Satch is one of the most melodic players out there, among virtuoso and let’s just say ‘average’ players. He’s no average Joe (I am though lol!). And surprise surprise, he’s also one of the most ‘popular’ (i.e. biggest selling) of the virtuoso crowd.
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There’s been some really great points from previous writers. From a guitar player point of reference, I think there is no ‘boring’ per say, unless the style becomes overly redundant, (same darn tempos) and even, then, I can tolerate more than most, IF there is a connection to the underlying harmony. I really hope it is okay that perhaps, David Gilmour can’t play overly fast, that he didn’t decide, heck, I should never pick up guitar if I can’t ‘compete’ with so and so of his time. I stepped away for 13 years because I couldn’t figure out how to play the way I envisioned, (fast and flawless) which is what most you guys probably do already, hear it and execute, even at 200bpm. I am amazed at how much I have improved in my last 10 years, but I kind of think I likely won’t be able to deal with tension to execute my lines at 200bpm, I now realize, there is much I can say on guitar, even if I can’t be ‘that’ player. I am developing my own thing because I will never be good enough to be anyone but myself, and I’m finding that it is not so bad, finally! This bmp is arbitrary but I think most would agree that 200 is a ‘shredder’ zone for 16ths. I’m talking about me, sorry about that, but only to give context to this discussion. It gives me greater appreciation because the instrument IS challenging, so I unify with all guitar players, as a whole.
If we all can’t play hyper fast, we are not lazy slackers, its just that guitar can be humbling for others and to some, it is not the end game.
Back to DG and (not vs) YM. There is so much to enjoy, I find the emotion can be equally felt when I listen to slow players or fast players. I love speed, BUT, I also like it when JP, or MF, or MS-UFO milk those hair raising bent notes with beautiful vibrato and control.
I will say, that I find it is much easier for my (slow moving mind) to process a slower amount of notes. Fortunately, with the technically proficient players, I certainly understand/completely appreciate what they are doing most of the time as I can do some of it as well, but at reduced speeds, not sure about the string noise thought, argh.
I love/connect with good quality sound, performance, tone, and control of the instrument. I am slightly snobbish/biased toward very good technically amazing players, but I also have an appreciation for other players who get it done using less notes. I think both can be equally effective. Why? Because there are people from all walks of life, with different emotional connections to music so there will always be people who appreciate different aspects of music. In the end, its different strokes for different folks. So glad we had the musical diversity back in the 60-70’s so we could have this discussion.
I actually feel so much from players who (with confidence) can combine both the melodic phrases with complex lines and phrasing.
I’m sure I missed some points for which I apologize in advance.
I will support, or stand up for anyone who has the courage to be an ‘artist’ and live what they love and love what they live.
Music is a journey, it is even to my skeptic mind, not an olympic event, and I love my technical players, after all, I am on this site for a reason.
If its boring, find something that is not boring. Or, look deeper in to the player’s music and hopefully we can all find something to appreciate without unnecessary judgement.
I will toss this out there, I think phrasing is something that gets overlooked too often. I think the way a player phrases lines is really what makes he/she the most interesting and unique. Off beat accents as opposed to everything starting on beat 1 down beat. I think Jeff Kollman does this amazingly well.
I spent way too much time typing this message. Again, I apologize if I missed the point of the initial poster. I will try to do better at staying on point in the future. I don’t have the heart to delete after all the time spent writing it. Could’ve played a thousand extra notes on guitar by now.
In the end, I love this challenging instrument and appreciate being in the company of my fellow guitar community. This exciting instrument is my therapy. Happy woodshedding.
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Guthrie Govan concurs.
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Music has the power to touch people, make them feel something, tell a story, take you on a journey… and Gilmour is a master of that using his guitar. And anyone who thinks that all you have to do is play slow and simple blues based licks to do that, we’ll go ahead and try! When there is so much space and little going on you are much more exposed, nothing to hide behind. It becomes more obvious what is good and what is not. Similar to saying that it’s easy to write pop song- just a few chords- but it’s hard to write a good one. Another example not mentioned here is Brian May, also brilliant with melody but more flashy than Gilmour. It’s good to remember that as guitarists it can be hard to hear music the same way as non-musicians. We are too focused on the trees to see the forest. We need to let go of all the things we work so hard to be able to do, because in the end nobody cares except other guitarists. Making music that makes people feel something is what it’s all about.
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Shredding is fun, and it’s appealing to other guitarists. Most people want to hear music, not speed olympics and flexing.
I learn to play fast just so I have it in my toolbox. But that stuff rarely makes it into my songs.
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I write for an audience that’s primarily me, my mother, and approximately six other people. F it, I play the stuff I want to, and don’t really care if anyone else likes it. 
(but, kidding aside, yeah, absolutely, I hear you. 
)
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It’s been really good to study this as I have found as I have learnt some things form analysing Gilmour’s playing - e.g. making vibrato a bit more subtle. He really does a great job with it. It really is nice to solo over Comfortably Numb and see how it sounds! I really focus on playing slower which I actually really enjoy. It is good to take a break sometimes from practising Malmsteen licks too!
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I think this is a really important point - people like Gilmour because of what he plays AND because of what he’s playing over.
Everyone goes nuts for that one bit in the Regret #9 solo, but always credit Guthrie and not the songwriting/arrangement that pulled the performance out of him.
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I always bring up Knopfler, as he is the nail in this foolishness.
Listen to the later solos in “Telegraph Road”
And lets not forget possibly the best “improvement” in a career. Tipton/Downing who went from this
to this
in 12 years time!
There are many “blues” type players that feature such “shred” moments in their playing, Slash in the tail end of “Paradise City” or “November Rain” comes to mind.
Billy Gibbons’ take on “shred” in the 80s
Brian May
It’s interesting that Gilmour’s “fame” with the guitar community is largely localized to his 70s work (selection bias much). Aside from these tunes the second being a very killer lap steel solo his playing post 70s is very ignored.
This has always been a false dichotomy in my opinion.
Likely bred as an ego protection of those that had a chip on their shoulder over not being “good enough” during the 80s shred boom and as things on forums tend to do it spirated out into insane exaggeration.
Were there shredders that are unlistenable wank? sure, I won’t name names and most of them recorded well past the 80s in metal bands of the most generic and derivative of natures that 15 people listen to.
Does this critique apply to Malmsteen, Gilbert, Becker, Johnson, Friedman, Rhoads, Buckethead, Batio et. al?
No, it never has only those that have never listened to their music would apply this critique.
The aforementioned playing is loaded with melody, the shred is merely the “frosting” on the cake.
If you don’t like instrumental music, fine.
This critique has always been based in the grossest of musical ignorance.
If you can’t hear melody at high speeds, fine but don’t lambast those that can out of ignorance.
and the king imo
/rant
(this topic absolutely grinds my gears)
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I mean, let me start by saying that I absolutely agree you can play “melodic” solos with quite a lot of fast bits in them - I wrote up a whole post about it a little up the page - nd that I also think there’s a tendency in certain schools of music to automatically discount anything “fast” as “not having feeling,” and that’s silly and - yes - probably a little self-protective, too.
But, there’s a pragmatic side of this question too, and whether or not it’s a position of ignorance to lambast people who can hear melody at fast speeds just because you can’t, well,
- there’s clearly a whole boatload of people who can’t hear melody at high speeds, based on how prevalent these attitudes are, and just because we think they’re wrong doesn’t mean they’re going to stop existing, and
- a lot of fast playing often times DOES sacrifice melody for speed. The best in the genre can do both, absolutely, but being able to play melodically at any tempo is a rare enough skill that probability alone dictates there’s gonna be a bunch of shredders out there who are just mindlessly blowing scale patterns, because they have plenty of technical ability, but an underdeveloped melodic ability.
So, yeah, false dichotomy… but one we can still learn from, I think, and simply expecting everyone else to realize they’re wrong probably isn’t going to work, or at a minimum saves us from a valuable growing experience.
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This is why I’m such a fan of those that perfectly ride the melody vs speed/technicality balance.
There are a boatload of people that can’t hear melody at all at this point due to popular music shifting further and further towards rhythm and away from melody.
Modern metal from nu metal onward to djent is a good example, hyper focused on rhythm, melody in the background if at all present.
I’ve heard “I can’t get into classical cause there is no beat” far too many times from people.
I would argue Japan has largely escaped this trend in western popular music which might go to explain their affinity for all things melodic in metal (power metal, shred, etc) and the deep love of western baroque to romantic era music in Japan.
It seems Schoenberg finally got his wish, the dissonance is emancipated. So emancipated that there is no dissonance as there is no consonance for dissonance to be contrasted to. There is now just a menacing trap beat that goes on forever, the melody is dead. 
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Agree - the Gilmour effect as you see it in arguments about shredding seems to always reference Comfortably Numb. The two (his playing and the song) are inextricably linked I think in the context of the argument.
Another interesting thing is to read comments about this solo (for example in the comments section of the video in the opening post) , and the effect it has on people. Very few guitarists get those kind of compliments about their playing in my experience.
Yeah, shred or not to shred, whatevs. I think Gilmour’s ok, basically a blues/pentatonic player, and I think a good case can be made that that’s a better style for PF. He joined the band in the era when that was the height of British rock guitar aspirations–Peter Green, Danny Kirwan, of course Clapton. And because Floyd were so renowned for being experimentalists and taking things “outside,” having a solid blues-groove lead player was a way to keep things grounded. If, I dunno, Holdsworth or Steve Howe had come along at that point, would they have worked? Gilmour just has the exact right ingredients for that band’s chemistry.
I was thinking for this discussion there are better, or at least to my ear more interesting players to stand for the non-shred pole. Brian May for instance. Deeply satisfying lines, but with a lot more harmonic “verticality” than Gilmour. Rarely if ever gets above 16ths, but his playing is so architectural. That’s maybe a better term to use than the shred-vs-non shred thing. I think it describes what Gilmour is about; even though he’s mostly pentatonic, he does it in a way that’s sensitive to the underlying chordal movement, which is a thing. There’s a way of playing blues scale over progressions that’s actually pretty cool and not necessarily easy to do well. SRV an example.
And of course Hendrix. One of the things I love about Hendrix is that he could play fast, sure, and pentatonics out the wazoo, but he had HUGE ears for the vertical space as well. The arpeggio playing at the end of Axis Bold as Love among many examples. NOBODY was doing anything like that in rock guitar. I always loved his line, “I don’t play guitar, I play amplifier,” but it wasn’t just the pyrotechnics; he had giant ears.
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Be really interesting to see what Comfortably Numb would have sounded like if another guitarist had played on it. Would it have the same impact?
I think Brian May is a genius. His compositional skills and melodic playing are utterly brilliant!
I think part of the reason for the disparity is that electric guitar players are largely self-taught. In the absense of a standard pedagogical method, being able to play something that most others can’t lets you stand out from the crowd. Playing fast is easy to quantify and obvious to a casual observer, but it’s also a very naive way of judging a musician’s skill level.
If there were a well-established method for learning to play fast, then you would not be able to impress anyone with technique alone.
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Huge, huge, huge generalization, though. I’m no particular fan of either genre, and particularly in the case of djent there’s an argument to be made that the guitar functioning more as a true “percussion” instrument (which technically it is) is a hallmark of that genre… but there’s also plenty of very melodic stuff in there too. Periphery is one of the bigger bands in the genre precicely because they do mix in melodic passages, and this really speaks to my ignorance because I don’t know ifd Meshuggah is even considered djent, or one of the proto-djent bands that influenced the ones that came after them, but I always thought the outro to “Straws Pulled at Random” is one of the most hauntingly beautiful things I’d ever heard, and the fact you have to really struggle to pick up the key change that sets it up because up tot hat point it’s just so damned jarring, well, somehow makes it even more effective.
If you wanted to single out a genre of metal that really did everything they could to do away with melody, I might point to death metal… and even then, the bands there I like the most are still the ones that incorporate melodic passages in with the more atonal singing - thinking of Opeth here, back when they were a progressive death metal band and before they almost entirely embraced clean singing.
I mean, we’re talking about melody in this thread, and how it can be very effective for building a solo… but so much of what makes music effective is tension and release, and sometimes the lack of melody can really make melodic sections that much more effective when they do kick in.
Not sure how universally known Meshuggah and in particular “Nothing” is outside of the extended ranghe guitar world these days (it was one of the first recorded forays into 8 string guitars in the metal world), but I really do think this section is achingly beautufl, and while it might be a little jarring listening up to that point,
Outro starts to set itself up after 2:25 or so - that’ll let you catch the very end of the “song” itself, as well as the extended transition to set up the outro changes, around 3:30, until around the 4:00 mark a very simple lead line comes in which, ironically probably does bear more than a passing influence to, oh, what Holdsworth might play trying to imitate Gilmour. It’s a pretty awesome passage of music…
It’s like sticking this
in the intro to this
That song just backs up my point.
There is a reason a band like Tool has cross appeal, melody, consistently morphing most of the time.
If you took that 3:30 to 4:00 minute mark of that Meshuggah song and it was just that ok, interesting under rhythm nice lead, but the whole first half. 
. It’s like mixing vodka and milk.
There are some “djent” bands that don’t do this Tesseract comes to mind but Meshuggah is probably the poster child for the type of music I described in the previous post. I’m of the opinion Meshuggah should have stopped after the first album which in my mind is one of the most underrated technical thrash metal albums of all time (and it’s hilarious how hard Jens was trying to sound like Hetfield in the vocal department).
I’m reminded of the black metal equivalent of Meshuggah.
Shining, a band that is essentially one edgelord’s angry scream to the universe with Gilmourian leads hamfisted in.
I’m clearly not doing a very good job explaining myself. :lol:
This isn’t a “modern metal doens’t have melody” thing, and it’s not even a “modern music doesn’t have melody” thing. I think some genres of metal DO try to do away with as much commercial appeal as theuy can, yes, including melody, but for example, I’d say Death takes that a bit farther than nu metal bands, doubly so considering the metal of their day they had to draw on for inspiration.
It’s too easy to say that this is the fault of listeners, and “popular music” is no longer melodic, but “niche underground music, which just happens to include genres i like,” is. That’s a huge generalization and I don’t think is one that really holds up.
We’re getting a little off topic here though, but I guess to try to tie it back, 1) there’s nothing wrong with music with strong melodic hooks, 2) there’s also nothing wrong with very technical music that doesn’t just rely on melodic hooks, and 3) there’s not necessarily anything wrong with music that relies on rhythm over melody, as long as it’s done in ways that are interestng.
Funny you mention too - that’s a band that I love, but have always found them kind of interesting in that both the bass and to a degree the drums ave more of a “melodic” function in the band - you can totally hear the decades Carey has spent studying tabla playing, his phrasing is just oddly circular in ways thaty are all kinds of awesome - while the guitars are probably more of a true “percussive” instrument than in most rock bands I can think of.
Idunno. This is a really complex topic, and not one that can be distilled to something as simple as “moden metal has no melody,” and “listeners who can’t hear melody in fast passages are ignorant.”
I agree. It is surprisingly complicated with a lot of variables coming into play - as well the enigmatic trait of popularity. What makes David Gilmour’s playing so popular as opposed to other similarly well credentialed players? How do we evaluate the importance of the song Comfortably Numb in the effect?
How important is the sheer scale of Pink Floyd’s popularity in contributing to the effect?
I don’t have the answers but am enjoying discussing it! 
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I disagree with a lot in this post but that album is indeed underrated and it would be great if they revisited that style.
Have you heard their earlier project where he sounded even more like Hetfield?
