Loud, Bad Guitar

Much as I love Steve Hackett's guitar playing, I listen to a lot more metal than prog. Granted, I like my metal on the proggy end of things, but I also like a heaping helping of darkness with it. And when I sit down to actually play guitar I don't end up playing much that sounds like Hackett's music either, other than my having learned a couple of his solos. As such, most of my practical guitar heroes are metal players. My favorite metal guitarists are Mikael Ackerfeldt, Peter Lindgren, and Fredrik Akesson of Opeth. Again, it's not that they are amazing technical players. Fredrik has some serious shred and speed and I love what he has brought to the band, but what has always set Opeth apart for me is the sheer range of what they do and the tremendous contrasts that they put in their music. They manage to be both beautiful and brutal, intimate and epic. Early on in their catalogue they tended towards a lot of twin guitar riffs like on The Night and the Silent Waters -- n...

Not sure how much of an honor it is to be a hero to a crappy guitar player, but... Yeah, yeah. We all know about Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. They are both amazing guitarists for very different reasons (jaw dropping live playing and amazing composition respectively), so I won't waste your time going over their achievements or the achievements of the dozens of other great guitarists who get a ton of coverage in the guitar mags whether by dint of talent or of marketability and endorsements. Instead I'll concentrate on some of the guitarists I love who get less attention than they merit and from whose playing I have learned a little. Steve Hackett -- merits top of the list for his solo on Genesis' Firth of Fifth alone. Much as I like some of his solo work, I have to say that what I love most about his playing is the way that he works within a virtuoso ensemble like Genesis in its idiosyncratic prime between Nursery Cryme and Wind and Wuthering, with Steve's special brand of g...