Zappa.com

Santana and Eddie Van Halen
Two Guitarist that play the same song or solo over and over.
Can't anyone else hear this. :?
They were good for one solo and thats it.
Eric Clapton is on that list too. He was good for one solo in the 60's and don't even know what that one was.:roll:
He's put out crap for the last thirty years.

Just about any guitarist whose followers are just derivative imitators.

Frank Zappa's guitar work is so good that nobody will think "Hey i can do that too" and that's why he's better than so many of those overrated players a la Hendrix or John Frusciante.

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There are groups that tend to dazzle a drug-stupefied audience into submission

Steve Vai puts me to sleep. Yangle Menstruation is juvenile at best. Uh, that's all I can think of at the moment.

Does it get any worse than Yangle Masturbation (what I deem to be the ultimate nadir of guitar self-indulgence)?

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There are groups that tend to dazzle a drug-stupefied audience into submission

I guess I'll jump in here and disagree on a couple of points.

First, I would challenge any guitarist to write, perform and compose music with as much depth as

Steve Vai:
"Melissa's Garden" from "The Seventh Song".
"Freakshow Excess" from "Real Illusions Vol. 1".
"All About Eve" from "Fire Garden"

Jimi Hendrix:
"Bold As Love" from "Axis:Bold As Love".
"1983, A Mermon I Should Turn To Be" from "Electric Ladyland".
"If Six Was Nine" from "Axis:Bold As Love".

These examples don't scratch the surface of the genious of these two guitarists. If anything, these two are grossly underrated.

I do agree that Yngwe and Frusciante are pure cheese. 80's hairdo band wankers are pretty monotanous to me as well.

Spaceman, I never said Hendrix sucks. I just think he's overrated in the sense that a lot of starting guitarists choose to imitate him and his ilk. I don't like when a popular artist inspires legions of faceless imitators.

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There are groups that tend to dazzle a drug-stupefied audience into submission

I think you have a valid point but I would tend to rank the imitaters as overrated as opposed to the original artist. Certainly Hendrix spawned many imitaters like Robin Trower, Pat Travers, Frank Marino and Stevie Ray Vaughan just to name a few as first generation. Then you get to the second generation like Johnny Lang, Kenny Wayne Shepard, John Mayer ect. I guess thats the point where people really lose originality.

Though you could say the same about Jaco Pastorious, Stanley Clarke, Miles Davis, John Coltrane or Maceo Parker because each of these icons have many imitaters as well though their not all guitar players.

I think as a whole package (guitar player, singer, songwriter, etc.), guys like Clapton and Hendrix are quite good but as guitar players alone, one could argue that they are overrated.

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Some folks got it,
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some so yoogly,
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ah yes, and of course the problem with hendrix is that while he was very inventive and revolutionary player, there were, are and have been technically better players than him. Hendrix himself did consider Terry Kath of Chicago (and to Kath's own credit, he actually was quite a fluid and versatile player, despite what you might think of his band) better than him. so to call him the greatest guitarist ever is really stretching it.

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There are groups that tend to dazzle a drug-stupefied audience into submission

The same can be said about Zappa, so what? I also can't buy this imitation thing. Great people are often imitated - why try and imitate someone who isn't - that doesn't stop them being great.

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The way I see it Barry, this should be a very dynamite show.

Dweezil said that Hendrix had a signature sound and so did Van Halen, and most aspiring guitarists would say 'wow i can do that', but Frank, who also had a signature sound would make people go like 'wow that's cool but i don't know what the hell it is'.

Fact is, every musician has to start somewhere. So naturally starting musicians usually have a role model or two. but as you grow as a musician, you're better off if you develop your own unique approach and sort of, "kill your idols", which means you purge yourself from the habits of ripping off your influences.

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There are groups that tend to dazzle a drug-stupefied audience into submission

I agree with this - I guess it's self evident - you have to work at what ultimately comes more naturally for you. In some ways it's easier than you first realise being original. One example is, Zappa was influenced by Spike Jones and used, for want of a better term, a lot of mistake sounds and although I love listening to that stuff, I'm not really motivated to compose that way - I would have to really force myself to go down that track.

Something I find interesting about Zappa is that he was using "still plays blues" in the eighties as some kind of put down towards other guitarists and yet, in my opinion it's his unique blues style that really sets him apart - not the fact that he played blues but the way he played blues. Most of my favourite Zappa solos come from the seventies before he started trying to get rid of that blues thing.

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The way I see it Barry, this should be a very dynamite show.

Joe Satriani

Eric Johnson

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To be honest, Frank himself is sort of overrated as a guitarist. I mean, when you hear Zappa praised most often it's for his-what?-guitar skills. Which are there, of course, he's one of my favorties, but compared to his other skills that one is near the bottom.

I guess if based on a guitar players inability to play outside of pentatonic type scales in their guitar solos I would rank Keith Richards and Pete Townsend as way overrated.

I could'nt honestly put anybody on a single pedastal as being "The Greatest Guitarist In The World" because different players have different strenghths.

I could say the best guitar player I've ever heard/seen perform was a street musician in Chicago aroud 1995 who was playing "polyphonic" style tapping (like Stanley Jordan) on a homemade double neck guitar through a car battery powered hard-wired homemade amplifier utilizing his left hand for bass and rhythm on one neck while playing melodic and solo oriented stuff with his right hand on the other neck. If I only had a portable DAT recorder with me at that instance.

I think most of them said 'wow, I wanna do that.'

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"bit of nostalgia for the old folks."

I never understood why Eric Clapton often ends up being considered the "greatest still-living player"... the same goes for about half the people on that Rolling Stone list...

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Have you heard Satriani's self-titled album? It has some very good blues and funk, which shows that he is a versatile player and not a one-trick shredder that he might seem to be.

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Some folks got it,
some folks don't,
some so yoogly,
they never won't

I might get some flack for this one but...

Alan Holdsworth

I think he has some great skills and all that shit but I swear the tone and voice he uses just turns me off most of the time. I have not gotten his solo stuff and taken a serious listen but all the stuff he played in the 70s with various bands all sounded the same to me for some reason... slowish bent notes spinkled with faster runs. Repeat.

I really, really like his sound. My favourites are Bruford, Tony Williams Lifetime and Gongzilla...

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The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true Art and Science. - Albert Einstein

I do agree with the Bruford & Williams sound. It works great with that band for some reason!

John Frusciante from the red hot chilli peppers... I opt for creativity over technical skill in a guitar player, but Frusciante's latter abilities don't strike me as spectacular either - yet he keeps getting praised.

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I agree with that one bigtime. Never thought much of his stuff at all.

I liked Frusciante's playing on Mother's Milk and Blood Sugar Sex Magik, pretty solid funkrock playing with nice chord voicings to my ears. His chops and creativity seem to have deteriorated after his comeback, don't think his playing on the later Peppers albums is all that special.

Holdsworth is a giant, but his music is so cerebral that the one time I saw him in concert, I almost found myself wishing he'd strum a simple E major chord or play a 12 bar blues after two hours of stuff that sounded completely off the wall. I think I like him better as a guest player on other peoples' albums.

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"When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone in the air. You can never capture it again." -- Eric Dolphy

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Ace Frehley of KISS gets my vote.
But I think that was intentional.

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