but he evolved his music and his guitar playing, going into the far reaches of jazz-rock fusion with albums like
Blow by Blow and
Wired. Fast forward to day and he's still innovating with his guitar technique and solos, and plenty of compositions. Check out
Live At Ronnie Scott's on YouTube.
Third,
Jimmy Page. I would say Page isn't the most technical or best guitarist but he wrote some of the best guitar riffs, recorded studio solos, and songs in all of rock music. The thing I always liked about Jimmy is that all his playing is based on the blues, but he's tampered with it so much and fucked it up, that he made it his own. At Page's best he could like Hendrix even, especially on those live Led Zeppelin dvds that everyone has. Plus Led Zeppelin is like the musicians' band. Every musician that is a bass player, guitar player, drummer, and singer all love the mighty Zeppelin, and they're hailed as one of the greatest rock bands of all time.
Fouth,
Eric Clapton. I used to think very highly of Clapton because of his work with Cream. I thought Cream was the best rock band of all time when I was in high school. I even liked Cream over Hendrix sometimes because I loved Jack Bruce's vocals, Clapton's blues-rock solos, and Ginger Bakers jazz influenced drumming. The thing about Cream was that Ginger and Bruce were jazz guys and Clapton just played great blues solos while they comped (accompanied) under him. Clapton was so great in his Cream days that people use to write Clapton is God over street signs and walls in England. I would say Cream was the first rock supergroup. My favorites from Cream are
White Room, Sunshine of Your Love, White Room, and Steppin' Out, a great blues number.
Now here is where me and my old guitar friend geaser start to disagree. Number 5,
Marty Friedman. I really love shred and metal guitarists, while its hard not to call Marty a product of those styles, he also has a great unique voice on the instrument that differs from all other shredders. For one thing, he's super melodic, uses Asian scales, and writes great instrumental metal, jpop, and rock n roll. If you are a young guitarist and you like metal, you definitely know and love Marty Friedman. I've been inspired by him and learned to use some Japanese scales. The lead guitar work on
Megadeth's Rust in Peace is just amazing, Marty should get some kind of metal award for the guitar solos on that one, they are just super epic, melodic, fast, and flashy. Everything you'd want in a metal band's lead guitar player. His band Cacophony is the greatest shred metal band of all time. It was amazing hearing him play with
Jason Becker. Jason and Marty ARE shred guitar, they're the best, way better than
Vai and Satriani. That's Marty in the picture, look at the curly locks and the sick red guitar. Check out Marty's stuff with Megadeth like Rust In Peace, and also his latest solo record
Inferno. One word: Dragon's Kiss. Look it up.
Number 6,
Steve Vai. While I think Steve is a little too New Agey bullshit sometimes, he's had a big influence on my guitar playing, especially about three years ago, when I was practicing all the time and working big time on technique. I really love how he got his fame playing lead guitar with
Frank Zappa, and transcribed a lot of crazy stuff for Zappa. In addition, some of his solo work is pretty good, although I would say that he doesn't improvise like the way Marty can. I would say Vai can't really improvise all that well, he would never be able to play jazz. Marty being another kind of shred guitarist like Vai though, could definitely fake his way through some jazz changes(chord changes).
Number 7,
Paul Gilbert. PG is another one of those guys who, when I first heard him I freaked out, and started practicing a lot more just to perhaps one day get to that level of speed and technicality. What was so great about him is that he had perhaps the second greatest speed metal band of all time with
Racer X. Check out the song Scarified, and any of Paul's solo albums, and you will hear how fast, precise, and melodic he can be with his string skipping arpeggios. Not only was PG a great lead guitarist for speed metal and neoclassical metal, but he was also in a great rock band in the 90's that had a lot of catchy songs. The band was
Mr. Big, which brought him a lot of fame. At first, you could tell that Paul was influenced a lot by Yngwie Malmsteen, but as the years went on, he developed his own style, to the point where its hard to just call him a metal guitarist. I think he's evolved into a much more musical guitarist that plays blues and even going into the jazz realm sometimes. He's changed and progressed so much over his Malmsteen copy days as a teenager. Speaking of Malmsteen.....
Number 8,
Yngwie Malmsteen. Swedish guitarist Malmsteen gets a lot of shit for 'lacking soul' and just being a neoclassical wanker but I think he's the greatest thing since sliced bread. The only album I like or recommend by Malmsteen is his first album, Rising Force. I feel like everything he's done since then was already done on that first album, and perhaps he petered out of style, songwriter, and originality maybe a few years after making Rising Force and making a big name for himself in America. What I like about Malmsteen is that all his licks are original in the rock music world, but he straight up jacked everything he plays from the Baroque classical era, stuff like Bach and Paganini. Some of his songs are just rearrangements of classical pieces just put to a rock beat and bass line. He's probably the most influential shred metal guitarist of all time since Eddie Van Halen. Speaking of Eddie.........
Number 9,
Eddie Van Halen. You can tell I like those metal guitarists with the long hair and the pointy pink guitars from the 80's right? Well, Eddie was the king before all those guys took over the 80s, before people like
George Lynch and all those hair metal guitarists that were great players. Eddie is one of the greatest guitarists of all time, and I would say that maybe at his peak he might've been near Hendrix's level. But he got caught up in stuff like alcohol and sickness so he went away for a long time and didn't reappear in the musical world until recently. His work with
Van Halen with
David Lee Roth was just amazing to me. I used to listen to Van Halen a lot when I was in high school.
Eruption made me change the way I thought about electric guitar. Before I thought guitar solos were always suppose to be blues based and have certain kinds of tones and styles, like Hendrix, Beck, and Clapton type sounds. Eddie showed me the way to rock guitar god mode before I heard Marty, Paul Gilbert, and Malmsteen. To me he's like the original OG shred metal guitarist. He wasn't quite at the level of technicality that people like Jason Becker and Marty Friedman would get to, but he had the spirit and emotion of a truly great musician. Eddie is one of the guys that my old geezer guitar friend likes as well. A link between the metal guitarists and the blues guitarists maybe? We can only hope.
Number 10, this is a hard choice because its potentially the last guitarist that I think should be on my top ten list, at least I want to keep it to 10 for a little while until I think more clearly about my idea of who's the greatest guitarists. I'm going to go ahead and say a jazz/fusion guitarist named
John Mclaughlin. Mclaughlin made his fame playing with
Miles Davis on
Bitches Brew and then forming his own jazz fusion band called
Mahavishnu Orchestra, one of the finest fusion groups of the 70's. Not only that, but he continued pushing the boundaries of jazz and guitar playing, playing Indian music with his band Shakti, and forming numerous other jazz bands. It's hard to say Mclaughlin had an influence on me because I could never play anything like the way he plays because he's just so fast, technical, and influenced by other cultures of music. I would say I'm still limited to Western sounds like rock and jazz, although some jazz has a lot of European harmonies in it. Nowadays, Mclaughlin has a band called the
Fourth Dimension that is just amazing. He's doing a kind of midi sounding guitar thing with a lot of bebop influence. It's great stuff. Anyways, this will end the list for now. I might add more people down the road. Who are your favorite guitarists? Feel free to open up in the comments.
