just air guitar with a guitar.

I'd rather watch 4 kids in a village hall play their first gig after only a week's practice than watch Paul Gilbert fret-wank.

I caught Fleetwood Mac's You Make Loving Fun on the radio yesterday morning and was struck for the umpteenth time at how great Buckingham's guitar work is in the service of that song. That's the measure of a great guitarist: putting in the work to make someone's else's song (Christine McVie) be as good as it can be.

Saying "this nonsense" you close the debate completely because your mind is already made up. I guess people who like a good widdle fest do find it soulful, and may well find "At the dark end of the street" a bit dull. Only a theory. FWIW I find that Gilbert clip boring/borderline hilarious, but I can imagine in a gig if you're a 17 year old guitar totin' metal fan it's brilliant. You're never going to get tasteful though. You might as well say some gangsta rap album isn't soulful. That's part of the point!

I think lumping all such players together is a bit dodgy...Satch is much more song/melody orientated, and Vai with his Zappa background is much more interesting harmonically, though, true, with loads of screaming widdle involved.

Compare and contrast

You're never far from Spinal Tap with any of these guys though...

Let's not forget Yngwie - more an overexcited Ritchie Blackmore (note - I saw this tour and left after an hour)

but looking at his wiki entry (I'd not heard of him) seems he truly is big in Japan. Huge, actually.

I have to admit I got bored after about 45 seconds, though there's no doubting his technical ability obviously. I think if I was maybe in my teens I would enjoy this more. Maybe it's to do with testosterone levels?

There seem to be some key rules/guidelines that work across all artforms and one of these is surely that Less is More.

I think jo satriani has done nice soulful stuff - though I cant remember names of any of them. something with blue in the title was quite nice if I remember.

Bow down before The N.I. Contribution....

Although I appreciate that they are very skilled guitarists I find this style very soulless & boring.

Slash is one of the few guitarists who I think can bridge the shredding & soulful styles of guitar playing.

For me less is definitely more. I think the lead on this track played by Mr Steve Cropper is the best lead ever

This morning that the musician I most admire is johnny marr. But stuff like this delights me too.

What I'd really like to see is a shit-hot piano player doing a job on William it was really nothing....

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Dear Paul Gilbert,
You have wasted your life.
Yours sincerely,
Bob.

....of this style of playing when I was 17 years old. I thought that if you could string sweep, double-hand finger tap and play 4 octave scales at the speed of light then you had everything mastered on the instrument. Ludicrous.

A few years later grunge happened, as did the allure of acoustic, folk, quality pop and the realisation that the song is far more important than the technical ability of any one of the musicians in the band. Besides no-one ever cares about fret-wankery. To demonstrate, let's take a look at the actual big-selling hits of a number of yesteryear's shredders:

Paul Gilbert (Mr Big) - To Be With You; Just Take My Heart; Wild World

Nuno Bettencourt (Extreme) - More Than Words; Hole Hearted

Vito Bratta (White Lion) - When the Children Cry

Yngwie Malmsteen - none

Steve Vai - none

Joe Satriani - none

In fact, 'Summer of 69' alone probably out-sold all of the above artists combined, 20 times to 1.

Enjoy the wanking whilst you're young, but never lose sight of the fact that the guitar (and indeed any instrument (including the vox)) is solely there as one of many tools (which may not even be called for at all) to craft as perfect a song as possible.

being brilliant at keepie-up. Yet shit at football. You just know that Yngwe would never pass the ball.

view guitaring as a technical skill, but what I enjoy is listening hearing the beauty in the, ahem excuse the cliche, 'less is more' approach. Even Hendrix (Wind Cries Mary) and Jimmy Page (Sick Again) had a natural feel and could emote the loveliest feeling from playing a few simple notes. 'It's the feel man' as Mr. Keith Richards would say. As much as I find the above very impressive in a technical manner, as a guitarist myself one thing I've noticed over the years is that a lot of lead guitarists have trouble holding down a song playing rhythm, in the manner of Jimmie Vaughn for instance, which for me is the real sign of a good guitarist. At the end of the day, each to their own, the bloke above and his audience look like they're having a load of fun, hats off to 'em.

I have to admit that one of my favourite guitar solos is the one in Hello by Lionel Ritchie.

I know ...

Top that

to save you the trauma of watching the whole video, the solo starts at 3.30.

to redeem some credibility back I should say that probably my favourite solo of all time is Walter Beckers solo from Home at last.

weirdly this also kicks in at 3.30. sublime:

Ah I take it Clapton isn't God then!

...technical skill coupled with originality and someone who looks as if he's *really* enjoying himself, I'll listen to FZ, who never fails to do it for me. I wonder, though, how many of these stunt guitarists could do a really choppy rhythm/lead like Wilko or Pete Townshend? When I had a vintage Tele, I tried for years to get the guitar part for She Does it Right even remotely near and gave up eventually.

You'll unleash the f*cking fury.

http://www.roadrunnerrecords.com/blabbermouth.net/news.aspx?mode=Article...

Oh dear (would have paid to see it though).

This is how you play the Maple Leaf Rag.

I've just spent half an hour trolling through YouTube. I love the Joplin piano rags. I think that Joshua Rifkin has recorded the definitive versions of almost all of them, following the notes exactly without putting his own interpretations into them. I think guitarists should try to do the same. This chap seems to have done so.

Watch his left hand. It is not a hand. It is a strange, alien thing which forms unfeasible shapes upon the neck of the guitar, spanning frets which no human hand could do. Were this performed by a human, it might be construed as fretwankery.

Watch.

Listen.

Gasp.

Now *there* was a guitarist. Judas Priest on a Rusty Moped, I HATE fretwankery.

This kind of talk has it's other side; when I hear people talk about 'soul' in music, it can end up in all sorts of vile 'sincerity' (Paul Young as a soul singer, anyone) and tactful repositioning to gain 'authenticity' (U2 get BB King in to not look like mulleted clowns). Bedroom plank-spankers are rarely straight out of Clarkstone so much as out of a suburb somewhere. Pop and rock music is usually artifice - and a good thing too. Projecting moral goods into it ties you in knots of inconsistency. Sometimes you need a shred - sometimes elegant economy. Good musicians know when to do both.

And Lenny, I love that Joshua rifkin; pretty amazing too. As Twang said on the beano thread 'Broad tent'

..and there's a time to wax your board.

This holds true for all musicians (as Vincent has already stated). I have played guitar for a few years now and only recently got into things like sweep-picking arpeggios (playing individual notes of chords mega fast) and tapping.

I appreciate the skill and commitment required to master these techniques but have never really found a practical use for them when playing in bands. A few well considered notes make much more impact than a widdle-fest!

My favourite speed merchant on guitar is Django! Only had two fingers an' all.

I'm going to stand my ground here and say that in some places here, Vai has been rather unfairly traduced. Yes, he does do widdle. But he does, and has done a fair amount more. As Twang says earlier he is harmonically more interesting than many others mentioned. For me the best example of that for is the Flexable/Flexable Lefftovers project recorded just after leaving FZ's band: it's a fine album. It has a lot of very Zappa-tinged edges to it, but it has a great mix of the more trad rocky stuff (like The Attitude Song), the kooky (Little Green Men), the poppy (The Boy/Girl Song), the satirical (Details at 10) and the downright weird (Little Pieces of Seaweed). When I was 18 I loved Passion and Warfare. Now I look back and think it a bit overcooked, but I still think there are moments of brilliance on there. And that's before stuff with Dave Lee Roth like Yankee Rose, which is a riot.

Here's something Vai that's not in the least widdly and is rather delicate, from Flexable Leftovers

And here's something newer:

Apologies for multiple videos, but here's The Attitude Song with an orchestra.

Very nice!

First thing to say in the case of someone like Vai, or even Satriani is that they are a genuine virtuosi. The level of skill required is so profoundly high that it's almost impossible for most non musicians to appreciate how high it is. It's like someone suddenly pole vaulting 8m. It's also possible for someone with skill like that to be able to play anything they hear, straight away, with no rehearsal.

But having said all that, is the music actually any good? Is it in fact music or merely a sporting event?

I think it is music that has been broken apart to such a degree technically that it has often lost all its soul. It's also true I'm afraid, that almost none of these players (Malmsteen, Vai, Satriani) or can play with any dynamics. They don't have the natural expressive touch that someone like Peter Green, or Hendrix or Jimmy Page had. So they have worked enormously hard at developing other exceptional skills. Each trying in his own odd way, over a period of more than 15 years, to be the best technician in the world. Any apparent expression in the music is so often rehearsed, it doesn't sound genuine or effective enough. They just don't have the taste to take the foot off the accelerator.

The student or the genius? don't think of any of them as really good students because they somehow missed the most basic thing.

I saw this guy a couple of years ago on a Monday night at the Bull's Head in Barnes (famous jazz pub). Probably only 20 people in the audience (mind you, just about every one of us bought a CD or two so he made some money). A very unusual style of playing and repertoire, plus entertaining as well as jaw-droppingly skillful.

"The Art Of Fingerstyle Jazz Guitar" is his standout album. I like "The King Of Bongo Bong" too