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?
That's why Prince works for me. His guitar work on Purple Rain gets me everytime. And I love Joe Satriani.
