What follows isn't so much a standard "greatest guitarists of all-time" list, nor are these necessarily my 12 favorites ever. But in recent weeks I've picked my guitar back up and spent a good deal of time listening to guitar music again (because I actually have the time to do that for now), and I have noticed certain trends in my listening and come away with certain mental notes that I am going to share with anyone who cares to read any further. Every guitarist has their own set of skills, styles, and lessons that can be taken away from watching/listening to them play, so here's a few specific things I've picked up from watching each of these guys.
Also worth noting these "lessons" aren't specific to these guitarists, per se. They're just ones I in particular associate with the thoughts I've attached to them, and I will try to explain my reasoning a little more as I go.
#1 - Eric Clapton
In the 60~ years Eric Clapton has been performing/recording, he's mostly stuck to the blues-rock template and consistently gone back to it even as he's branched out. But never has he stagnated. Even as he reached an age where most accomplished musicians would just call it a day and phone in their performances, Clapton has pushed himself further and even managed to improve his play well into his 60s and 70s. This can't necessarily be felt in his studio recordings, which are by their very nature stripped down within the blues genre (seriously, if you haven't watched blues live you're missing out on a huge part of the experience), but you can't watch his Crossroads Guitar Festival performances and tell me he doesn't bring it every single time. Not only is Clapton one of my favorite musical artists across all genres and phases of my life, but his guitar playing has been a template I can always return to and inspire myself to move forward and improve. If Clapton, the greatest guitarist alive, still feels like he hasn't achieved the level of play he desires, why should I feel I've even cracked the surface?
#2 - B.B. King
While I'm as guilty as anyone at having been an enthusiastic teen guitarist who became overwhelmed with a desire to shred and play as many Van Halen/Satriani-style solos as I possibly could (I have a few comically over-the-top recordings I won't even share here, they're so embarrassingly idiotic), when I got a little older (and dare I say more mature?) I came to appreciate and gravitate more towards the beauty of a single note. Not only did B.B. King have one of the most fantastic guitar tones imaginable, his relatively simple style of playing told far more than any blistering fretboard-scaling solo ever could. It's rare for a single note to be hit on a guitar and have me totally able to identify the player like I can with King, but that says a lot about his unique identity as a guitarist within a genre drowning in skillful players. He wasn't concerned with being the fastest, but when he played, you can tell he felt every note. You don't need to play fast to play big -- the notes you choose can be felt much stronger with the proper emphasis and when you play what feels right.
#3 - David Gilmour
Alongside B.B. King, Gilmour is a master of tone, but what I most often find myself thinking during one of his solos is how wonderful the structure is. With something like 'Comfortably Numb' (an obvious solo to name, consider its near-universal acceptance as the greatest rock guitar solo ever recorded), it isn't just the tone and the note selection that solidify it as an absolute masterpiece, but how well he builds into it. When a solo is structured well, even the simplest note escalations can help it soar, and Gilmour is an unrivaled genius at knowing how to make that happen. Even the 20-minute instrumentals Pink Floyd recorded have passages, peaks, and valleys. It's not just an onslaught of guitar guitar guitar. Finding the right time and giving yourself space to build a great solo isn't something that's easy to accomplish, but that doesn't mean it doesn't sneak into the back of my head every time I try to come up with a solo for any crappy song I'm recording. My laziness often just leads to improvised garbage that doesn't have that impact. Here's hoping I'll actually let this lesson sink in next time I try my hand at a real guitar solo.
#4 - Ry Cooder
If you spend much time listening to Ry Cooder's music (which I have done a great deal of lately), you'll likely find yourself going down some interesting corridors that lead to all sorts of genres and styles of music you'd never really given a chance before. With Cooder you have a guitarist with over 50 years of experience in about as many genres and nations of origin as any single person in the history of music. But not only does he do all these genres, he does them in a way that changes your approach to guitar. He doesn't just slap a generic solo into a song and say "bam, now I did a reggae song", he adjusts his style and patiently doses the songs with appropriate fill-ins, transitions, and the like. With his chameleon-like ability to change and meld genres, I've found an entire world of guitar music open up to me and my desire to explore these new areas has only been slowed by my inability to magically shed everything I've learned and start again with a new outlook on structure. But with patience and time, I hope to find ways to inject any future recordings I make with even close to his level of tasteful, worldly pizzazz.
#5 - Frank Zappa
Anyone who's ever learned guitar has had the issue of trying too hard to get good and finding themselves getting frustrated when they hit a wall, turning the entire process into work instead of fun. Sometimes as we're trying to grind out a song we forget that at the end of the day music is an emotional thing, and being angry isn't the only emotion we should be experiencing when we make it. Zappa, who often pushed the boundaries of good taste with his prolific and often insanely weird music, is the guy to listen to to remind yourself that guitar can indeed be a lot of fun -- both to listen to and to play. Not only was he an absolute genius with the instrument, but some of his solos are so off-the-wall weird and his sense of humor so childish, it's hard not to smile and walk away with a more positive outlook on guitar. Whenever I hit the wall creatively, I've always found a good dose of Zappa to be a wonderful cure, opening my eyes to new possibilities that never would have otherwise occurred to me.
#6 - John Frusciante
Much like my small segment on how shredding is something pretty much all teen guitarists get into, this is something I have found I have been guilty of ignoring especially when composing/recording my own songs. Rhythm guitar isn't super flashy, and it's generally a pretty thankless role for a guitarist who wants to show off, but that doesn't mean rhythm guitar needs to be boring. When you listen to Frusciante's playing in pretty much any RHCP song, there's a good chance he's adding tons of extra notes and flair that might not occur to someone who's playing a rhythm section on a track. For example, his riff in 'Snow (Hey Oh)' is so complex it's tougher to get down than most guitar solos, and sounds amazing while not being so overtly flashy as to distract from the composition as a whole. While Frusciante has a decent amount of moments to shine in solos, he manages to always catch my attention just by the way he approaches rhythm, and he does it in the midst of Flea's bass-slapping, drums, and vocals. Rhythm doesn't need to just be simple power chords, and Frusciante is a great example of that.
#7 - Buckethead
From a technical level, I don't believe a single other guitarist exists with more impressive abilities on the instrument than Buckethead. Not only can he hit 40 billion notes per nanosecond thanks to his "nubbing" technique, which is unbelievably complex and unique, but the range of emotions he achieves with the instrument is equally as impressive. His speed is amazing, but his relatively simple-sounding compositions are what generally catch my ear, and some of them are truly beautiful. With over 300 studio albums (no, that's not a typo), Buckethead might seem to have explored every possible avenue the guitar has to offer. Yet he still finds more new things to play, and while a good 40 hours of his discography could be chalked up as just shredding, he shows that even with virtually unmatched skill, there is so much more ground to cover with the instrument. No, I won't ever become the technical wizard that Buckethead is -- but even if I did, I would never run out of new things to do with the guitar.
#8 - Kristian Matsson
If you've ever watched Tommy Emmanuel, Earl Klugh, Phil Keaggy, etc. play then you know the acoustic guitar can be approached in some genuinely impressive and technically astounding ways, but it's not just precision and range I'm talking about right now. Kristian Matsson, better known by his stage name "Tallest Man On Earth" is largely recognized as a vocalist, due to his genre of choice being folk and usually featuring only himself and a single instrument in accompaniment. But even though his emotional vocals and songwriting could be more than enough to carry his songs, his fingerpicking skills and skillful chord changes and fill-ins are hard to ignore. Having recorded a handful of vocal/ukulele single-track cover songs myself, it's hard for me not to appreciate someone who can so flawlessly blend melodies into his rhythm playing, while singing and having it all come together so beautifully. Nothing super flashy here, but hard for me not to praise.
#9 - Chet Atkins
Much like the aforementioned RHCP song 'Snow (Hey Oh)' which features an incredibly difficult rhythm track, a large portion of Chet Atkins' discography has a deceptive quality to his play. On the surface you hear someone playing melody, with a different guitar plucking rhythm patterns, but it doesn't necessarily strike you right away that what is going on isn't so simple. Atkins possessed this rare ability to play lead and rhythm simultaneously with a kind of clean, unadulterated crispness that I can't even begin to comprehend. While he obviously used multiple tracks on some recordings, this style of play was integral to his sound and would be nearly-impossible to replicate not only in a recording, but to play live as well. He's definitely a little harder to appreciate unless you've ever played guitar yourself. While I could never do what he did with a guitar, I still find myself occasionally trying to blend rhythm and lead together, with every single fluke instance of it working out making me feel like a true wizard.
#10 - Trey Anastasio
As the frontman of Phish (one of the most revered jam bands around, not to mention one with a huge cult following), Anastasio has had his fair share of 20-minute live song performances with extended solos. When you take into account the technical aspects of his songs, the elongated play style, the tireless documentation of his shows by dedicated fans, and the decades worth of touring, it's not hard to imagine he's had some less-than-stellar guitar performances. But as the true pro that he is, every mistake he makes seems to lead him down a different avenue. Improvisation can be messy, but he makes it work, and that can sometimes work out better than his original intentions might have been. It's okay to miss notes and to land on the neck somewhere other than planned. In fact, landing on the wrong notes during practice has led me to writing a few new melodies, so even if you're just playing guitar at home, don't let a flub throw you off.
#11 - Robert Fripp
With the nearly limitless potential you'll find within recordings by weirdos like Zappa and Buckethead, the notes are always there. Even when they're doing the unexpected or pushing the instrument to new limits or in bizarre directions, they still generally still sound like they're playing guitar. Fripp, who has some awesome more traditional guitar skills, was too forward-minded in his play to let the instrument limit him at all, utilizing methods that led him to ambient music and paving the way for tons of other musicians to expand on his almost otherworldly style. Not only is the guitar an endlessly diverse instrument that can find its way into any genre and be played in millions of ways in a more conventional sense, Fripp has opened my eyes to the capacity for the instrument outside of convention. From his solo in Brian Eno's 'Baby's On Fire' to his eerie, horn-like feedback track on David Bowie's 'Heroes', Fripp's contributions to the world of guitar are too odd and brilliant for me not to be totally inspired nearly every time I hear him.
#12 - Jimi Hendrix
It's a known fact that every guitarist since the '60s has been influenced either directly or indirectly by Jimi Hendrix. His impact on guitar is as far-reaching as the instrument itself. Hendrix and guitar are forever linked, so its natural for anyone playing guitar to have moments where they're confronted by the fact that they're pretty much just doing a Hendrix impression. While it's not inherently a good thing to rip off someone else's style (the ultimate goal for pretty much anyone playing guitar should be to make the sounds they like and carve out their own identity in doing so), there are far worse people to emulate. Don't be afraid to recapture someone else's style, even someone as obvious as Hendrix himself, as long as you find ways to expand on it. There are thousands upon thousands (perhaps even millions) of talented guitarists out there, so finding your own unique style and energy will be hard. So it's fine to borrow licks and methods, just don't always dip back into the same well or you'll find yourself stagnating creatively really fast.
Guitar music has fallen out of the mainstream in recent years, but that doesn't mean guitar is irrelevant. It's a wonderful instrument and I take great pleasure in playing it and listening to it. I might need to do another guitar post at some point in the future, but until then I hope you've enjoyed reading a bit about some of my favorite players and the sorta-advice on playing and learning guitar I've absorbed from them. If you've had different experiences listening to these players, let me know. I'm curious to hear how, who, why, and when people have been bitten by the guitar-bug. Okay, I'm done now.
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