Sinister Gates is awful, too.

oh teh noez u gaiz, its speled Synyster!

are you kidding me?

So on top of being a crap guitarist, he's dyslexic too? Man that guy cannot catch a break.

Dan Auerbach.

rofl and no i wasnt joking about that

About what?

synyster gates being on my top 200

Can you even name 200 guitarists that you know enough about to compare?

I think that Neal Shoan(Forgive spelling) and Mick Taylor should be up on the list a little, for the most part looks good to me.

There should be no debate the Hendrix is #1, and I hope that no one does.

Oh theres been debate. It may be the obvious choice to put Hendrix as #1 but he'd be my #1 too without a doubt.

If Jack White makes this list at 127, Dan Auerbach should be up there. The only thing you can ding him in (off your criteria) is popularity, as he isn't a common name, although I think the Key's 'Attack & Release' may have put him more mainstream... that album is probably the worst showcase of his talents.

Heres my top 10 list. ALL OF YOU WHO COMPLAIN ABOUT A LACK OF FEELING IN THIS LIST, HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHAT THE DIFFERENCE IS BETWEEN THE TERMS GUITARIST AND MUSICIAN, SO IF YOU'RE ABOUT TO COMPLAIN ABOUT THAT CRAP, GO DIE. PLENTY OF THESE PLAYERS HAVE BOTH ANYWAY, BUT I JUST KNOW SOMEBODY IS GONNA BITCH.

1 - Guthrie Govan - By FAR the most versatile, technical, and generally excellent all around guitar player I have ever seen. He can improvise the kinds of melodic structures most guitarists can't even comprehend, and he's absolutely demonic when it comes to note perfect accuracy and clean playing.


2 - Rusty Cooley - For all out SPEED, nobody can come anywhere close to Rusty. Musically, he's pretty boring (Although Dark Matter shows at least SOME promising musical elements), but the man plays faster than ANYONE ELSE I HAVE EVER SEEN. Note: These videos are NOT sped up. He actually plays this fast.


3 - Mattias Eklundh - He's wierd, he's hilarious, and he plays the impossible. Not the fastest, as Shawn Tiago and Rusty will demonstrate, but my GOD does he ever manage to bend that guitar of his into doing some wierd ****. He uses a harmonic map of the fretboard to play notes VASTLY higher than the standard range of a guitar, and he does it with disturbing dexterity.


4 - Shawn Lane - He's actually NOT a favourite of mine, but he's here because his technical skill is undeniable and because plenty of people think he made beautiful music. One of only 2 people I've seen get even within spitting distance of Rusty's speed.


5 - Tiago Della Vega
This guy is the second of the 2 I mentioned a moment ago. He practically makes economy of movement into an artform. Generally its difficult to tell when his fingers are fretting notes, because he sets his action so low and he's practiced an absurd amount to reduce any extraneous movement in his playing.


6 - Michael Romeo - He's awesome. He's fantastically technical, he has great phrasing and feeling, he's extremely accurate, and he's the guitar player for arguably the best band ever.


7 - Paul Gilbert - The man is a string skipping alternate picking GOD.


8 - Michael Hedges - He's awesome. Speed isn't his technical forte (Though he certainly has it), but the sheer level of coordination required to even begin playing his music is insane, and his use of harmonics is awesome to behold. Good voice too. The second vid isn't of him, but the sound quality is so much better than the hedges recording on youtube, I used it instead.


9 - Tommy Emmanuel - This man, possibly Hedges excluded, SCHOOLS EVERYONE ELSE AT ACOUSTIC GUITAR. FULL STOP.


10 - Phil Keaggy - Just freakin watch.

i've seen that phil keaggy ebow clip before. he might be a good guitarist but his use of effects is pretty bland, you can pull out WAY more than what he shows with that device and just a little fuzz. he's playing with a safety net and definitely thinking inside the box on that one.

Wats teh diffurunce between a guatarist an da musichan?

Guitarists make shit music.

I really liked that, great guitar player. Both on a technical and musical level, it was truely some great guitar work.

Another guitar player that does great tapping work is Spencer Siem. Not only does he have great playing ability, but I love his style and music as well. Its hard to find a good video of him playing though. Alot of the videos on yoututube are always looking at the drummer in the band. Zach Hill is an amazing drummer, but I wish more would pay attention to Spencer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdMDcG3zAEI

Spruance is more of a better composer then a guitar player. He is a good guitar player, but not the best. He makes up for what he lacks in technical skill with good creativity with the music he makes, and he can play a variety of instruments beyond just the guitar. As a guitar player, hes not my favorite, but as a musician overall, he is one of my favorites.

.

Paul Gilbert is sick.

the choice of focusing on the instrument over the full spectrum of the art form.

Wow. Some interesting guesses on that question, but I disagree.

A guitarist is someone who plays guitar. Their only defining musical feature is playing the guitar.

A musician can be a guitarist, but to qualify as a musician, they must have an interest in making music rather than sheer technical skill. Their skill as a musician isn't determined by their technical skill but by the complexity and effectiveness of their work as a whole.

Technical skill will play a part hence why Guthrie Govan is a fantastic musician and Rusty Cooley is not. Guthrie knows his theory inside and out and can play accordingly, making him extremely versatile and capable outside of his staggering technical skill.

Rusty knows a lot of theory but its specific in nature and applies largely to his own playing style rather than giving him the ability to work in different contexts, hence why you don't see Rusty playing jazz licks and touring with the young punx at the same time.

top ten is probably
michael angelo batio, zak wylde, eric claption, dimebag darrel, stevie ray vaughan, dimebag darrel, synyster gates, steve belong, dave mustaine

Thats only 9 mate, actually it's 8 because Dimebag is in twice.

I'm just trying to imagine what kind of personal hell two Dimebags would have made for me :D

Most of the videos being posted in here are putting me off rock music rather than make me think i'm listening to the best of it.

No kidding. I feel like he should have prefaced it by calling it a list of "ten middle aged dudes that have way too much time on their hands."

Christ. And I thought Steve Howe was a knobjob at times...

Nobody said best guitarist equated to best songwriter. Besides, I'm fully aware Rusty Cooley and Tiago Della Vega at the very least, make awful music. Fact is, they're the best guitarists I can think of underneath Guthrie, so into the list they went.

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I love Michael Hedges. I don't think he really belongs in a thread about rock guitarists but he certainly made some great music. This may sound like a weird question but you do know he's dead right? I only ask because you seem to be referring to him in the present tense in your post.

Yeah, I do, its a damn shame. Sorry for the grammatical confusion.

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actually John Frusciante (you'd have to class him as one of these rock archetype guitarists I guess) has made good music. Only album I have is 'To Record Only Water For Ten Days', a classic by all accounts and not leaning on his guitar 'abilities' (which were somewhat diminished by drug abuse at this point I'm led to believe).

On topic though I am not an expert or a guitar bod so I hate these lists, what's the consensus on Frusciante's playing? I always thought he was quite good, managed not to get too stifled by the funk/metal of that early Peppers stuff

frusciante is kind of like flea in a sense. he'll get listed as a top player on most lists by people who don't really know much about the respective instruments. they (like the chilis) are gateway musicians, if you start paying attention to them and reading their interviews you WILL learn about greater musicians.

if you only compare him to the readily available mainstream (both above and below ground versions) then he'll come across as one of the top guys. on the other hand if you start comparing him to more avant garde and experimental musicians he's still not that bad but not nearly as outstanding as some people would like you to believe.

ultimately frusciante is like a modern hendrix only difference is it's impossible to directly compare hendrix to a predecessor and frusciante's comparison is incredibly obvious.

having said that, he'll still always be in my personal top 3 (tied with hillel slovak) along with hendrix and kim thayil.

Frusciante's good and all, I enjoy some of his work with RHCP, and some of his solo stuff, but I would not approach calling him a modern day Hendrix. Hendrix changed the way people thought about and approached guitars and guitarists in music.

yeah i see where you're coming from and that's why i added the little bit about the direct comparison to hendrix in my previous post.

i call him a modern hendrix based on style not influence.

Nah. Frusciante is very calculated and sparse with his guitar work. Hendrix had a characteristic sloppiness that bled into his songwriting. I don't think I've ever heard a Frusciante song/solo that didn't have firm direction.

have you heard the early solo crap? If you want sloppy look no further

I just realised how ridiculously random this list is, its too long, the bloke from Yo La Tengo :confused: If i had to list 200 guitarists i'd be scraping the bottom of the barrel too...

I've been listening to some wanky blues guitar music recently (specifially Texas Flood). I can actually live with this, nobody makes it sound as effortless as him and in improvisational terms Vaughn is like a bebop musician, except he only has one scale to work with and erm.. has to be melodic. It's a rare case of guitar music where I can just appreciate the technical prowess of a player, usually I demand a decent song framework but it's hard to mess up with the blues.

Guitarist with a soul, plus he was in Procol Harum and knows how to pull a guitar face


Guitarist without a soul, loves guitars similar to how men love cars, there are thousands of fat kids shut away in their rooms right now playing along to power metal records lining up to follow this wanker into the guiness book of records and artistic oblivion. It's just practice. Years of constant practice and sh*t music. I just can't relate to this at all, it's like the musical equivalent of a dumb blonde skank.

Ira Kaplan.

came across this on my travels, it's just weird and scary.

^^^^^

Sometimes I'm ashamed to like Metal :(

hahaha its pretty amazing, his fingers don't appear to be moving most of the time... However if you consider prodigious talent and songwriting ability to be inversely proportional (except Hendrix) his records must REALLY suck. *goes to find Dragon Force CD-R he used to really like*

cheers, but that was more of a 'what the f*ck?' than a 'who the f*ck?'

Well at least it got shorter every time he played it.

Thats Tiago Della Vega. TBH I don't agree with the record, since its obvious from the videos that Rusty is much faster, but hasn't had it officially adjudicated.

And Janzsoon, the Piece is Flight of the Bumblebee by Rimsky Korsakov. Nothing to do with his own musical merits, so be careful on judging the musicality of it.


As for the guy who listed Yngwie on the previous page, it would have helped if you'd listed a SONG instead of an improvised live guitar solo. Its obviously not going to be as musical as a fully written piece of music since theres less freedom for chords changes and rythmic variation.

I'm not saying he's your cup of tea based on that, but I am saying people should try and choose their examples to be representative of the artist, instead of picking and choosing outlying examples to try and strengthen their points artificially. Theres a video of Shawn Lane on youtube at 16 years old, playing nothing but random crap as fast as he possibly can. Its a stark contrast to almost ALL of his later recorded works, and thus using it as an example to say he's unmusical isn't justified. Your Yngwie example is only more of the same, although admittedly less extreme. He's written some perfectly viable music, such as the examples below.

This, for example, is Black Star, An Yngwie Malmsteen song. He worked with Tokyo Philharmonic and released a live album with both him and the orchestra playing some of his most acclaimed works. I defy you to tell me this isn't musical.


And this is taken verbatim from the CD.



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Now playing on Winamp: Maybeshewill - Not for Want of Trying
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Now playing on Winamp: Maybeshewill - Not for Want of Trying
via FoxyTunes