Top 10 Guitarists of All Time

Old-Wizard’s Top 10 Guitarists of all time will not be your traditional Top  Ten  Guitarists of all time list. There won’t be obvious choices on here. Just because a guitarist can wank to no end doesn’t mean anything to us here at Old-Wizard. We could go into a guitar shop, turn on a Marshall Stack, plug in any guitar, and sound like we’re good wankers. So fuck the Stevie Ray Vaughn’s and Eric Clapton’s with their boring ass blues wanking. This list isn’t for the old farts whose conception of good guitar playing is limited to the most banal modes of style. This list of the more adventurous at heart who don’t hear just plain technical musicianship, but aesthetically pleasing sounding styles and innovative work that influenced guitarist past their own records. Certainly there was a history of guitar after the blues. This list’s focus is on those great guitarists who did something else with the guitar.

10.Will Sergeant

Will Sergeant of Echo and The Bunny is an often overlooked guitarist.  One listen to their album “Ocean Rain” though and one will hear some of the most innovative and neurotic guitar playing of the 80′s. His classic delay used on their previous album’s was overwhelmed by spontaneous creativity on every single song off of Ocean Rain; more specifically the song “Thorn of Crowns”. It’s hear that Sergeant matches the Voltairian madness of Ian McCulloch’s vocals delivery to a song that exists somewhere in the sadistic reaches of and 18th century romantic comedy. Beyond the brilliance of his work on Ocean Rain is his work on subsequent singles like “The Cutter”and “Lips like Sugar”. He could play pop, spontaneous guitar madness; everything under the sun but his work always sounded distinctly his own. Break out Ocean Rain to hear what creative guitar playing sounds like.

9. Noel Gallagher

Hmmm…Noel Gallagher on the greatest guitarists of all time list?  Well, this is Old-Wizard’s list so we didn’t have a choice so we might as well start going into his great solos and ending it like that. First off, listen to the solo in “Live Forever“. Simple, but emotive and perfect in the context of the song. Listen to his massive amount of guitar overdubs in “D’Ya Know What I Mean”; That was certainly a new sound for the time regardless of how much someone would like to simply call it psychedelic. Listen to his hypnotic guitar lines in “Up in the Sky” and “Columbia” and one will find further evidence of a man who just had a sense for what a tune was and what a guitar needed to do to carry that tune. Alright, that’s it.

8. Jonny Greenwood

Since The Bends onwards, Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead has established himself as one of the greatest guitarists of his generation. Whether it’s in alt-rock modes like “Just” or the twiddling heard on “Paranoid Android“, Jonny Greenwood is always looking to expand the sound of the guitar, and when he couldn’t anymore he turned to the programming for his sounds. But between The Bends and Ok Computer, he exhausted all the emotion out of the guitar that there could possibly be. Beyond his actual playing is his striking sound that pierced the listeners ears especially during a solo. He moved across the fret board with a feeling of limitlessness not seen in most guitarists. His expansion of what the guitar can sound like puts him in high rank among the endless list of guitarists through the instruments history.

7. Kevin Shields

Kevin Shields, leader of shoegazing’s most coveted band My Bloody Valentine took the guitar and made it sound like something it never sounded like before. Forget the simple overdrive and sometimes guitar interplay of his “alternative-indie” contemporaries. He made the guitar sound like flowers and volcano explosions at the same time utilizing the whammy bar of a fender Jag more creatively than any guitarist before. It was with Kevin Shields that the obsession with guitar pedals became enormous for better or worse.  What many people didn’t understand though was that Shields got his sound from the way he played his guitar, the way he would exaggeratedly bend notes on entire bar chords with countless amounts of amps portraying the sounds. The sound of the guitar had never seen it’s most outward limits since Kevin Shields and no one has come close since.

6. Jimmy Page

There is no guitarist with as many recognizable riffs as Jimmy Page. No matter how queer it sounds, he is the “riff master”. It would be too obvious to name the obvious songs that one recognizes immediately by his playing. Beyond his penchant for creating memorable guitar riffs though was someone who commanded the guitar itself like a toy. Watch him during the early days in the DVD “How the West was Won”. Watch his playing during “Misty Mountain Hop“. He has total control over what he’s playing that answers every musical move by the rest of the band with an ease unseen by any guitarist before or after. He just knew what to do with the guitar at every second and created memorable lines in 80% of the songs in the band. He is THE hard rock guitarist of all time.

5. John Squire

John Squire of The Stone Roses may be more recognized by “GUITARISTS!” for his second album “The Second Coming” which perfectly updated Jimmy Page’s style into a 90’s alternative sound, but it was with their debut album that John Squire will always win his legacy. Every one song on The Stone Roses debut album was sprinkled with the shine of the best Byrdsesque guitar playing and sound. When he wasn’t sprinkling sunshine on the groove of these songs, he was going to subterranean Caribbean guitar styles that took this pop music into a completely different place never occupied by pop music before. Take a listen to “Bye Bye Badman”. Listen to his solo at 3:00 minutes in and think about the style he played in the entire song before.  Combining this Caribbean shuffle with guitar lines that literally sounded like a sunny day made for one of the most enjoyable guitar experiences put to record. Whatever Squire was being influenced by at the time, we were the beneficiaries

4. Jimi Hendrix

What Jimi Hendrix did with the guitar influenced so many guitarists afterwards. It would take an endless amount of time to list all of them. He not only influenced guitarists who concentrated on their musicianship, but all those other guitarists who wanted bend the living shit out of the guitar string, the other guitarists who wanted to make one note sustain for five minutes, the other guitarists who wanted to combined 10 delays with 20 reverbs to see what massive sound would come out of their Marshall Stack after all this work. Hendrix epitomized a figure who influenced the most disparate amount of guitarists of all time. Think about it. What other guitarist could both influence Eric Clapton and Kevin Shields? The legacy of Jimi Hendrix is without question. You know him, you hear him, you know what he does. It’s pretty simple actually.

3. Johnny Marr

The jangly guitar is owned by Johnny Marr. Listen to the entire Smiths catalogue and at every turn you will find Marr coming up with the most creative guitar lines that was perfectly complimented by Morrissey’s idiosyncratic lyrics. But this is what makes Johnny Marr such a great guitarist. It was never just guitar wankery. Every song had to be tuneful and melodic guitar lines. Everything popped out in Johnny Marrs pop playing. Listen to “This Charming Man” and “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” to get a glimpse at the quality that Johnny Marr put into his guitar work. Every note meant something. There was no chugging or power chords; it was all just melody that never got in the way of the vocalist. This sense for restraint and melody puts Johnny Marr as one of the greatest guitarist of all time.

2. David Gilmour

One feels like a charlatan putting David Gilmour as the 2nd greatest guitarist of all time because of not including Syd Barrett with his psychedelic musings that must have influenced Gilmour. But when one listens to Gilmour, one hears a guitarist more controlled while still retaining the intensity that Syd Barrett originally brought to songs like “Astronomy Domine.” One hears this equal control and intensity in Gilmour’s guitar playing on “Meddle“, especially “Echoes” which is listed on our greatest songs of all time list. It’s hard to argue the greatness of Gilmour during the solo of Echoes. He pulls something off that’s unspeakable from any guitarist before or after. It’s unfortunate that Gilmour turned into such an average musician ‘rehashing the classics’ in his old age when he was at one time operating at such a primal level in his guitar playing. It’s hard to think of a guitarist who just understood the instrument more naturally than Gilmour.

1. Keith Richards

Keith Richards certainly wasn’t the best technical guitarist of all time but we already said in the introduction that we could care less about that. What we do know about him is that he wrote the beginning guitar line to “Gimme Shelter.” What we know is that he wrote the riff to “Brown Sugar.” What we know is what he played in “Can’t you hear me knocking.” We know how he responded to all of McJagger’s vocal lines. What we know is that we listen to him and we hear someone playing the guitar in a way that evokes more soul than any guitarist before or after. He has an instinct for knowing when to make his playing sound haunting. He has an instinct to know when to make his playing sound more raw than any player in guitar history. 2 albums; Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street. Listen to these albums, and you will hear a guitarist with the most instinctual sense for the guitar. He is the rock guitarist who matters most. The guitar was more than a guitar for Keith Richards. It became his body and something more.

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