The Official Guitar Thread

Tenks_sl said:

Not to entirely shit on the genre of indie. It is just they don't feature instruments and instead feature vocals. I have yet to have her sit down through an entire Megadeth song without her ripping on Mustaine's voice, intermixed with her complaining about the guitars. She doesn't seem to understand I'm far more interested in whats coming out of his guitar than his mouth. I find the songwriting of both genres about the same (ie: they're both only decent.)

@Above:

Was not expecting a random Ernie puppet

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I spent a long time educating my wife on the merits of most metal. Honestly, metal has some of the best musicians on the planet playing it these days. Mustaine, whatever you think about the man, is probably the best rhythm guitarist alive today, because he's taken the kind of shit that would normally be considered lead guitarist material and built entire songs about them. He's primarily responsible for the success of 2 of the big 4, because nearly every song that was on Metallica's demo that got them signed was written and arranged by Mustaine. The good metal drummers are above and beyond almost everyone else playing, by a country mile. Dave Lombardo? Gene Hoglan? These guys are fucking legends and will be talked about long after they're gone. Jeff Hanneman had been playing guitar for 2 months when he joined Slayer, never had a guitar lesson, and was entirely self taught, and started writing music immediately. Listen to his lead work on Show No Mercy. That blazing solo in the beginning of Captor of Sin? Who the fuck do you know has been playing for under a year that could even touch that solo? He wrote Die By the Sword himself, and that's still played live in Slayer sets today. A lot of bands don't play their early shit for a reason -- because it fucking sucks.

My wife is very much into "one guy, one guitar" type music (we overlap on a little bit, she loves Tool and Type O Negative), but it's taken her a long time to come to appreciate the virtuosity that's present in metal. It's certainly not an overnight thing, and there's a lot of stuff I know she'll never understand, but I was pretty proud of her when she came home one day shortly after getting satellite radio on her car and said she was flipping through stations and got to one of the metal ones and she couldn't even wrap her head around the drumming that was going on. She's making progress. I might make a metalhead out of her yet.

Alex_sl said:

If you value speed as the most important facet of guitar playing then of course metal has all the best guitarists. That and bluegrass. There's something to be said about badass composition though. That is something many of these metal players are missing. John Petrucci's got it, but he's a rarity.

Awesomeness starts at 1:35.

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I thought that was Gilmour from the title screen, and yeah, don't need to listen to that to know what it is.

There's a distinction to be made there...Gilmour and guys like Slash are widely regarded to be great guitarists because of their "feeling" and emotion they put into their playing. But in Slash's book, he said that basically everything on the Appetite album was all Izzy, except for his solos. Even live, he'd play single note rhythms, Izzy was the one keeping it all together. And there are certainly a lot of people that pick up the guitar specifically because they want to be like Gilmour or Slash or Vai or whatever, but I think you can make a case that without solid rhythm, solid leads don't mean shit.

Tenks_sl said:

Pretty soon everyone in this thread will own a Schecter C1

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No reason for them not to, it's a great guitar.