Yeah Tim Henson is definitely taking the guitar to some cool places. I remember when he first posted that riff from Goose, I was totally blown away
I’m all ‘metal’ed out’ from my 7 years in a wanna-be regional metal band. It feels like another life from where I am now. Djent isn’t really my thing. I do like what I’ve heard of Polyphia though!! I fell for their click bait trap one day. I don’t even remember what the song was but the video thumbnail was some scantily clad lady. I got what I deserved when my wife yelled at me for it. But the music was actually pretty interesting! I don’t recall any ‘eye-roller’ licks. Hearing the heavy stuff with no vocalist screaming at me like I just ran over his dog was a nice change from what I expected of the genre. Still, nothing as groundbreaking as Guthrie Goven, for sure. I hope all the best stuff hasn’t happened already…but what if it has? Where does that leave us?
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Haha, yeah, you sound like me!
Guthrie was a huge step forward. I was aware of him through the English mag Guitar Techniques, but seeing his success is nice and well deserved. Kiko Lourierro is right there with him in terms of technique, though that is also someone that is 48, so not new either.
Another mid 2000’s guy, Daniele Gottardo is incredible. I remember him posting back in the Harmony Central days as Gottyboy. He is the new ‘Jason Becker’. Precocious, with an incredible ear for classical/romantic melodies and his tapping is next to god tier.
As to new guys, Japan has a lot of guys pushing the limits, Leda is one of many. I’m not super keen on the music, but there is no denying they are pushing the boundaries of technique, from tapping, slapping, and fingerstyle all in one song.
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Another kid to keep an eye on is Matteo Mancuso
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Thanks, he’s good! Seeing a finger style player tear it up is inspiring. Have you ever seen Scotty Anderson? He’s similar to Brett Mason.
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I have not heard of either of those dudes, checking them out right now!
Brent Mason? Just checking and making sure I’m not unaware of some awesome guy with such a similar name 
Some great posts in this thread.
@tommo - I’d extend that analogy to speed in general. A lot of these classic ‘shred’ licks are classics precicely because there are various mechanical reasons why they CAN be played fast, whereas some other stuff can’t. That doesn’t make them better or worse for it, and it’s always worthwhile trying to put your own spin on them (on the rare occasions I do something like the Yngwie 6s pattern, I tend to do it as either a major or natural minor thing rather than play up the harmonic minor aspect like he does, and the Gilbert 6’s pattern which for me is more of a “building block” lick, I’m rarely doing that in position and often shifting around a lot to try to make it a little more unpredictable). But, I think where you run intp problems is when speed stops being a texture to support other stuff, and instead starts to become the “core” of the solo. Maybe Rusty Cooley could play a solo that JUST relied on speed to catch and keep a listener’s attention, but I certainly can’t, so I tend to look at speed - when I’m just not shredding away for the fun of it - as an effect to maybe help create tension and release elsewhere. Guitarists like fast solos, some of them, anyhow, and pretty much no one else does, which is something I’ve been trying to be more aware of in my own writing.
@Tom_Gilroy that makes a lot of sense, and is the best possible reason to stop some of these patterns. 
Let me add a second to Nick Johnston, by the way - “Remarkably Human” is one of my favorite “shred” albums in recent years, it’s all relatively lower gain Strat tones, and he describes his style as, more or less, trying to rip off Yngwie licks using hybrid picking, and really failing. It’s pretty interesting stuff, and a lot of his music has some really good mood to it.
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They’re the 80s-90s OGs of Nashville. If Holdsworth took legato to its limits, Stanley Jordan tapping, Scotty Anderson took fingerstyle. The first solo, he harmonizes himself, using the thumb pick and index finger at incredible speeds. He also just wails at Paul Gilbert speed later on. The guy is truly incredible.
Sorry typo, the left half of my keyboard hardly works.
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I’ve experienced this with the various classic blues licks and pentatonic licks we’ve all heard.
I’ve heard and learned so many blues licks, that I can predict what a typical blues player is going to play before they play it.
I can also predict what a shredder is going to play before they play it.
You have to put some passion in what you play, no matter what.
In my experience, in my 22 years of playing guitar, I’ve experienced more eye rolling licks from the older dad rock guys. The same type of guys who say that those who can play fast have no soul or emotion, that those who learn music theory are hurting their creativity as musicians, and those who like players like Marty Friedman, Yngwie Malmsteen, and such have no taste.
I don’t hate the blues, I just feel players like SRV, BB King, Derek Trucks, and so forth are one in a million players that make the blues cool.
The same can hold true for shred licks. Plenty of soulless shredders, and the players like Steve Vai, Marty Friedman, Randy Rhoads, George Lynch, Yngwie Malmsteen, Joe Stump and such are the ones that make shred cool.
As someone else has said, if you think of music as paint by numbers, it gets real boring, real fast, regardless of genre.
If we keep to what music is, that is, it’s a form of expressive art that uses and manipulates sound, then no matter what you play, blues, soul, fast, slow, will sound good.
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it depends where you go looking for your music, whether it be technicians (Instagram shredders) or musicians in actual bands. It’d no surprise that you would have this experience if, for example, you are listening to major label bands or stock social media shredders. There is nothing wrong with those things, it’s just that higher up you go with this stuff the more likely it is to be calculated and generic and overdone for the masses. Guitar technique, bands, or otherwise. Why does it seem overdone? Because these are the people that - for whatever reason - are being perceived as more important, and then everyone rushes to imitate them. And then things quickly become watered down as others rip them off and create facsimiles.
Many of the people who are pushing boundaries you won’t hear about until they blow up. And then they, too, become the guys standing on the shoulders of giants in short order as the next group comes along.
For example: Misha Mansoor, Jake Bowen, and I think even Tosin Abasi were posting on the SMN Forums years ago and released the Animals as Leaders debut album demos as some sort of holiday gift to the forum before its actual release. Keep in mind this was like 12 years ago so my memory is fuzzy. It was a pretty obscure metal forum with a really abrasive and offensive culture, but the amount of friends, music recommendations, and I made from there was nuts. Nothing I saw on that forum music-wise was generic, but I promise you if I was reading major metal magazines and reading what the metal journalists were pushing at the time, I would have had the same frustrations with generic shred licks and song arrangements.
There is always creative (read: not necessarily groudbreaking) music being made by someone, somewhere. The question is do they care enough to make it heard or do they have enough luck or whatever.
The mentality that “It’s all been done before, no one else is doing things in an interesting way!” is pretty absurd. Guitar shredding can be very derivative in general because the amount of work required to play guitar quickly is staggering, and many players rip licks from one another as a means of speeding up the learning process. You don’t know what works until you can play it. I can hear most tricks used by fast players, but that doesn’t mean I don’t find their melodic sensibilities to be incredible, which often overrides the generic sequential structure of what they are playing. It is what it is.
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Re: OP: yes. I don’t really listen to any rock music with guitar solos, or very, very little, which might make me part of a minority in this forum, but am very much interested in guitar picking technique. I did a whole lot when I was younger, and I respect a solid solo for sure.
It’s certainly very subjective. But after a while all the shred stuff started to sound really goofy to me. It’s definitely a lot of fun to watch and interesting to learn about the mechanics, but there isn’t much I can enjoy listening to anymore.
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Bulb was just this kid posting really interesting percussive metal riffing to the Petrucci forum for years before Periphery became an actual band, and while I’m no fan of djent, it’s mostly because of the hordes of less-creative immitators posting “mixtests” of 0-0-0-1-0-1-0 riffing and spamming their YouTube channels hoping to be the next Periphery - the band itself was doing interest things (though obviously the influence Meshuggah and Sikth had on them can’t be understated).
That kind of speaks to a broader point of this thread - ANY time you seem to be playing stuff that’s entirely things that you’ve already heard other people do, and not putting a new spin on it or presenting it in a fresh angle or doing something different, you’re probably going to lose people. The world doesn’t need another Paul Gilbert any more than the world needs another Misha Mansoor.
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You just engaged my PTSD I acquired after reading the sevenstring.org forum in 2010.
“MIX TEST (SD2.0/BKP/BLACKMACHINE/AXEFX)”
unnecessary drum fill intro
0-0101-101-1–11010101-11010101010101011-10101001010010101-1-1
So, yeah, that’s the same group of buddies, we ran that one until… maybe 2012, when we sold it? We hated that shit too. Despite the associations of seven strings as a “nu metal” and later “djent” instrument, most of the mod team were thrash players, and I was a weird hybrid of blues and shred.
It got to the point where I kind of had to try to appreciate the more interesting and creative “djent” bands because I was so burned out on all tose stupid mixtests. To this day, nothing sets me off faster in any conversation about recording than someone making a reference to making some tweaks to their “recording template” where they just save all their VSTs and plugins as presets and every “mix” is just dropping in a new set of DI tracks and some new MIDI.
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I get what you’re saying but I agree with someone above who stated that these typical shreddy licks generally lend themselves to that nature because they seem more built for that and that’s probably why more people end up doing them. But to each their own. Ultimately, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. For me, I generally like the way “fast shred” licks sound in general more so than their musicality. Like Paul Gilbert hitting some ascending Sixes just sounds cool to my ears and I dont really mean musically, maybe it’s the percussive nature. So whenever I mix in a fast shred into my playing, I mix it into other slower musical phrases and go for a different feel. Im no pro, but Ive learned everything ultimately has its place.
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To the OP: yes, jeez learning this stuff can drive you nuts; I’m so sick of some of the Yngwie cliches, but I still work on his ability to come up with quickly improvised sections like this one:
None of his typical stuff seems like the kind of stuff we worked on growing up but played here (Far beyond the sun… ) at a ridiculous clip. That Chris Brooks book on 100 licks is a damn good collection, sure some are cliches but as others have said, if you can meld them the right way, it can be rewarding.
This is so important when I’m practising there are those moments where you’re on fire, you know you gave it 100%, live for those! It’s why we play. I always say play with gumption.
This has been me for a while, I think I gave up on new stuff 10 years ago. Not a fan of djent or the tapping tone. I keep going back to old music; either live jazz-rock gigs from the 70s (McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Scofield… ), baroque era (Biber/bach) or stuff like song-oriented Rush etc. I still enjoy the 80s stuff especially when I’m under the influence 
I keep telling myself once I’m feeling better about the last sections of the FBTS track, I’m going all out on bach’s double concertos or that direction in general, and some “original” work. Or may throw the towel in and just learn jazz standards for a while. Sit with the Ted Greene book Modern Chord Progressions, few know that’s the book to use, the Chord Chemistry book is just a dictionary, the other book give it all context.
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It’s funny, I don’t really listen to music for enjoyment all that often, but when I do it tends to be singer songwriters. :
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I have seasons of ear cleansing, its just too much to list, but instrumental non rock music is a huge part of it. Though I spent all evening yesterday listening to Humble Pie and Rush, and Celine Dion