That's because 90% of the US doesn't even know who he is. I still get a laugh from the Rolling Stone list. They did a "Greatest Solos" bit in the 90s and Floyd had four in the top 30. (Including #2.) But when they did the best 100 guitar players a few years later, he was like in the 70s. I'll agree with this to a point. Hendrix's chops are certainly overrated, but the guy just oozes awesome. His approach to the guitar was fresh and new. He esentally took Albert King and rammed him through a bazooka. His style may be passe and cliched now, but it wasn't in 1966. And yet his most famous guitar solo (November Rain) is in a Mixolydian/Aeolian/Locrian minor hybrid also know as the "Satch Scale." But that doesn't mean he deserves to be #2. I agree to some extent. There are a good dozen blues players I'd put ahead of B.B King. They just aren't nearly as prolific. Yeah I don't get that one. He's not even the best guitar player in the Rolling Stones. This is where you fall off the wagon. First and for most they don't play a strait pentatonic; They play the blues scale because, you know, most of their music is based on blues. If you'd actually listen you hear that both are masters of using the the common #4 and less common Major 3rd and 5ths as grace notes. And since they both adhere to the three notes per line rule, you have something that looks vastly different from your lauded pentatonic. Secondly, Clapton dabbled pretty much every style of music over the years and adjusted his playing accordingly. To say he was limited to the pentatonic scale is just utter nonsense. More importantly, the guy wasn't sloppy either. Pick any live recording and I dare you to find a mistake. The guy is the consummate perfectionist. In Page's case, they guy invented various runs, slurs, and sounds and brought them to rock music. He may have been sloppy at times, but that had more to do with being sauced to the gills than it did his skill. When he was sober, the guy was fucking unbelievable. In fact, go listen to him now. He doesn't hit the juice anymore, in a lot of ways at 65 he's better than he was at 25. Lastly, who the fuck cares about the pentatonic. I hate when guys who think they know everything about playing the guitar try to peddle this nonsense. The pentatonic scale is the oldest form of music and predates the standard eight note scale by several thousand years. There's a good reason for this: humans have five fingers per hand. To early man, it was the most logical and direct step. So through trail and error they found the five notes that sounded the best together. Interestingly enough, various cultures from various parts of the Earth all settled on the same notes, and, as he culture's music evolved into something radically different it still had something in common with the others: the pentatonic scale. Obviously, this is because it is so aurally pleasing--wither it's 2000 B.C or 2000 A.D. The people who spend their time complaining about such trivialities are usually pseudo intellectual wannabes whose greatest musical compositions can generally be found in the Guitar Hero downloads. I'm just sayin'. Yet he pretty much invented the modern Rock guitar solo ... In 1953. Nonsense. Like any art form, making music is simply an artist using his chosen medium to invoke an emotional response from his audience--even the critics. But in order to criticize, one has to leave all bias at the door. If he doesn't, he just sounds like a whiner. It's the whiners who, after they've failed at using their art form to invoke an emotional response from their audience, resort to pointing fingers, making faces, and shouting nonsensical jargon an obscenities from the gallery. You come across like a whiner. Do I even need to diginfiy this with a response?
See, I say anyone can "shred" or play a guitar quickly and loudly. It takes talent and artistry to make a good sound. Shredding, for me, is mostly noise.
Shred tests how well you know the fretboard and how technical you can play but at faster and faster speeds. A slow but "emotional" guitarist will never be as good as a shredder because they wouldn't be able to play fast whereas the reverse isn't necessarily true. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8NC4LE2YIw
That's complete nonsense Of course playing fast is not the only or most important component of being a "great" guitarist, but it still takes years and years of practice, dedication and innate ability. Have you ever tried to play guitar?
That's the biggest bag of rubbish I've ever read. Knowing the fretboard is like knowing the Periodic Table. You can learn it in a night if you're willing and has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of a guitar player (Chemist?) you are. That logic is akin to: A witch burns because she's made of wood. Wood floats. Ducks also float. So, if she weighs the same as a duck, then she must be a witch! Also, Blackmore is hardly known as a "Shred" guitar player. This and This isn't shredding. And I'll go further and argue that for your goofy logic the reverse is also true. This is a perfect example of having to know something more than scales an nodes and having a technical acumen that exceeds being able to move your fingers fast. In fact, knowing the fretboard is irrelevant in this case because half the notes aren't even on the fretboard. 99% of the shred guitar players in the world would turn that into a garbled mess. See, now that is complete nonsense. Speed is note a talent, it's a skill--a skill, as Trekker said, that can be picked up by anyone. I've taught several people to do it, in fact. They can't play the guitar to save their lives, but they can play fast. Yes, it does take a lot of practice at determination, but it's all exercises, drills, and scales. Anyone who wants to can do it. The funny thing about playing fast is it only requires keeping in time with a metronome. The guitar is really the only instrument where the niche power of it comes from being able to play slightly off time and still make it sound good--hold that dotted quarter note for just a little bit longer and then smoothly drift back into time. Then there is the nuances of the guitar like properly being able to bend in tune (I can't tell you how many shredders miss this one!), vibrato, melodic phrasing, et cetera. B.B. King is a great example. While one can argue his place on the list, the simple fact is, one has to call out the National Guard if he plays a single sixteenth note, but the guy probably has the best vibrato of anyone whose ever picked up a guitar. And, as far as speeding being a prerequisite for being consider a "great" guitar player, that's total hogwash. I could prattle off an extensive list of guitar players from pretty much any genre who were anything but speed freaks, but all considered great.
Speed does not neccessarily a good guitarist make. In fact, one of the most important elements of any good solo, no matter the instrument, is the incorporation of silence. Resting for a bar can often say much more than stuffing as many 32nd notes as possible into the same space. It's technical skill versus having an understanding of what effect your playing has. For example, someone trained to be a typist can probably write much faster than, oh, say Ernest Hemmingway could. But that doesn't make the typist a better writer than Hemmingway, it just means they had a greater technical understanding of the instrument they were using.
David Gilmours solos are easy to replicate, most of its just effects and even in that live version he a little bit sloppy. Blackmore is ok but the blues is what he does and the blues is very simple. Shred is for the best players because its not just about learning things off by rote, there is a certain barrier only the best guitarists can break, and that is to master the guitar completely so that they can play it really fast. Paul Gilbert is one such guitarist http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES1RypBww_g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYlx5gW90Aw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-ZyhNUWyB0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8Wbb8r8PUs
What a load of rubbish. That's like saying that anybody can learn anything physical they want to. Some people are predisposed towards learning such skills, others aren't. I know plenty of people that have tried to learn but simply not been able to develop the coordination to become expert at it. Just like not every good guitarist is going to be a Steve Vai no matter how hard they try, some of them aren't even going to achieve even a fraction of that.
What you said. That's why Prince works for me. His guitar work on Purple Rain gets me everytime. And I love Joe Satriani.
And yet so many have tried and so many have failed. Playing the notes and emulating the expressionism are two completely different things. Snowy White, Doyle Bramhall, and the 1000's of home-brew Youtube vids are testament to that. Not to mention the ability to create them is in a whole different league from the ability to copy them. Yeah. Fuzzface and Echoplex. Uh Huh. So why did you call him a shredder? Yes it is. It's all it is. Once again, Gilbert's standing as a great player has little to do with how fast he can play. Except the actual motor function physically needed to play fast is quite small. It's just muscle memory, not muscle ability. Sure there are people who can't do it, but most of them simply don't spend enough time at it. The actual percentage of humans who can't physically do it is probably pretty small. It's like drawing. The ability to draw different shapes perfectly without the use of a tool is a skill. It has to do with using muscles most people aren't used to and can be awkward for most to the point the don't think they can do it. But, if they practice long and hard at it eventually they can do it. But, it doesn't make them an artist. Fuck, I was born with cerebral palsy, have very small fingers and my pinkies are slightly deformed, yet I can probably play faster than 70 (80 on a good day) percent of the people in the world. Why? Because I spent thousands of hours when I was a kid sitting on my bed doing scales and speed drills. I have now come to realize what a colossal wast of time it was. Sure, I can run some 24th note arpeggios at 160BPM with the best of 'em, that doesn't make me a good guitar player. I'd give it all up in a heartbeat if I could have B.B. King's vibrato.
I said Blackmore tried to be a shredder and failed spectacularly. Gilmour is all sound, just like The Edge, its easy to replicate his style if you have the right effects boards. Shred is the standard, given that its rooted in the most technically complex genre, classical, but speeded up I can't see how its not the ultimate standard. And now for some classical shred http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54txdiTofxs&feature=related