Innehållsförteckning för Holiday 2021 från Guitar Player

IF YOU’RE LOOKING for musical inspiration, Guitar Player is always a great place to start, and this issue is especially stimulating. Inside these pages you’ll find writeups on more than 100 exhilarating guitar solos chosen by our readers and a host of guitar greats, each of whom took time to reveal from one to five solos that have made a difference in their playing. When we first set out to create this special issue dedicated to guitar soloing, we had a few expectations. Chief among them was that many players would choose a track by an artist named Jimi, Eric, David, Jimmy, Keith… and of course a couple of Joes and a few Steves. Fair enough, but we wanted to shake things up and discover what lesser-known inspirations lurk in…

WHEN WE SET out to poll our readers about the greatest guitar solos of all time (see page 46), we thought it would be interesting to see what solos our current crop of star guitarists would choose. But first we decided to set a rule: Nothing obvious. No Hendrix. No Clapton. No Gilmour… You get the drift. What we wanted were the deep cuts that inspired and influenced some of the day’s most famous players. Plus, we thought it would be fun for our participants to champion the players and songs that they hold dear, but which might not get much love from the community at large. Unintentionally, though, we created a conundrum for many players, who wondered just how off the charts to go. Nels Cline summed up the…

Van Halen GUITARIST: EDDIE VAN HALEN (1978) Eddie’s iconic solo that shook the world. With its mix of fast legato hammer-ons and pull-offs, pinched harmonics, whammy-bar dives and two-hand tapping, Eddie Van Halen’s mindblowing instrumental guitar solo inspired a generation of guitar heroes. While the tapping gets the attention, his tone, blistering legato and creative note choices are all equally important. Amid all that virtuosity, Eddie still played with joyous rock and roll abandon. Remarkably, Ed was never completely happy with the released recording. “I didn’t even play it right,” he told Guitar World. “There’s a mistake at the top end of it. Whenever I hear it, I always think, Man, I could’ve played it better.” His admission aside, the track is a technical opus. The first eight bars are…

Eagles GUITARISTS: DON FELDER, JOE WALSH (1977) Those iconic twin-guitar harmony lines took the Eagles to new heights. The title track from the Eagles’ fifth album, and without doubt the song the band will be most remembered for, “Hotel California” frequently tops greatest guitar solo polls. The solo begins at 4:20, forming an extended coda, over which guitarists Don Felder and Joe Walsh trade licks before joining together to play those iconic harmonized licks at 5:39. As it turns out, those harmony lines work in a relatively simple fashion. Felder and Walsh play an arpeggio of every chord, and the harmony is created by one of the guitars always playing one note lower down in the chord. For example, the notes of the Bm chord are B, D and F#,…

Lynyrd Skynyrd GUITARIST: ALLEN COLLINS (1974) The Bird is the word. As it happens, the four-minute-and-24-second guitar solo that closes “Free Bird” was originally added to give singer Ronnie Van Zant a chance to rest his vocal cords during Lynyrd Skynyrd’s relentless performance schedule. At 143 bars long, the solo is far and away the most epic offering here (in fact, it’s 286 bars of recorded music because the whole thing is doubled). The tune appeared on the group’s eponymous debut album in 1973, and guitarist Allen Collins delivered the lot on his 1964 Gibson Explorer. As Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gary Rossington once told Guitar World, “The whole long jam was Allen Collins himself. He was bad. He was super bad! He was bad-to-the-bone bad. When we put the solo together,…

Michael Jackson GUITARIST: EDDIE VAN HALEN (1982) Breathtaking results from an unlikely pairing. Asked to contribute guitar to Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, Pete Townshend declined but offered a suggestion: How about Eddie Van Halen? Jackson and producer Quincy Jones thought that was a great idea, and got Ed onboard to play the solo to “Beat It.” But after hearing the part where he was asked to solo, the guitarist was unhappy with the chord changes and had the engineer edit the tape to create a new pattern that better suited what he had in mind. Ed knew Jackson might be surprised and possibly unhappy with his executive decision. “So I warned him before he listened,” he told CNN in 2012. “I said, ‘Look, I changed the middle section of your…

Deep Purple GUITARIST: RITCHIE BLACKMORE (1972) Race with devil on English highway. “I wrote that out note for note about a week before we recorded it,” Ritchie Blackmore said of his remarkable and most definitely memorable solo to “Highway Star.” “And that is one of the only times I have ever done that. I wanted it to sound like someone driving in a fast car, for it to be one of those songs you would listen to while speeding. And I wanted a very definite Bach sound, which is why I wrote it out—and why I played those very rigid arpeggios across that very familiar Bach progression — D minor, G minor, C major, A major. I believe that I was the first person to do that so obviously on…

Cream GUITARIST: ERIC CLAPTON (1968) The finest rock and roll cover of an acoustic blues song. It started as a blues tune called “Cross Road Blues” by Robert Johnson and became one of the finest examples of natural ability, soulfulness and showmanship from a virtuosic 22-year-old guitarist named Eric Clapton. His reimagining of the song as “Crossroads” further cemented a legacy that by then had earned him the nickname God. Famously recorded at San Francisco’s Fillmore West venue for supergroup Cream’s Wheels of Fire album, Clapton’s arrangement retains the soul and spirit of Johnson’s original but updates it for a contemporary audience raring to cut loose and be entertained by dazzlingly quick, passionate musicianship. Remarkably, Clapton is no fan of the performance: He complains that the band lost the “one”…

Gary Moore GUITARIST: GARY MOORE (1990) The definitive blues guitar ballad. Presented as the title track from his 1990 album, this wistful tune in A minor became Gary Moore’s calling card fairly late in his career, when he reinvented himself as a blues artist. There’s a point in the solo where you can hear the Belfast great switch from the neck humbucker to the bridge on the 1959 Les Paul Standard he nicknamed Stripe and start deviating from its main theme, mainly sticking within the A minor pentatonic scale, with a few notes from the Aeolian and harmonic minor scales. Moore was plugged into his prototype Marshall JTM-45 reissue head with one of the company’s newly designed Guv’nor distortion pedals out in front. More than 30 years later, this remains…

Jeff Beck GUITARIST: JEFF BECK (1975) Stevie Wonder–penned instrumental genius. Beck’s solo here may be the greatest display of dynamic control ever on electric guitar. Using the guitar’s volume and varying his attack, he moves from clean to filthy, and from barely audible to raging. This was before Beck became the Strat master and was recorded using his Tele-Gib, a Telecaster with humbuckers. Even without the Strat trem, Beck’s control of bends gives the main melody a lyrical quality to rival any vocalist. The song reaches peak intensity at around three minutes, and, incredibly, he sustains this level of passion for over a minute before gradually bringing things back to Earth. The volume swells on the intro are inspired by Roy Buchanan, to whom Beck dedicated the track. Play them…

Stevie Ray Vaughan GUITARIST: STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN (1983) The delicate side of SRV. When the young SRV couldn’t afford $350 for the ’65 Strat he found in a pawn shop, his future wife Lenora got all his friends to chip in on it as a birthday present. The touched Stevie, who stayed up all night writing “Lenny” in tribute to her. The guitar was mellower than his Number One Strat, which made it perfect for the song’s extended chords and softer approach. Stevie plays with huge dynamic range in this track, using pick and fingers at different times. The tone is essentially clean, but when he picks hard, you can hear it break into overdrive. It’s predominantly played with neck/middle-pickup combination, but there are moments on bridge and neck pickup…

Chuck Berry GUITARIST: CHUCK BERRY (1957) Ringing a bell for rock and roll. A thinly disguised account of Chuck Berry’s own rise to international stardom, “Johnny B. Goode” was born after a 1955 tour brought the guitarist to New Orleans, “a place I’d longed to visit ever since hearing Muddy Waters’ lyrics, ‘Going down to Louisiana way behind the sun,’” Berry wrote in his 1987 memoir, The Autobiography. “That inspiration, combined with little bits of dad’s stories and the thrill of seeing my black name posted all over town in one of the cities they brought the slaves through, turned into ‘Johnny B. Goode.’” Berry’s upbeat diads and bluesy phrasing set a template for generations of rock and roll acts that would follow. If you plan to tackle his solo,…

Santana GUITARIST: CARLOS SANTANA (1976) Latin fire burns bright in this comeback hit. Released in 1976, Santana’s Amigos album marked a return to commercial success for the band across Europe. Particularly remarkable was the chart success of “Europa,” not because Santana weren’t well-known but because it’s a five-minute instrumental. Take a listen and you might feel like you’ve heard the track before, and this is thanks to the use of a standard jazz chord progression. Listen to Joseph Kosma’s “Autumn Leaves” and you’ll hear where Carlos found his inspiration. Following those trademark licks in the song’s first half, “Europa” takes you on a journey outside of that standard progression with a move to a simple I-IV progression in a minor key and some fiery playing.…

Jethro Tull GUITARIST: MARTIN BARRE (1971) Melodicism and gorgeous tone. “Ian [Anderson] wrote the riff and verses to the song ‘Aqualung,’ but he felt it needed a new section for the guitar break,” guitarist Martin Barre recalled to Guitar Player about the title track to Jethro Tull’s fourth album, cut in part at London’s Island Studios. “I said, ‘Why don’t we just play the verse chords in half-time for the first part of the solo, then pick it back up for the rest of the solo?’ It was a simple solution that really worked.” Most remarkable is that the solo — played on a 1958 Gibson Les Paul Junior through a 100-watt Hiwatt head into Hiwatt 4x12 cabinets — was nailed in one take. “We were dealing with 24 tracks,…

Joe Satriani GUITARIST: JOE SATRIANI (1989) Mixing unmatched versatility with a sense of childlike awe, Satch achieves lift-off. Joe Satriani was half asleep and imagined that he was flying… in a blue dream. From that blissful state of mind, he composed a transporting song (and the title track to his third album) that truly lives up to its name. Over a delicate acoustic guitar backing, Satriani, using an Ibanez JS1000 prototype into a Mesa/Boogie head and cabinet, begins a captivating melody, and from there he’s into the clouds. In many ways, the entire performance can be described as a solo. Although it’s meticulously plotted, nothing sounds rehearsed; each phrase seems to feature a dynamic moment of discovery. For the next five minutes, he provides a master class in fluid, legato…

Dream Theater GUITARIST: JOHN PETRUCCI (1992) The hitchhiker’s guide to shred. If anyone ever asks you what shred guitar is, play them this solo. In just 59 seconds, John Petrucci covers alternate picking, sweep picking, tapping, whammy techniques, legato, harmonics and aggressive blues-scale phrasing. It’s a nearly comprehensive tour of modern guitar technique in under a minute. The tune jumps between C# Dorian and E Lydian, and despite the inclusion of some offbeat rhythms, the entire thing is in 4/4. The hard-grooving pentatonic section shows Petrucci’s great sense of feel. A useful lick you can steal no matter your ability comes at 5:04–5:06. Here, Petrucci plays in 5ths on the first two strings (using the classic power-chord shape), and slides it between the 14th and 17th frets, playing the notes…

Aerosmith GUITARIST: JOE PERRY (1975) Funk-rock with more swagger than Jagger. One of the funkiest rock tunes ever, “Walk This Way” features a groove that is powered by guitarist Joe Perry’s incomparable swing. It contains no fewer than three solos, each of which is imbued with exciting and idiosyncratic phrasing. Perry has a reputation as a standard blues-rock player, but he tries to avoid obvious clichés. These solos are each full of slippery lines created by mixing major pentatonic and blues scales. The first solo was played on a Les Paul Junior that also provided the rhythm tone; the others were recorded on his ’57 Strat. One of the coolest ideas comes at 2:38, where Joe plays a typical repeating lick in C minor pentatonic shape 5, starting on the…

Rage Against the Machine GUITARIST: TOM MORELLO (1991) Guitar solo or car alarm? Though Rage guitarist Tom Morello may be best known for reimagining the art of soloing as collages of abstract noise, the self-proclaimed “DJ of the group” doesn’t rely on a huge range of pedals to create his unorthodox sounds. In the solo for “Killing in the Name,” Morello employs his humble DigiTech Whammy (using a two-octave pitch-shift) to complement his precise tremolo picking and D minor pentatonic licks. Despite the fascinating sonic assault, the setup is relatively simple. Says Morello, “I enjoy embracing limitations. I’ve had the same amp and pedals for the entirety of my career. I decided I wouldn’t go crazy with buying new pieces but rather plumb the depths of my imagination to take…

IN 1971, ROCK and roll guitar was barely in its teens. But, remarkably, what started as R&B- and western-swing infused three-chord rave-ups had grown to incorporate elements of folk, Chicago blues, modal jazz, Indian classical music and flamenco. The music of the 1960s — especially that of the Beatles — proved that the pop charts could deliver expressive, high-quality artistry that rivaled that produced in jazz clubs and symphonic halls. The music of the time also became the de facto voice of one of the most significant cultural upheavals in American history. As the new decade dawned, musicians were presented with a blank canvas on which they created what can rightfully be seen as the rock era’s belle époch. Indeed, many famous artists released their defining masterpieces during this fertile…

VALCO HAS BECOME synonymous with a kind of retro cool, largely thanks to quirky vibe-laden instruments produced under its own name, as well as those marketed through Supro, Airline and National. The brand has been revived and is now being distributed by Eastwood Guitars of Canada. The first pedal in the series was the BloodBuzz, which, inspired by the rare Lovetone Cheese Source, combined fuzz and overdrive in a dual pedal. Valco’s latest release is the KGB Fuzz. Though you may hear “KGB” and think about a certain Russian-made vintage fuzz, in fact, it stands for “keys, guitar and bass.” Designer Carl Cook has optimized it for use with all three by including features like a line/instrument switch to adapt to some synthesizers and a blend fader to permit basses…

IN A WORLD OF none-more-black amp stacks, there’s something irresistibly lustworthy about a rig swathed in bright, bold, stage-stealing red levant. Sure, the circuit, tubes, transformers, speakers and everything else under the hood are just the same, but a stack like this just has to sound better than the standard issue, right? Regardless of any imaginary sonic superiority, custom color Marshalls from the golden years are extremely rare, and highly collectible. And regardless of that, we can still expect this month’s featured amp and cab to generate a raging aural assault defined by gut-thumping lows, fat mids, and sizzling, crackling high-end crunch, and that’s what it’s really all about. Call it classic rock, Brit rock or what have you, it’s the sound that launched a thousand hits, colloquially known as…

Chicago GUITARIST: TERRY KATH (1969) Wah-drenched ecstasy. This magazine once described Terry Kath’s “25 or 6 to 4” solo as “Wes Montgomery meets Jimi Hendrix,” and it’s a fair point, as Kath was influenced first by jazz and, later, hard rock. As a founding member of the jazz-rock band Chicago, he held down guitar duties for the group until his tragic death from an accidentally self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1978. Though his superb playing graced many tracks — notably “Introduction” and “Free Form Guitar,” both from the group’s 1969 debut, The Chicago Transit Authority — there’s no denying the power of his soloing on the group’s early hit “25 or 6 to 4.” Kath uses his wah generously to add emotion to his lines, giving them at times a frenetic…

Ozzy Osbourne GUITARIST: RANDY RHOADS (1980) Fretboard fireworks galore on Ozzy’s Blizzard of Ozz comeback. The Double-O has often cited Randy Rhoads as the man who saved his career — and when you hear the solo on “Crazy Train,” you understand why. Although Rhoads’ classical- and modal-based approach was far from Tony Iommi’s blues leanings, he was, like Ozzy’s old bandmate, a true inventor. There’s a section toward the end of this solo that actually sounds like a train squealing off the tracks, thanks to the use of a chromatically ascending trill that then descends in key. Rhoads concludes the solo with a fast-picked F# minor pentatonic phrase before a rapid Aeolian legato run ending with a big bend on the 19th fret. The shredder performed the solo with his…

Prince GUITARIST: PRINCE (1984) The Purple One’s defining guitar moment. The epic outro to “Purple Rain” — which takes up nearly two thirds of the song itself — stands out as some of Prince’s finest work on the six-string, wailing away in G minor pentatonic and occasionally including some more modal notes, like the minor 6th. There’s also that repeating motif that dances around the 2nd and minor 3rd intervals. It’s simple and effective, setting things up for the vocal melody that comes in toward the end. It’s not a busy solo by any means. Rather, the Purple One chose to leave a lot of space in between the lines he played and focus on big hooks instead of monster licks. Prince would extend the solo for up to 15 minutes…

Steely Dan GUITARIST: LARRY CARLTON (1976) Messin’ with the “Kid.” Steely Dan’s catalog is filled with remarkable guitar solos (see entry No. 22), but Larry Carlton’s brilliant work on The Royal Scam’s “Kid Charlemagne” remains the most celebrated. Carlton strings together a series of tasty phrases that follow the underlying chord changes with a blend of inside and outside playing that is technically mind bending and emotionally satisfying. “I was pretty familiar with the tune, so I just improvised,” he tells Guitar Player. “People think I’m kidding when I say that, like I had worked the solo out beforehand, but I didn’t. It was straight improv, and it worked.” Very well, in fact. Perhaps more has been written about his solo than of the song itself. Despite the acclaim, Carlton…

ZZ Top GUITARIST: BILLY GIBBONS (1973) Pinched-harmonic trailblazer. Billy Gibbons is credited as the first guitarist to record a pinched harmonic, and there are tons of them here. The song changes key for the first solo, moving from A to C and kicking things up a gear even before Gibbons brings the fire. There are two essential licks to get down from the first solo. For the first, Gibbons slides into the G string at the 12th fret and alternates between this and the B string at the 11th fret with hybrid (pick-and-fingers) technique. You can hear this lick for the first time at 1:41 and repeatedly thereafter. The second lick is the turnaround when the song moves back to A at 1:58. Again using hybrid picking, Billy starts at…

The Allman Brothers Band GUITARIST: DICKEY BETTS (1973) A tribute to Django. Though he named it for his daughter, Dickey Betts reportedly wrote this as a tribute to Django Reinhardt, which is why it’s possible to play it with just two fingers, Reinhardt having lost the use of his other digits in a fire. Sonically, though, this track from the Allman Brothers Band’s 1973 album, Brothers and Sisters, is pure southern rock. An Allman secret is to add the perfect 4th to the major pentatonic (in A major this is A, B, C#, D, E, F#), and that sound is here in abundance. Despite the regular appearance of the G natural in the rhythm guitar part, giving a Mixolydian sound, that note never appears in the main theme and is…

Steve Vai GUITARIST: STEVE VAI (1990) The deep and spiritual side of shred guitar. Passion and Warfare, the second album from American virtuoso Steve Vai, has become one of the most important instrumental guitar records of all time. “For the Love of God” — its most popular track and a staple of Vai’s live performances — is a deep dive into two E minor scales, Aeolian and Phrygian, starting with a motif that he evolves and rephrases as things unfold, transitioning from smooth slides to furious bends. It only gets more frantic from there, as Vai employs two-handed tapping, liquid legato and whammy-bar techniques to twist what starts out as a deep soulful lullaby into a cacophonous nightmare. And yet there remains a real sense of purpose behind every single…

The Allman Brothers Band GUITARIST: DUANE ALLMAN (1971) Good medicine in a glass bottle. There can be no discussion of electric slide playing without mentioning Duane Allman’s impeccable work on “Statesboro Blues” from the Allman Brothers Band’s 1971 At Fillmore East. Though he’d been playing slide for just a few years, Duane was a natural, and there’s a lifetime of experience in his masterful phrasing and smooth singing vibrato. “I heard Ry Cooder playing slide on Taj Mahal’s debut album, and I said, ‘Man, that’s for me,’” Duane recalled. He would usually play in open tunings — most often open E (low to high, E B E G# B E) and occasionally open A (E A E A C# E) — with a glass Coricidin bottle on his ring finger…

Ten Years After GUITARIST: ALVIN LEE (1969) Captain Speedfingers rides the waves. The 1970 Woodstock film has plenty of guitar moments, from Pete Townshend’s guitar acrobatics to Jimi Hendrix’s “The Star Spangled Banner.” But for sheer giddy delight, nothing tops Alvin Lee’s adrenalinefueled shredding on “I’m Going Home.” “They called me ‘Captain Speedfingers’ and such, but I didn’t take it seriously,” Lee told Guitar World. “There were many guitarists faster than me.” That said, there’s no denying Alvin’s fleet-fingered fretwork, nor his melodicism, which nods to both vintage blues and 1950s rock and roll. “The solo in the movie sounds pretty rough to me these days, but it had the energy, and that was what Ten Years After were all about at the time,” Lee said. “However, I often wonder…

The Rolling Stones GUITARIST: MICK TAYLOR (1971) Love at the improv. Conceived as a blues-funk workout, “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” is an agreeable slab of southern-fried soul from the Stones’ Sticky Fingers album. But the tune became immortalized in the pantheon of guitar solo greats thanks to some masterful improvisation by Mick Taylor, who led the musicians in an extended jam at the song’s end. “It just happened by accident; that was never planned,” he told Guitar Player in 1979. “Towards the end of the song, I just felt like carrying on playing. Everybody was putting their instruments down, but the tape was still rolling and it sounded good, so everybody quickly picked up their instruments again and carried on playing.” Following tenor saxophonist Bobby Keys’ extended solo, Taylor…

Funkadelic GUITARIST: EDDIE HAZEL (1971) The closest anyone got to Hendrix? In the year following Hendrix’s death, the rock press searched for a worthy heir — and most concluded it was Funkadelic’s Eddie Hazel who most deserved the title. “Maggot Brain,” his definitive guitar statement, is a 10-minute improvisation laid down in one take. Like Hendrix, Hazel finds joy in fuzz, wah, whammy and feedback, and he gives himself the space to explore every sound his Fender Strat can make. At five minutes in, it’s nearly clean. By the eight-minute mark, Hazel has produced the most extreme Velcro fuzz tone. He initially recorded the cut with a full band, but Funkadelic leader George Clinton faded most of them out and created the spacey backing on the final track, adding multiple…

Pearl Jam GUITARIST: MIKE McCREADY (1991) The grunge classic that pays tribute to classic rock. Despite being one of grunge’s biggest acts, Pearl Jam have always been more of a classic rock band with a distinctly ’90s aesthetic. Behind the plaid shirts and warbled vocals of Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam are a stadium-rock band hiding in plain sight. Case in point: Mike McCready’s solo in the Ten highlight “Alive” is in fact a homage to Ace Frehley’s solo in Kiss’ 1975 track “She” — which is itself copied from Robby Krieger’s solo in the Door’s “Five to One.” The self-identified plagiarism (at best a compliment, at worst a lawsuit) doesn’t take away from its impact, though, as “Alive”’s laidback riffing and incendiary choruses are the perfect backdrop for McCready to…

Frank Zappa GUITARIST: FRANK ZAPPA (1979) The master’s greatest solo. “Watermelon in Easter Hay” opens side six of the triple album Joe’s Garage, where it’s presented as — in the narrating voice of the record’s Central Scrutinizer — the main character’s dream of “his last imaginary guitar solo.” The title refers to Zappa’s difficulty with a band that overplays: “It’s from the statement that playing a solo with this band is like trying to grow a watermelon in Easter hay,” he explained to one interviewer. “And most of the bands that I’ve had, it was like that. It’s been just recently where I’ve had rhythm sections that don’t get in my way and let me do what I am going to do.” Following the opening narration, the song emerges as…

IF YOU STRUM A ukulele in space, does it make a sound? In Chris Sembroski’s case, it certainly makes a difference. The Air Force veteran won the Generosity seat on the first-ever all civilian crew for SpaceX’s Inspiration4 mission. With a donation to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, the U.S. Space Camp counselor and Lockheed Martin data engineer was entered in the contest that ultimately punched his ticket beyond the stratosphere. He brought a Martin soprano ukulele designed specially for the mission aboard and played it in space. Now that uke, autographed by the entire crew, is being auctioned off during St. Jude’s Virtual Holiday Auction, from November 22 to December 6, as a part of the overriding goal of raising $200 million (see stjude.org for details). The other members…

LOCATED IN AUSTIN, Texas, Modern Vintage offers a series of guitars and basses that are based on ’60s-era Strats, Teles, and J- and P-basses. However, they feature modern updates that include torrified (roasted) maple necks, headstock accessible two-way truss rods, premium electronics and hardware, body and neck binding (on the MVT-64 only) and nine color choices, most of which include matching painted headstocks. All Modern Vintage instruments now feature PLEK process fretboard dressing to ensure the best possible playing setup. This comes at no extra cost, which is a real bonus when you consider what a PLEK treatment can add to the price of an instrument. We received two MVT-64 guitars for this review: a Sea Foam Green model with a rosewood fretboard, and a 3-Color Sunburst with a maple…

TV COPS ARE usually dudes who listen to jazz — y’know… the kind of jazz Ken Burns enjoys. Typically, after a long day of combatting their superiors and being removed from their latest case (while failing to quit smoking), they go home and listen to cool jazz, a preference meant to indicate an intellectual sensitivity to the arts and hidden creative depths. But in actuality, the sultry elegance of jazz doesn’t seem compatible with the usual TV cop clichés, like misogyny, stereotyping, failing to connect with their daughters in the stranglehold of unjust custody restrictions, and serving vigilante lone justice. Wouldn’t something a little more rocking, chaotic and energizing be more appropriate for the typical TV cop during a 70-hour work week? To them — and to you, dear reader…

Pink Floyd GUITARIST: DAVID GILMOUR (1979) Gilmour’s greatness comes through in waves. It’s easy to see why our readers made “Comfortably Numb” the number-one pick in our poll. But the real question is, which of the song’s solos qualifies for inclusion? The fact that Gilmour came up with both on the same track is simply inspired, and all the more reason to support its position at the top. The tone is legendary: Gilmour’s iconic black Strat, then featuring a DiMarzio FS-1 bridge pickup, into a HiWatt DR103, with the essential EHX Ram’s Head Big Muff pedal. The FS-1’s fatness and the Big Muff’s smoothness leave no hint of the harsh treble that can plague Strats. With some extra help from an MXR Dyna Comp, Gilmour had so much sustain that…

Dire Straits GUITARIST: MARK KNOPFLER (1977) An understated guitar hero fingerpicks his way to glory. Right when the world was crowning Eddie Van Halen the new King of Guitar, along came the rather unassuming Mark Knopfler — schooled in rockabilly, blues and jazz — who demonstrated that you didn’t need walls of distortion to turn heads. Knopfler composed this pub-rock classic on a National steel guitar but thought it sounded “dull” — that is, until he picked up a Stratocaster, at which point the song “came alive.” Using nary a hint of grit on a Fender Twin, he fingerpicks not one but two standout solos. The first features a lyrical section of elegant, Chet Atkins–style single-note and chordal bends that sigh and swoon with dreamy romanticism. In itself, that would…

The Beatles GUITARIST: ERIC CLAPTON (1968) An uncredited Slowhand makes a rare guest appearance with the Fab Four. By 1968, George Harrison was penning compositions that rivaled those of his bandmates John Lennon and Paul McCartney. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was every bit as good as anything his musical partners wrote, but no one could get up the enthusiasm for it, so Harrison invited his pal Eric Clapton to play on the session, knowing it would put the Beatles on good behavior. Using Harrison’s 1957 “Lucy” Gibson Les Paul through a Fender Deluxe amp, Clapton doesn’t so much mimic the haunting, aching main melody as he creates a harrowing song within a song. His descending bends and release notes, and that inimitable vibrato, are on full display and are…

Guns N’ Roses GUITARIST: SLASH (1988) A game of two halves. Slash’s solo on this Guns N’ Roses breakthrough single is rock guitar at its finest. The first half is laid-back and modal, built around the Eb minor scale with a few major 7ths thrown in for a harmonic-minor flavor. The second half is much more aggressive and bluesy, and sticks mainly to position one of the pentatonic scale an octave up the neck in the same key. The bends feel that much wider and the vibrato more pronounced. Slash plays the first section on the neck pickup for thickness and warmth before switching over to the bridge for more bite, with his Cry Baby engaged. Perhaps most impressive is his off-the-cuff sense of feel and how he strings it…

Eric Johnson GUITARIST: ERIC JOHNSON (1990) Heavenly tones from the Texan great. This instrumental won Eric Johnson a Grammy for its exquisitely tasteful guitar playing and jaw-dropping tones. For the recordings, the Texan musician mainly stuck with his early ’60s ES-335, though he chose to use his 1964 “Virginia” Strat for the opening lead and parts of the main solo. The guitars were fed into a 100-watt Marshall Super Lead, with an Echoplex and BK Butler Tube Driver to help achieve those smooth, violin-like tones and warm sustain. “I first heard him in 1986 on Live at Austin City Limits,” Joe Bonamassa told us in 2015. “It was ‘Cliffs of Dover,’ and it was just terrifyingly good guitar playing. I wasn’t even sure if it was real! Then I saw…

Steely Dan GUITARIST: ELLIOTT RANDALL (1972) Puts the “thrill” in Dan’s debut — and in one take! Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were sure this track from Steely Dan’s debut, Can’t Buy a Thrill, could be a hit if they could find the right guitar solo to kick it off. So they put in a call to Elliott Randall, with whom they had worked in the backing band for Jay & the Americans, and who had played on many of the duo’s early demos. “They were having trouble finding the right flavor solo for ‘Reelin’,’ and asked me to give it a go,” Randall recalls. “We did it in one take, and nothing was written. Jeff Baxter played the harmony parts, but my entire lead — intro/answers/solo/end solo — was…

AC/DC GUITARIST: ANGUS YOUNG (1980) A master class in structure and phrasing. The way Angus sets up and then winds up his solo here is masterful, with the opening line reccurring twice before climbing up to the fourth position of the E minor pentatonic scale on the seventh fret. From there he heads to the first position an octave up, at the 12th fret, which is where he remains for the rest of the solo until the closing line, which is a higher reprise of that opening idea. Reflecting on his approach to soloing, Angus offered, “If you listen to where you would say, ‘Here comes the guitar solo,’ it’s actually more rhythmic playing. It’s got a little bit of a guitar bite to it, but it’s more of a…

B.B. King GUITARIST: B.B. KING (1969) The definitive minor-blues solo. The King doesn’t waste a moment in this classic track from 1969. Every note is stunning, from the barely audible fills in verse two to his magnificent solos. If you’ve ever wondered how B.B. manages to craft such lyrical lines, it’s because he creates entire phrases with string bends. Those bends offer an infinite range of pitch in which he finds sweet spots that aren’t available on the frets. Just 15 seconds into “The Thrill Is Gone,” he spits out a lick with more subtlety and feeling than most guitarists manage in a career, topped by his peerless vibrato. B.B.’s playing here is a little busier than on many of his classics, but a huge amount of it can be…

Rush GUITARIST: ALEX LIFESON (1981) Alienation and fascination — Alex Lifeson responds to success with guitar poetry. Alex Lifeson has often cited the solo in “Limelight” as his own personal favorite, specifically referencing its sad and lonely qualities and how they reflect the narrative elements of drummer Neil Peart’s lyrics, which detail the isolation he felt amid Rush’s commercial success. Underscoring that point, the solo section seems to exist in its own atmosphere. The time signature shifts, and everything about Lifeson’s guitar playing changes. Instead of the dry, jagged sound he employed on the verses and choruses, his tone becomes spacey and disoriented, an effect he achieved by running his Hentor Sportscaster electric guitar through multiple delays. After hitting a B harmonic, he plays dreamy, elastic notes that cascade over…

The Rolling Stones GUITARIST: KEITH RICHARDS (1968) Keef works some wicked blues voodoo on one of the Stones’ most sinister cuts. With Brian Jones descending into drug addiction and alienation, Keith Richards assumed more of the electric guitar duties in the Rolling Stones, and on “Sympathy for the Devil” he proved to be a formidable force. The band attempted several rhythmic iterations of the song (at first it was more folky) before ultimately deciding on an entirely appropriate and darkly hypnotic samba groove. Richards, who also played bass on the cut, used a 1957 Les Paul Custom through a Vox AC30 for his two bracing solos — a nearly minute-long midsong burst and a two-minute ride at the end — both of which crash through the mix. Stinging and wicked,…

Megadeth GUITARIST: MARTY FRIEDMAN (1990) The Mustaine/Friedman partnership at its very best. Megadeth have had no shortage of great lead guitarists over the years. It’s on the job description — if you want to play with leader Dave Mustaine, you really have to be at the top of your game. One of the reasons for this is because you will have to execute leads crafted by former Megadeth guitarist Marty Friedman when performing live. “Hangar 18” could very well be the most impressive of them all, with no shortage of fingertwisting leads at blazing speeds. The solo is rooted in F# minor pentatonic, but Friedman adds colors that don’t conform to scale. He has a knack for twisting the wrong notes into the right ones — often bending from a…

Black Sabbath GUITARIST: TONY IOMMI (1970) A stone-cold classic combining blues bends and dark mystique. Told that their second album was too short, Black Sabbath quickly wrote a new track that should have been a throwaway. Instead it was “Paranoid,” the early hit that established the group as the dark lords of heavy metal and put the spotlight on Tony Iommi’s ferocious chops. His solo is a masterpiece of blues-scale licks combined with exotic flourishes and tasty bending, most likely played on his favored Gibson SG through a Laney amp. Remarkably, Iommi hated the solo for years, particularly producer Rodger Bain’s decision to swathe his guitar tone in ring modulation, a trick he also applied to Ozzy Osbourne’s voice for “Iron Man.” “At first, I said, ‘What the hell’s that?!…

Joe Bonamassa GUITARIST: JOE BONAMASSA (2007) A 21st century blues classic. Bonamassa’s reputation as a high-octane performer makes his work on this classic cover all the more impressive. Although he easily has the rock chops to match his blues, he never plays fast here. Instead, he relies on his superb note choice, sense of rhythm and vibrato to convey passion, along with some bruising three-fret bends. As always, he lands on notes from the underlying chords at the most opportune moments, while the wah-wah and killswitch effects in verse two mirror the chaotic state of mind shown in the lyrics. Bonamassa’s Les Paul tone is enormous, and when he reaches for the neck pickup for the raked arpeggios at 2:57, every note is gorgeously articulated. Guitar solos account for nearly…

Yngwie Malmsteen GUITARIST: YNGWIE MALMSTEEN (1984) The Swede brings classical grandeur in a genre all his own. Yngwie’s signature track, “Far Beyond the Sun” appeared on his 1984 debut album, Rising Force, and established him as the father of neoclassical shred. With its combinastion of lyricism and blazing shred, the song is an exemplar of the genre he almost single-handedly created. “I was thinking a little bit about Beethoven’s Fifth, rhythmically,” Yngwie told Guitar Player. “I was shamelessly stealing from the greats.” “Far Beyond the Sun” is jam-packed with the tropes of the genre: light and shade, tension and release, and crescendos that explode into flurries of cascading notes. “When I was young I realized that so much rock music was based on five notes, and I wanted to break…

The Beatles GUITARIST: GEORGE HARRISON (1969) The Quiet Beatles’ most expressive guitar moment. Following the sprawling White Album, George Harrison’s songwriting continued to mature into the Abbey Road sessions, culminating in “Something,” one of the most stunning compositions of his career. The symphonic ballad saw Harrison, for a moment at least, outdo fellow songwriters John Lennon and Paul McCartney, with Lennon himself referring to it as the best song on Abbey Road. The simple piece is mostly in the key of C major, moving to A major in the bridge. As eloquent as the song’s words and music, Harrison’s guitar solo is a masterpiece of emotion that he releases with teasing restraint. Just one year before, he’d invited Eric Clapton to record the solo for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”…

Thesopranois the smallest-sized ukulele Martin makes and the same size as the Konter Uke that made the trip to the North Pole in 1926. Thewholebody is made from sinker mahogany, an environmentally friendly wood taken from logs that were submerged in the rivers of Belize more than 200 years ago. The result is a bass-rich sound, with more volume than normal mahogany. Thebridgeand fingerboard are made of FSC certified rosewood. Themissionpatch inlay is made of black gloss acrylic; white G10 (fiberglass); light-gray G10; dark-gray reconstituted stone black mop; dark-blue recon stone dark lapis; teal recon stone chrysocolla; blue Corian.…