A guitar that dry and direct usually sounds pretty icky to most people, but what’s really good about it sometimes is that you can really hear everything. That includes hearing that he is picking pretty lightly during his fast runs.
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Yeah - he’s got an extremely light pick attack, I’m not so much a fan of that and it feels like the harpsichord unisons in his writing are kind of compensatory there. The main thing I like about his playing are his economy and sweeping patterns, his 2 string pedal tone runs are something you don’t see a lot and definitely a technique I’ve spent some time adopting.
Great topic! “Better” is relative…
Nothing tops Yngwie’s early stuff for me, as a fan of neoclassical.
Michael Romeo is superb. Cesario Filho is brilliant.
Those guys stand out as some of the best “newer” players of the genre for me.
I love Gus G, such a great mixture of technical ability and creativity.
To me the best players always use their speed and technique tasteful and artfully with great phrasing and expression.
This guy is fantastic:
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Josh Middleton is great, Sylosis is a great band. All Shall Perish was also pretty incredible- I’m not sure if he’s up to anything anymore but Chris Storey the guitarist for most of the bands history was a pretty accomplished player. His subsequent project never really took off.
Another one I don’t see mentioned often is Paul Masvidal. His playing is pretty compelling and brings a tinge of Holdsworth to progressive metal
Then there’s Tom Monda of Thank You Scientist who’s pretty damn wild on the fret less guitar
This forum tends towards favouring 80s metal and neoclassical, which isn’t surprising.
But there are a bunch of amazing new guitarists in other genres, too.
Pasquale Grasso on the jazz side of things is doing stuff I never thought was possible on guitar, playing very pianistic bebop lines; it’s insane. He’s also probably the most accomplished hybrid picker around at the moment.
Josh Martin from Little Tybee is just as technically gifted and innovated as Tosin Abasi, perhaps even more so - the stuff that he’s done with tapping, for example, is insane. He uses it in a progressive folk band, which is great.
As for creativity, the stuff that the folks in King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are doing, especially on stuff like Flying Microtonal Banana, is awesome and definitely way out of the realm of the stuff EVH and Yngwie were doing in the 80s.
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No to be contentious, but could you give some specific examples of this?
I wasn’t familiar with Josh, but I’ve watched a few videos. From what I’ve seen, what he’s doing isn’t radically different Stanley Jordan has been doing since the mid '70s, or the Michael Hedges inspired school of acoustic players have been doing since the early '80s. Regi Wooten has been combining tapping with thumping/slapping/popping for decades too.
No worries, I can understand your concerns.
I think the big one is specifically what he’s called glitch tapping - using tapping from either hand to achieve a tremolo effect on a single note. I’ve messed with it a bit myself and it’s very difficult, and that’s with my dominant hand (I’m a lefty who plays righty). See the linked video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCTRCG20Jb4
He does some other stuff that I’ve never really seen anyone else use, like understrumming (which he also mentions in the video linked).
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I think I’ve seen something akin to the “glitch tapping” before, but used as an infrequent ornamentation rather than a tremolo technique to build themes around. I think I’ve seen T. J. Helmerich use this idea on certain licks, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Chapman Stick players using essentially the same thing. I also feel like I’ve seen this done with two fingers in some modern acoustic playing.
The “understrumming” is definitely something I’ve seen before. I’m very sure I’ve seen some acoustic players doing this, and I’ve experimented with something like this myself before in that context. I’m not totally sure who I saw doing this, but I think it was Antonio Forcione.
Again, I’m not trying to be contentious and I definitely don’t intend to undermine Josh his playing. He very likely independently discovered these ideas for himself. To me it just seems that much of this style that Josh (and Tosin, etc) is an amalgamation or evolution things which have been around for quite a while.
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As far as introducing that tapping mechanic, though in an atonal way, Buckethead comes to mind as the earliest “glitch tapping” in the outro of Welcome to Bucketheadland, which apparently he attributes to trying to mimic some particular Shawn Lane runs
And I remember seeing this from Alan “Robot” Van Wert on his old geocities pages in the early 2000s.
He basically took some of the “video game” tapping Buckethead did and systematized it To make his guitar sound like an early game console/dying modem
Not to detract from this other use of it which is I think, a more traditionally musical application. He just didn’t invent any new technique, rather combined a couple existing ones. Though honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if Buckethead already had something combining slap guitar and glitch tapping considering he does both and has a million albums I’ll never listen to - here’s a fun slap guitar solo of his from a while back
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I think the name “glitch tapping” is specifically referring to repeated tapping of the same note with different fingers to produce a tremolo effect. I don’t see Buckethead doing that in these videos.
The story is that Shawn made some tapes where he edited together some sequences of notes which he thought were impossible to play on guitar. The idea was to emulate Conlon Nancarrow’s compositions for modified player pianos (something like “Black MIDI” today). Somehow, Buckethead obtained copies of those tapes, and thought Shawn was really playing those sequences, and he started the 8-finger tapping stuff in attempt to play those edited sequences.
I could absolutely believe that he’s done the “glitch tapping” tremolo technique before and combined it with slap/thump. He has so much recorded output, I’ll never listen to all of it.
This is T. J. Helmerich in 1988:
And this is Stanley Jordan in 1986:
Supposedly, he’d been doing the two handed tapping for a decade at that point already, making his first album in the '80s.
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True with Buckethead, the closest thing is when he’s hitting the same initial note with two right hand fingers in places, he’s typically adding a slide in on both taps which is distinct from a purposely tremolo sound.
Alan Van Wert takes that to an extreme to get things like the Atari/NES effects.
Yeah I just found this from when he was in Falling In Reverse - i wouldn’t say he was ahead of 80’s guitarists at all, but on par with many top ones
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A little known fact about Falling In Reverse is that they almost went with “Ascending” as a band name.
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I remember I bought the ultimate picking program off Allen Van Wert years ago. It was an A.I type program he designed for picking practice and exercises.
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I think this thread makes me realize I suck more than I thought lol.
I know what you mean. I’ve spent the better part of my lifetime trying to be an accomplished player. Seeing how big the ocean really is, I’ll never be above mediocre. I should probably change my profile to average_joe
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I’m a huge 80s hair metal fan but the one thing I never grew to like was insane sweeping and tapping. Fire, alternate picked licks mixed in with everything else is what I love from the hair metal! This guy is very good though!
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I definitely prefer a bit of sweep picking interspersed with some other stuff rather than “up the arpeggio, down the arpeggio, up the next arpeggio…”
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MAB? It seems very similar to the solo from Freight Train in terms of techniques used.
More recently, and I’m sure he’s just not quite physically where he was in 1989:
He actually came to my mind when I saw that post. I guess players of this caliber in general, it’s tough to say “yeah this guy can do all the things this other guy does”. We’re probably splitting hairs.
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