h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've submitted an Entry to the Collaborative Writing Workshop on guitar heroes (A3384317) and I'd like to get some other people's ideas on what makes a guitar hero.

I'm not looking for a list of guitarists, but the reasons why they stopped being just "blokes (or chicks) who play the guitar" and became classed as guitar heroes.

If you have any thoughts, please let me know, either here or in the conversation in the CWW (F57152?thread=543854)

When I've got enough feedback (or it runs out of steam) I'll write it all up and credit everyone who contributes



Danny B.

Good things:

Ability to express a genuine feeling of emotion (whether it be anger, pain, love, happiness etc) purely through the instrument.

A unique style or technique- most of the best guitarists can instantly be recognised just by listening to a few notes they play.

Good guitarists show a mastery of the instrument- as if it's a tool, and the player has spent his whole life improving on it's use. With a guitar God, it's impossible to determine where the person ends and the guitar begins- it's just an extra limb, and it's doing nothing but what it evolved to do.

True variety in the work they produce- not just the same solo song after song.

TK[1]

Excellent - just the sort of thing I'm looking for

If you can suggest particular guitarists who embody the things you're referring to, please do!

Jimi Hendrix and Brian May fit all of them. Eric Clapton too.

TK[1]

I think Hendrix is a name that's going to crop up again and again in this respect. There's an Entry on him, but it's very biographical and says little about what made him a great guitarist.

Personally, I'm not keen on his *music*, but can see appreciate why he's such a guitar legend.

Nice to see Brian May mentioned as well

Originality. It doesn't matter if you can do any techical thing you want with a guitar if it ain't original. The man that best represents this to me is B.B. King. His music and his techniques can be heard in just about every guitar great's best work for the last sixty years. Without B.B. and those if his ilk, there never would have been rock & roll.

And calling your guitar 'Lucille' has got to help in the guitar hero stakes

Brian May has to be high in the Guitar God stakes. Anybody who saw him at the Queen's Birthday Pop Concert a year or two will agree. May stood on the roof of Buckhingham Palace in his white suit and played God Save the Queen in classic Queen style. A moment to remember.

Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin is another - the guitarist's guitarist. Always at the forefront of what a guitar was capable of, Page pioneered all sorts strange sounds, tunings, just about everything.

Mark Knopfler - effortless playing, always the right phrase at the right time. He made it all seem so effortless.

One person I was surprised by was Les Paul - the designer of the second most popular guitar of all time was an unassuming showman, who played a style which is totally old fashioned and alien to the rockers of today, being a sort of cross between hillbilly and 40s dance band.

Brian May again!

May is also important for his guitar orchestrations - he writes polyphonic music for guitar like no-one else, particularly on the early Queen albums when they proudly proclaimed "no synths" and used layers and layers of guitar lines to build up orchestral sounds.

Glad you mentioned Mark Knopfler, Gnomon! Not only that DNA would be pleased, but he is one guitarist I could sit and *watch* for hours, even with the sound turned down. His fingerpicking style is incredible and, as you say, effortless. Another guitarist with an odd technique is Lyndsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac - I remember seeing a live show (I think it was the 'reunion' show, which was televised about 6 years ago) in which he seemed to play almost exclusively using his thumb, even when playing quite fast, complex solos.

Les Paul opens up another tangent as well - can guitar designers such as Les Paul and Leo Fender be classed as guitar heroes?

From a posting above: "A unique style or technique- most of the best guitarists can instantly be recognised just by listening to a few notes they play."

This is so true! Was just talkin' about this yesterday with some bandmates. Santana, Zappa, Braian May, Knopfler are good examples.

A genuine Guitar hero, IMO, is however more than that. He's not just a skilled performer, or creator of an unique style, but also adds another dimension to guitar playing. Gilmour or George Harrison did not produce the most 'bitchen' solos out there, yet the musicality of their solos makes them - for me - Guitar heroes.

I think a guitar hero, first of all, has to be able to communicate through his guitar. If he does that via dexterity, melody, attitude, with his butt or on an classical guitar is of secondary importance.

HELL

Oh, I didn't mean to say that that was all that makes a guitar hero, just that it's just one feature that's observable in all of them.

TK[1]

Angus Young. Not really for what he played, but for what he didn't. He is a master of melody in a few notes. AC/DC proved that you don't need lightning fast solos and intricate guitar work to make music that is classic and instantly recognizable, and they did that playing heavy metal.

Angus Young has been mentioned in the other thread on this topic (the one at the CWW: F57152?thread=543854), but that was in relation to his on-stage gimmicks (the schoolboy outfit etc.)

I agree entirely with your comments about Angus's technique (although I think his brother Malcolm has to take a lot of the credit for the AC/DC sound as well).

Not sure I'd class AC/DC as heavy metal, though... Hard rock, perhaps? Is there a difference..? Confused now!

Wisemen fight over this topic. Back in 1984 the same folks that loved Maiden also loved AC/DC. Back then they had no problem putting AC/DC's music in the Heavy Metal drawer. From a modern perspective, they probably weren't Heavy Metal, though...

HELL

They are heavy metal in the same sense as Black Sabbath. What we have today is more of a speed metal/death metal approach to the music.

I'd also like to mention James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett for their amazing guitar work that poineered the speed metal genre as well as the sheer beauty of what they play. The complexity of what they play effortlessly astounds me daily.

I am a diehard Metallica fan, so you may want to ignore that last comment.

Perfectly valid comment, even if it is Metallica

I don't think those two count as 'Universal' Guitar Heroes, as I imagine most people will never have heard of them, but speed metal is obviously a guitar-based genre and therefore worthy of a mention in an Entry

I don't mean to be contrary, but I do know who James Hetfield and Kirk Hammet are and.... I'm sorry, I just can't see anything extra special about them. They are /good/ guitarists, in my opinion, and no more. I couldn't class them as guitar heroes because they do nothing which, to my mind and ear, sticks out from anything else. O.k, they have a pretty definitive sound, but there's nothing /amazing/ about it.

That's just my opinion.

On a related note, /are/ there any guitarists who are universally accepted as guitar heroes by everyone? I mean, I've even met people who don't see Jimi Hendrix as anything special, yet to most he's considered the granddaddy of guitar gods.

TK[1]

Robert Johnson. Sure he only recorded 23 or so tracks during the turn of the century (the 20th that is), but his work influences every guitarist you care to name. If there is such a thing as a guitar god, he would definately fit the bill.

hey its looking good

a couple of my guitar heros well 3

slash (guns n roses)

mark knopfler (dire straits)

hank marvin

The concept of a 'Universal' guitar hero is one that's come up on the other thread as well. So, I'll copy the reply I've just given there (which gives me less typing to do )

-------

I'd like to include as many 'types' of guitar hero as possible, but I still think that there is an *almost* 'universal' character that many people think of when you say 'guitar hero', and this corresponds to Hendrix et al.

[...] some of the things that make a 'guitar hero' are appropriate to all genres - a guy who can't play for toffee is no more going to become a bluegrass hero than he is a rock legend...

At the moment (and this is liable to change) I see the structure of the Entry as something like:

The things important for a guitar hero are:

1. Technique - some examples of guitarists with fantastic technique are Derek Rockgod, who plays incredibly fast solos, Chet Country, who practically invented modern fingerpicking style, Django Jazz who... etc.

2. Personality - and so on...

I think there are always going to be disagreements about who is a guitar hero and who isn't, which is why I'm more interested in what elements make up a guitar hero, rather than just a list of names.