Best Guitar Players of All Time

[NozeCandy]

I have heard very, very little of anything he has done, but I know that John Mayer is starting to be considered a pretty good guitar player. For anyone who has heard his blues tracks or more recent stuff, how does he compare? I very much doubt he's close to the best of the best, but does he have potential to be great?

[Renixe]

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Joe Pass is definitly up there too, incredible jazz/blues musician

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QFT

also, im a real musician and some of you guys are seriously underestimating how important technical skill is. i mean i love zep, but cmon, jimmy page is sloppy as hell

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agreed. when someone asks me who i think the best guitarist is (emphasis: not songwriter), i judge on two criteria:
their technical ability (how well they can play any given music that is given to them on a sheet of paper), and their improvisational skill.

there are many amazing classical musicians who can sightread and play anything you give them, but cannot improvise worth a damn, and there are incredible improvisers who are not very good technically. there are a lot of people in between, but many players never transcend their own favorite genre, so it's difficult to say who is truly best. my pick, if i had to choose, is definitely bireli lagrene, as stated in my other post. he plays several instruments very well and sings, and plays one of the most demanding styles of guitar, gypsy jazz, as well as funk/fusion/classical, and he played metal when he was younger.

and at the expense of sounding snobby, nominating jack white as one of the greatest guitarists ever is like nominating john grisham as being the best writer of all time. not that i dont like jack white, but he plays and writes songs that are very simple and really shouldn't be considered, as enjoyable as they may be. i'm unfairly singling out jack white here, but there are a lot of people mentioned in this thread that fall in the same category.

[Taso]

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I have heard very, very little of anything he has done, but I know that John Mayer is starting to be considered a pretty good guitar player. For anyone who has heard his blues tracks or more recent stuff, how does he compare? I very much doubt he's close to the best of the best, but does he have potential to be great?

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I havn't heard him play anything and sound original - I think he sounds a lot like SRV.

[sethypooh21]

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Joe Pass is definitly up there too, incredible jazz/blues musician

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QFT

also, im a real musician and some of you guys are seriously underestimating how important technical skill is. i mean i love zep, but cmon, jimmy page is sloppy as hell

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To a certain extent, isn't that kind of the point? Most of the best blues and blues-rock stuff isn't 'clean', really. That's my problem with lots of Yardbird-era Clapton and/or early Beattles stuff, as it's just whited-up blues, sort of like (though not as bad as) Pat Boone covering Little Richard.

(And since someone opened the floor to nominations for best 'blues' recording with "Voodile Chile (Slight Return)", may I counter-nominate Jimi's instrumental "Born Under a Bad Sign?")

[owsley]

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Joe Pass is definitly up there too, incredible jazz/blues musician

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QFT

also, im a real musician and some of you guys are seriously underestimating how important technical skill is. i mean i love zep, but cmon, jimmy page is sloppy as hell

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agreed. when someone asks me who i think the best guitarist is (emphasis: not songwriter), i judge on two criteria:
their technical ability (how well they can play any given music that is given to them on a sheet of paper), and their improvisational skill.

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I totally disagree with this way of judging musicians. Saying jimmy page is too sloppy to be considered one of the best guitarists of all time is just nuts to me. Personally, I value songwriting, performance, and overall accomplishment/importance a lot. He had total control and innovation of the sound he was making from a production standpoint, I enjoy listening to his early albums because they are such a great blend of traditional blues and the heavier metal sound. The fact that he was the central part of zeppelin and wrote stairway to heaven counts for a lot, I mean how many guitarists are ever as big a part of something as that? His role in that band and the sound he made makes him an incredibly qualified musician, in a way that a lot of great guitarists never reach. A lot guys who blow him away technically could never touch that area of his play. That is another part of being a musician, just as technical ability is.

It's all personal preference. i just love learning how to play his songs, his songwriting ability has amazed me from day 1. im also biased because I am a college kid who started playing guitar a couple years ago, and when I started listening to stuff like him and hendrix instead of modern music it made me go out and buy a guitar. So jimmy and jimi will always be 1 and 2 for me regardless of anything else, because that's how I started listening to guitar music. But thats just me. I just think calling page too sloppy is sort of silly, yes, its true in a very narrow sense, but there are just other areas where page blows that same competition away.

[firstyearclay]

Doesn't this add to the validity of guys like Vai, Satriani, and Rhoads? I mean come on SRV couldn't even read music.

Just curious what you thought BIGMONEY.

FYC

[Renixe]

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It's all personal preference. i just love learning how to play his songs, his songwriting ability has amazed me from day 1. im also biased because I am a college kid who started playing guitar a couple years ago, and when I started listening to stuff like him and hendrix instead of modern music it made me go out and buy a guitar. So jimmy and jimi will always be 1 and 2 for me regardless of anything else, because that's how I started listening to guitar music. But thats just me. I just think calling page too sloppy is sort of silly, yes, its true in a very narrow sense, but there are just other areas where page blows that same competition away.

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this is why it would be better to list best guitar players by genre. yes, it is personal preference, but to iterate my point in my other post, i am not judging on songwriting skill here, i am judging by technical expertise and improvisational expertise. this is where i am trying to be unbiased, because i am trying to objectively look at their ability to play music without any regard to the genre. when you say, best rock musicians, i take into account that in a live performance with heavy distortion and guitar levels that deafen your ear, accuracy of all the notes doesn't really matter, because your audience doesn't care. if you talk about best classical guitarist, i take into account that classical guitarists perform in whisper quiet rooms and every missed note echoes loudly, and everyone in the audience knows you missed that note and hitting all of the notes correctly is the biggest criteria of how good your performance is.

i like rock/blues, those styles are what got me into playing guitar as well. but if we are talking about a top 5 list of greatest guitarists in the *history* of all music, i still think the majority of the rock or blues mentioned in this thread do not belong there. so who belongs there? it's incredibly hard to say, and i bet no two people will ever agree on the same list.

[TxRedMan]

Stevie Ray Vaughan was amazing, as is Eric Clapton. Jimmy Page, too.

I'm going with SRV b/c he had a style all his own and really took blues rock to a new level.

[Monolith]

I like your picks, but my personal favorite is Joe Satriani...

[Quinn Warren]

I've been playing/studying guitar for virtually my entire life (27). The #1 guitar player of all time (if there is such a thing) is Django Reinhardt .

LOL at John Mayer. In Austin, TX (where he is from) he would get kicked off the stage at any number of SRV-obsessed blues clubs. He is an average (at best) guitar player.