So since Wintersun has already been mentioned and I’m lately on a CoB run again I’m going for this:
3 Likes
KtS is great. I’m partial to Hate Crew Deathroll: I think that’s where Bodom really hit their stride in terms of the sass/tech balance. This one in particular, I’ve queued it to the solo.
2 Likes
Oh yes absolutely! What stuck with me from Hatebreeder was always this thingy from Sixpounder. It’s not the actual solo of the track but it’s so sick. Also you could tell Alexi was into the Paul Gilbert string skipped arpeggio stuff:
2 Likes
This is almost what I posted instead of the title track! I love that little break.
1 Like
I’ll bite…but I’m cheating to say any solo by my longtime friend JD Simo. He’s 12 years younger than me and I want to be like him when I grow up!
Here’s one of my favorite songs in his catalog from 2016…”Long May You Sail”. Exquisite song with great vocals and every note of this song is heaven for me, not just the great leads. The guy is the king of great guitar tone, dynamics and improvisation with absolute soul behind everything. ZERO to do with shred, though he can keep up with anyone you can name in that department.
Another one:
1 Like
I had to seek for the solo but that solo and tone may have instantly converted me into a Strat wanter. Wtf is that tone
On a similar groove as Chris Buck with the groovy bounce:
Yeah, I’m not really a big neoclassical or shred-for-the-sake-of-shred guy either, but I DO have a lot of respect for anyone taking something to about the furthest extensions of what’s possible. In the guitar world, that gets you Rusty Cooley, Shawn Lane, and maybe a handful of other guys… but not many.
The problem here though is this becomes INCREDIBLY subjective. I for one never really cared for Bohemian Rhapsody, great band, great musicians, deserve the respect they get, but if someone asked me to make a list of most “epic” solos in rock music, this wouldn’t rank.
Your favorite solos very well may be from the 80s, and that’s great. But it’s not like 80s solos were somehow “better” than anything that came before or after; your personal taste just leans that way. Which is totally cool, but lots of other people’s doesn’t, and that’s also totally cool.
3 Likes
yeah, if someone asked me to name teh most e 
ic rock solo!111 i would probably link this
which is, uh, a little niche, but I stand by it.
2 Likes
Isn’t that Rusty’s band? 
What a weird opening, with that sort of stilting, then repeating figure. Super effective though for something called “prelude to madness,” it IS oddly mocking. And dear god that’s a lot of gain. 
That somehow did make me think of another post-2000 solo that I found oddly emotive…
WILD song, at baseline, but (and this is more effective if you do listen all the way through first) then there’s that changeup at about 3:05. At first it’s still, if maybe less tonally jarring, still jackhammer heavy… but then 30 seconds later the intensity drops, and just after the 4 minute mark, a legitimately beautiful guitar line comes in.
I think this outro is gorgeous, personally.
3 Likes
@Drew Hell yes! 3’05 is so groovy. Truly the masters of rough jazz. I always love the Holdsworth tone of Frederik’s solos
1 Like
They were better IMHO because at that time there was massive talent in the space due to the popularity of guitar-oriented music. If one looks at the shred space, there are something like 1% or less of the guitarists that played back in the day (normalized by sales volume)? That’s why.
That said, you make many excellent points, and are certainly right that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. My taste is funny, while I love many fringe songs, I usually like big hits, and this is likely because they sold in such volumes for good reason.
Oh, I’ll leave another one here. I refuse to queue up the solo because the entire song is gorgeous. Well after 2000 and as well-written as anything from the 80s. It’s just harder to find this stuff since guitar is less popular.
1 Like
Since good ol’ Fredrik came up, and maybe some of you haven’t heard it, I’ll post the “33 Demo”, which was initially rumored to be some sort of Special Defects 2 thing (it’ll be Sol Niger Within’s 30th anniversary next year, egad!). Anyway, lots of neat Holdsworthian phrases here in this 2 and a half minute guitar solo.
EDIT: oh, and I’ll have to think of some Per Nilsson to add here, since he’s one of the absolute best of the post 2000 guys, imo.
2 Likes
Thanks to this thread I’ve been paying a lot more attention to solos, and here is a recent one (2009?) one that works well for me:
About as far as shred as possible, but this solo is special.
2 Likes
Ok, but by that metric the most epic, influential, and important guitarist of the last 20 years is Taylor Swift, and while I’ll confess to rather liking “Folklore,” if that were really true then we’re all wasting our time here, right?
You’re making a subjective determination. That’s cool, but then trying to paint it as factual, “solos were better in the 80s, and sales volume proves that,” really misses the point. We, as guitarists, have tastes. they often differ from mainstream tastes. That’s awesome, too, because it really helps contribute to the variety of different music we get to enjoy.
Looking at Spotify, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is only a couple hundred thousand streams behind “Bohemian Rhapsody,” while we’re at it, and I can say with confidence it inspired a whole generation of guitarists because I was one of them. I’m sure you just overlooked it, though, and it was already on your list of truly epic solos. 
I LOVE Tom Waits. To this I’d also add the slide riff on “Jesus Gonna Be Here,” and the harmonica solo on “Come On Up To The House,” which I doubt I remember it all now but I absolutely learned on guitar because of that slurred bluesy opening.
Another desert island album of mine, for sure.
2 Likes
Smells Like Teen Spirit was from 1991, an era of guitar-driven music. My main point here is that during times when guitar is an important mainstream instrument, a lot of great minds will be directed towards it, and the results will be a huge amount of wonderful music, including not only epic solos, but awesome fringe content as well. It’s a numbers game, really, the more participants, the better. Guitar, for the moment, doesn’t seem to be represented very well in popular music —and definitely not with regard to virtuoso solos — but it should eventually come back.
I still think you’re criminally underrating what’s been going on in the guitar world since the 80s, or even 90s, though, and you’re missing out opn some truly incredible playing under the guise of sort of a vaguely, oh, anti-elitist “popular stuff is better” intellectual spin on “back in my day music was better.” Like the stuff you like, by all means, but honestly I think the state of the guitar world IS better today than it was in 1987.
My daughter is just shy of two years old, more or less. She is NOT a sophisticated understander of music. but she knows what she likes. That includes telling her parents what nursury rhymes she wants them to sing to her, “up up up,” means she wants us to pl;ay her “Golden” from K-Pop Demon Hunters, and “oh-yeah” which is, we’re not entirely sure why, what she calls a guitar. Despite my mostly playing my acoustic for her, every once in a while I’ve played my electric for her, or played her some of the album I’m working on. So, she’s had some exposure.
Lately, 've been leaving Steven Wilson’s “The Raven That Refused To Sing” in my car, and on the way to work while listening to “The Watchmaker,” Guthrie Govan broke into his solo, and sure enouhg, from the backseat, “dada! oh-yeah! oh-yeah!” I’m a solid 99.9% sure she doesn’t think that’s actually me, because he’s way too good, but my main point here is she’s just over 20 months old and it’s a solo good enough to make her sit up and notice.
Solo starts at 5:05 or so - sort of a very fusiony, sprt of exploratory thing, but it’s cool and there are some wild runs in there:
That said, if you want to talk about Govan’s playing with Wilson, his solo early in Ancestral from Hand. Cannot. Erase. is as good as he gets I think:
Just after the 4:00 mark. Chorus beforehand is killer too, though there’s not really any guitar there. 2015, and if you want an “epic” solo, this is it.
Jeff Loomis got some love earlier on in the thread, but for more “epic” leads since 2000, I’d toss out pretty much everything he played on “The Heart Collector” from Dead Heart in a Dead World:
Main lead starts around 3:15.
There’s some really great stuff being done these days. Hell, Angel Vivaldi’s “Away With Words Pt. 2” is one of the best guitar albums I’ve heard in years, in part because of how unexpected it is.
2 Likes