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Originally Posted by lucifer_sam
That's a rather obtuse way of looking at him. It's not just me that thinks hes great; he was in Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time (#75) and Guitar World's 100 Greatest Hard Rock Guitarists (#9). But I guess that doesn't mean much to you.
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Number 75 is pretty much an honorary mention, and as for the Guitar World poll, it mentions quite explicitly that, and I quote:
"This is not a list that ranks who can play the fastest or with the most taste, feeling or technique (although many players on our list have all of those arrows in their quiver) ... It is, rather, a tribute to the great men who **** iron and piss stainless steel razor blades, and do it every time they plug into an amplifier."
If you want to talk actual pure dexterity in terms of speed and amazing technique, Jones is not skillful in that way and I believe he has admitted that too in interviews. This is one of the factors that has actually shaped Tool's sound. If Jones had always been an AMAZING riff player, soloist, and had all sorts of other insane tricks in his repertoire, Tool would have come to sound quite different to how they do. As it happens he's quite an unpretentious player, doing simpler things (compared to many other metal bands) but doing them very well. This is clearly reflected in Tool's music. The guitar parts never whizz off into the land of look-what-I-can-do. The complexities of Tool's music is built more in the interplay between the instruments and how the contrastive rhythms play off each other.
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Very well. Technically speaking, he is a fantastic guitarist. It takes a great deal of control to use a slide guitar like he does. He does for Tool what Tom Morello did for Rage. If you play guitar, you should be able to recognize the difficulty of using a slide with as much precision as Jones does.
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Actually, Jones is the one member of Tool who has been known to mess up in live sets. He didn't get his negative reputation among many guitar junkies for no reason. As I say, he's phenomenally good at what he does, but he simply does not possess the sort of skill that the really great metal guitarists do. Only the most fanatical of Tool fans would seriously try to claim that he has as much skill as the widely revered great players.