My Top Ten Guitarists

Today, Rolling Stone put out their updated list of the greatest guitarists of all time, and scrolling through it got me thinking about all the incredible guitarists who have influenced me over the past seventeen years of doing my favorite thing in the world. I wanted to do a write-up of some of my favorites and what I’ve learned from them, so this is that! I love guitars!

Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix reinvented an instrument over the course of his twelve years as an electric guitarist, and if you’re going to argue that makes him anything but the greatest rock instrumentalist of all-time, you’d better have a pretty convincing fucking argument. He was not only great at electric guitar but crafted an entirely new vocabulary for it. Most people are lucky if they come up with one marginally useful new technique.

Nobody has had the influence Hendrix has because nobody has had the same innate feel for their guitar. It was an extension of him; every note he played he felt, and because of that, we get to feel it too. You can hear it in every bend, every run, every sweep, every dive bomb. It’s the most vocal a guitar has ever sounded, the most human.

I don’t remember the first time I heard Hendrix because he seems to have always existed in my psyche as this towering figure dominating every sensibility I’ve developed “on my own.” I couldn’t be doing what I’m doing if not for Hendrix. I owe him almost everything.

Essential songs:

• “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” (Electric Ladyland, 1968)
• “Machine Gun” (Band of Gypsys, 1970)

Jack White

Jack White means every note he plays, and I never understood what that meant until I heard “Ball and Biscuit” for the first time as a twelve-year-old. It came to me at a formative time, a time where I wanted to be the next Steve Vai or something (for the record, I really like Steve Vai).

There is so much conviction to White’s playing, and I had never considered that maybe it’s better to mean all of your notes than rotely gloss over a dozen at a time. And fuck, does White mean them. The urgency with which he plays is astonishing. It’s like every single note he bends he has to get off his chest or he will literally die. His guitar screams when it wants to.

And other times, his playing is so gentle, and it’s also his versatility that I think makes him such a valuable player. Compare the riff and verses of “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” and you’ll get a sense of the range he can cover, even in a single song. He understands his craft and understands feel in a way few guitarists do. That was a real turning point for me: hearing that kind of sensibility in a contemporary rock context.

Essential songs:

• “Ball and Biscuit” (Elephant by The White Stripes, 2003)
• “Lazaretto” (Lazaretto, 2014)
• “Taking Me Back” (Fear of the Dawn, 2022)

Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin)

Jimmy Page didn’t invent the blues, but he sure as hell made it a lot heavier and weirder. And before I go any further, I want to acknowledge that Page essentially built his early career on appropriation. The blues existed long before Page, and, frankly, there are better blues guitarists. But where Page taught me an invaluable lesson is in how he was able to subvert an existing guitar vocabulary to make something that transcended its trappings. Page didn’t only steal from or even pay homage to blues guitarists but went to genuinely unexpected places given the expectations for where blues guitarists could go, infusing it with a psychedelic and raw sensibility that people have tried to copy for decades.

Essential songs:

• “Dazed and Confused” (Led Zeppelin, 1969)
• “Since I’ve Been Loving You” (Led Zeppelin III, 1970)

St. Vincent

I hear the word “angular” often used to describe St. Vincent’s playing, and I think that fits perfectly. Almost every note is unexpected, and when she plays notes that are expected (i.e. melodically, rhythmically, or tonally conventional), they’re within a greater context you wouldn’t expect to find them.

What I learned from St. Vincent is that if you can play something in a more interesting way, you should. It’s as simple as that. It’s easy to fall into established patterns as a player, and while St. Vincent certainly has a style, I never get the sense she’s leaning on habits but rather trying to do the most interesting thing possible at any given moment. Why wouldn’t you?

Essential songs:

• “Your Lips Are Red” (Marry Me, 2007)
• “Rattlesnake” (St. Vincent, 2015)
• “Huey Newton” (St. Vincent, 2015)

David Gilmour (Pink Floyd)

David Gilmour is among the most melodic guitarists ever. You could sing almost any of his solos if you wanted to, and the way that he bends his notes, they often already sound like they’re being sung.

His melodies are elegant, intentional, and distinct in a way that not many guitarists accomplish, especially using traditional blues structures. So many young guitarists learn the blues scale without learning how to break out of it. For me, Gilmour was fundamental in learning how to break out, how to add a simple six or a nine in an unexpected place to spice up a conventional melody. There are small things you can do to add points of interest, especially melodically, and Gilmour understands this and leverages the tiniest details to make melodies that are easy to follow without being conventional. It’s a skill that’s truly his own.

Essential songs:

• “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” (The Wall, 1979)
• “Comfortably Numb” (The Wall, 1979)

Kirk Hammett (Metallica)

Kirk Hammett was the guitarist that made me want to shred. I kind of secretly hate that word when used in serious contexts, but there’s a particular type of fast playing that warrants the moniker. Hammett in my mind is the quintessential shred guitarist. From his tone to his speed to the fact he makes it sound like he’s literally shredding the skin from his fingers, I had never heard anyone play a guitar like that when I first came across Metallica as a ten-year-old. I had only been playing for a year, and though I didn’t start with learning Hammet’s solos, being able to play “Enter Sandman” was one of the first goals I set for myself as I realized guitar was something I wanted to take seriously.

Fun fact: the first real pedal I ever got was a Kirk Hammett Signature Crybaby, which I still use today.

Essential songs:

• “Master of Puppets” (Master of Puppets, 1986)
• “Enter Sandman” (Metallica, 1991)

Jonny Greenwood & Ed O’Brien (Radiohead)

Jonny Greenwood & Ed O’Brien are my favorite guitar duo, and I think guitar duos are a cornerstone of rock music. When you have two guitarists with distinct voices that complement each other this well, there is truly nothing like it: the unique wall of sound you can only get from that combination. And the fact that they’re both so incredibly versatile only sweetens an already impossibly sweet deal. Both have the ability to go from the glossiest sounding chord voicings you’ve ever heard to pure, noisy chaos, and they do both of those modes (and every mode in-between) equally well. There is no sound these men cannot make.

Essential songs:

• “Paranoid Android” (OK Computer, 1997)
• “I Might Be Wrong” (Amnesiac, 2001)
• “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” (In Rainbows, 2007)

Eddie Van Halen

It is possible to love a guitarist while disliking what they did for the instrument. I remember my dad telling me at a young age that Eddie Van Halen was the greatest of all-time, and I believed him because I had never heard someone play that fast before. But so many people leave it at that: playing fast, which is a shame because there’s an underlying soulfulness to Van Halen’s playing that I think gets overlooked. Yes, he plays fucking fast, but listen to something like “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” and tell me he isn’t also a guitarist with an amazing melodic sensibility and an ear discerning enough to know when to dip into either mode. That’s the lesson I feel like people miss from Van Halen, and the fact people miss it has set some disappointing precedents for what shred guitar often sounds like.

Essential songs:

• “Eruption” (Van Halen, 1978)
• “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” (Van Halen, 1978)
• “Hot for Teacher” (1984, 1984)

Angus Young (AC/DC)

AC/DC rules, and my generation needs to stop pretending they don’t. “Back in Black” was the first solo I ever learned all the way through, which is not to say that it’s easy to play but to say that Young channels the fundamentals in such a way that his playing is incredibly accessible, which I see as nothing but an asset. That being said, nobody sounds like Young when they play his parts, even if so many people can. The way he distills rock and roll guitar to its simplest, dirtiest form is still incredibly unique to him.

Essential songs:

• “Let There Be Rock” (Let There Be Rock, 1977)
• “Back in Black” (Back in Black, 1980)

Thurston Moore & Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth)

This is a matter of two men doing things to guitars I didn’t know you could do to them, namely abusing the shit out of them. I didn’t know guitars could make some of the noises Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo got them to make until I heard them do it. This wasn’t reinventing an instrument; it was thoroughly deconstructing it, which I think is just as worthy a project.

Essential songs:

• “Teen Age Riot” (Daydream Nation, 1988)
• “The Diamond Sea” (Washing Machine, 1995)

Honorable mentions: The Edge, George Harrison, Josh Homme, Tony Iommi, Prince, Keith Richards, Nile Rogers, and Pete Townshend.