Top 5 Rock Guitar Players

And a few honorable mentions

Lists are always subjective, so I don’t have the audacity of trying to give you a definitive one here. I ranked the five guitarists (and a few honorable mentions) whose music and playing style connected with me the most. Personal taste is the best parameter for defining whether something is good since musical taste itself is private. Since rock is what I listen to the most, I restricted the list to this genre. Some chosen ones may be virtuosos, some may not, offering different and exciting approaches instead.

In this text, I explained what each of these players made me admire and look after them as inspiration. Being an amateur guitarist myself, these are also the musicians I try to incorporate more in my style of playing.

I would love to hear your list in the comments. Here is mine:

5. Andy Gills (Gang of Four)

It is like the guitarist of Gang of Four listed all the ways someone should not play the guitar to sound great, did all of those, and yet, it sounded terrific. Simply put, that’s the brilliance of Andy Gills.

There is no virtuosity in Gills playing; quite the opposite. He used the instrument in heavy rhythmic ways. Gang of Four disrupted the classic “guitar is for melody and bass is for the rhythm” rock and roll formula. The band built their sound around the bass lines, which are the melodic structure that tight it all together. With that, the band had a lot of room for Gill’s chaotic guitar playing to shine.

The guitar parts in Gang of Four are tight with the drums, adding a percussiveness to them. That’s a result of the band’s punk ethos, with Gills trying to sound as raw and straightforward as possible. As opposed to most rock songs out there, the guitar is an element as necessary as the vocals, bass, and drums, yet, paradoxically, stands out, and this is because of how different it sounds. Gills often uses the guitar as a noise-generating machine instead of a proper instrument, making unique and exciting sounds. That provides a messy atmosphere to the dancing bass and drums but still goes well with it, building a strange yet infectious groove. Good examples of it are To Hell With Poverty, Not Great Man, and At Home He’s a Tourist, in which the guitar evolves into different and unorthodox parts.

The first time I listened to Entertainment, Gang of Four’s masterpiece, I was mesmerized by how simple the guitar was, yet such creative and out-of-the-box result. It’s simple, but it’s not easy to do.

Gill had a unique grip, using his right thumb to mute the low strings and let the high do the job. He would also work very well with palm muting, alternating it with hard strumming, allowing the strings to ring — another great percussive way he used the guitar. Even when he would go with a more traditional approach to the instrument and do riffs, they still had that distinctive, disorderly and dissonant vibe. Check What We All Want, or I Love a Man in Uniform to see what I mean.

Another remarkable thing is the not so bright unique tone, having a dry hitting punch, as opposed to what a guitar should sound. Strange as it is, this tone gives a lot of power to Gills techniques, generating high-pitched metallic noises that are such a pivotal part of Gang of Four’s music.

Even with such strange sounds coming from his guitar, Gills still manages to sound incredibly pop-friendly. If you play one of his songs in a club, everybody will dance to it. He is a genius because of how minimalist yet original and enjoyable he could sound.

4. Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave, Prophets of Rage)

Tom Morello combines heavy metal riffs with melodic solos and a characteristic tone. But he is a master of the six strings because of how different use he made of it. I was fortunate enough to see him live, and it was pretty unbelievable the sounds he was making with that thing.

Morello thinks of the guitar as an instrument beyond its strings, playing with the jack, the volume buttons, and the pickup selector button, making a guitar sound quite peculiar. Just listen to the opening riff of Know Your Enemy, from Rage Against the Machine’s debut album, to see what I mean. But it is not just that. He has the power to alternate these crazy sounds with the heaviest riffs ever, giving a unique development to the songs he writes.

Rage Against the Machine members often refer to Morello not as the guitarist but as the DJ of the band. That probably comes from the band’s rap approach, with massive influences from hip-hop acts that embrace the rock and roll attitude and heavy sounds, such as Public Enemy and Run-DMC.

To go along with Zach De La Rocha’s rapping lines, the guitar on the band took the task of generating DJ sounds. And Morello, surprisingly, mastered that. It is hard to believe that songs like ‘Wake Up’ and ‘Bulls On Parade’ don’t have any actual DJ on them. A great video from a Prophets of Rage concert in 2017 shows Morello having a music battle with DJ Lord.

He said in interviews that he was never a prodigy and practice hard to learn it — 4 hours a day while attending Harvard. After a while, he started to practice mistakes, as he called it, which came out to be the different and new sounds that would define his guitar playing. But the time practicing hard on scales and more traditional techniques are very present in his playing too. Morello is a master riff composer, knowing well how to sound heavy and play very technical solos, as seen in songs such as Township Rebellion.

Another aspect that makes Morello great is his remarkable ability to adapt. His solo work features very different guitar playing, such as acoustic songs (‘One Man Revolution’) and EDM-inspired music (‘Rabbit’s Revenge’). But, outside of Rage Against the Machine, he is very well-known, mainly because of his work with Audioslave. Even though playing with the same bassist and drummer as before (Tim Commerford and Brad Wilk, from Rage Against the Machine), they delivered a different sound without losing its essence, being more soulful and melodic at times. Good examples: I Am the Highway and Doesn’t Remind Me. The incredible thing is that he used the same pedalboard for all his career. That shows a remarkable talent to innovate and be creative with what he already has, using the same pieces in multiple ways to produce new sounds.

Like other names in this list, Morello knows the cultural power of an electric guitar. He often says that he wants his songs to be revolutionary and dare to question the status quo. His instrument is his weapon to that. That’s probably why most of his guitars have something written on it, such as the ‘Sendero Luminoso’ Telecaster, the ‘Soul Power’ Stratocaster, and the iconic ‘Arm the Homeless’ custom-made guitar with the hippo stickers on it.

3. Dr. Know (Bad Brains)

Gary Miller (better know as Dr. Know) and his guitar playing changed punk music forever. He started as a jazz musician, which gave him a very technical knowledge of the instrument. Despite that, Dr. Know was very open-minded, listening to all kinds of music and trying to learn something with it. Metal, punk, reggae, funk, jazz, he was all over the place.

Instead of changing like a chameleon and playing these different kinds of music as requested, he instead merged all these influences uniquely, which is a significant part of the revolutionary sound of the Bad Brains.

Punk is often associated with attitude. The Ramones turned out to be one of the most influential rock bands ever and their guitarist, Johnny, only played power chords. He made those simple structures sound massive by changing chords at such a speed and hitting the listener with a bang. That was the revolutionary and genius aspect of Johnny and one of the building blocks of the punk movement.

Later, punk became more experimental, the apex being The Clash’s London Calling, released in 1979. The band took a step back to the rawness and fury of bands like Ramones, MC5, and the Sex Pistols to compose songs with heavy reggae, jazz, and even pop influences on this album. And then came Dr. Know and the Bad Brains, who happens to have both of these.

Like The Clash, the Bad Brains were really into reggae (the four members were Rastafarians), but instead of slowing down like their British contemporaries, they speed up. The band’s sound was faster than anything seen before. It was the birth of hardcore. Dr. Know took the Johnny Ramone power chord formula and tweaked it. The chord changes became faster, heavier, more diverse, and dynamic.

Since he had a great understanding of lots of styles of music, he incorporated that into it as well. He is a master of changing rhythm during a song, giving it exciting and dynamic paces. Check Don’t Bother Me or I Against I, for example. By alternating the beat, he can vary between a punk-metal and a funky feeling, or even made these somewhat contradictory vibes go well together at once, for example, in Re-Ignition.

Despite being influenced by multiple kinds of music, reggae is probably the one more present in Dr. Know playing (besides rock, of course). He managed to make reggae beats sound like heavy metal, take Redbone in the City and Send You No Flowers, for instance. In Banned in D.C, when the song goes into the reggae section, he even incorporates metal-like riffs during it.

But Dr. Know is not just a master of the rhythmic guitar. Unlike many of his punk contemporaries, Dr. Know was also a technical, creative, and diverse soloist. His solos can feel unique, another result of his wide range of influences. Sailin’ On has a boisterous-speed attack, for example, while She’s Calling You has a spacial-groove vibe and Big Take Over has a psychedelic-metal feel to it. That is another evidence of how complete and one-of-a-kind player Dr. Know is.

2. Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath)

When he was 17 years old, Tony Iommi was ready to quit his job working for a welding factory and hit the road with his bandmates across Europe. However, on his very last day working there, he chopped the tips of his right hand’s ring and middle fingers (he was left-handed, so those were the fingers he used at the guitar’s neck). The doctor said to him that day that his guitar days were over. Luckily, that didn’t happen. Instead, the accident redefined the way Iommi approached the instrument.

After being inspired by Django Reinhardt, who also had a hand accident and played beautifully with only two fingers, Iommi decided to relearn how to play the guitar. He created two improvised prostheses, built with melted plastic, for his fingers and started to develop new ways to play. The first adaptation was to tune the guitar lower, making the strings looser, easier to press, and making the sound heavier. That alone made Iommi’s guitar sound eviler than ever, a feature that he mastered how to use at his advance.

To go with it, he embraced fast dyad power chords, dissonant intervals as in Black Sabbath, sinister bends, palm-muting, and very riff-based music. As a result, he composed some of the most iconic riffs ever. The list is extensive, but some of the most famous ones are in Paranoid, Iron Man, and War Pigs. Several of his songs even include more than one memorable riff. From 1971’s Master of Reality, Into the Void have three fantastic of those, for example. Iommi is a natural when it comes to writing riffs, and by doing so, he paved the way for generations of heavy metal guitarists. Scott Ian, from Anthrax, said that no metal guitarist doesn’t take inspiration — directly or not — from Iommi’s work.

Even though he adopted all these different techniques, Iommi had a blues formation, and this is present in his guitar playing, laying all these new tricks into a classic rock and roll foundation. In addition, he heavily uses minor pentatonic scales, which makes his heavy metal very bluesy. Iommi uses, like few others, all these characteristics and techniques, which makes him sound so peculiar.

Another great innovation Iommi brought was the tone. Besides the tuning, which already makes the songs sound so heavy, he used a treble booster pedal combined with a Laney amplifier, not so typical at the time. Those made the guitar sound fuzzy in a different and more sinister way than Hendrix, for example. But Iommi is far from being tone-dependent. His acoustic work can sounds just like you expect from him. The single notes minor pentatonic solos with bits of psychedelia are still there, such as in Planet Caravan, Sleeping Village, or Zeitgeist.

All of these already make Iommi great, but the icing on the cake is the incredible chemistry he has with his bandmates. Few musicians knew how to complement each other to sound as tight and unique as Black Sabbath members. Geezer Butler’s bass and Iommi’s guitar work together wonderfully to create that heavy and signature Sabbath sound, letting enough space for Bill Ward’s jazzy drums and Ozzy Osbourne’s beautiful vocal melodies to complete the sound

1. Jimi Hendrix (The Jimi Hendrix Experience)

Maybe Jimi is the one with more first positions in ‘Best Guitarists’ lists, and here is no different. Hendrix was a God, and this comes from an atheist. He combined incredible technique to a unique approach to the instrument while making a huge cultural impact. And besides that, Hendrix could also sing beautifully simultaneously to playing tricky licks. He was the whole package.

For me, the electric guitar is one of the greatest inventions of humanity. The sounds it produces made possible a big musical and Cultural Revolution. It’s a potent social/political weapon. Woody Guthrie, a folk singer, and songwriter, placed on his acoustic guitar in the 1940s: “this machine kills fascists,” so electrifying it made that heavy artillery. Hendrix was fully aware of that side of the instrument, as you can see in his Woodstock performance of The Star Spangled Banner when he dropped bombs and flew helicopters on the American anthem to protest against the Vietnam War. That kind of approach turned him into a cultural icon.

He, indisputably, had the attitude, but he was also a technical genius. The God-like status I give to Hendrix comes from him being; apparently, heavens send guitar instructor. He arrived at Earth when rock and roll started to adopt and embrace the electric guitar in ingenious and new ways. He nailed how to use that with full power in that context, catapulting a musical revolution around the instrument and the genre. No one knew a guitar could sound like that. From his embellished chords to his serious innovative effects use, Hendrix had such a unique way of playing that contemplated almost all the modes you could use a guitar at the time. His fuzzy tone and his use of dominant seventh sharp ninth chords (until today, this kind of chord is popularly known as the Hendrix chord) are just some of the various things that made him a guitar hero. All of this is even more unbelievable when you remember that he started playing at 15 and died at 27. In only 12 years, he became a titan of the instrument.

Hendrix also played with soul. He became one with his guitar when he was playing, pouring himself into the songs, as you can see in any video of him playing. The best example of it maybe is All Along the Watchtower, when Hendrix turned an acoustic folk song by Bob Dylan into a sonic storm, full of intense solos and nuances. That is probably due to his almost spiritual relationship with the instrument — the apex of that is when he set his guitar on fire during the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.

Without him, we would have a very different kind of rock music today. Hendrix gave blues the heaviness it needed to become heavy metal, explored sounds that helped to trigger much of the psychedelic rock that came after him, and practically set the bar for how a master guitar solo should sound. He also showed us how to display delicate and right on the spot with his rhythm guitar, full of details and embellishment, such as in Castles Made of Sand and Little Wing. For me, the greatest guitarist to ever walk on Earth.

Honorable Mentions

Sister Rosetta Tharpe: Pioneer in using the guitar as a lead instrument and experimenting with distortion.

David Gilmour (Pink Floyd): Melody and ambiance finest junction.

Ace Frehley (Kiss): Bends and vibratos doesn’t get much better than that.

Andreas Kisser (Sepultura, De La Tierra): Trash metal with a Brazilian groove to it.

Kurt Cobain (Nirvana): Unique fusion of beautiful simple solo melodies and chaotic, dissonant rhythm parts.