Top List of Most Innovative Rock Guitarists

I found a 2004 Rolling Stone 100 Greatest Guitarists on the Internet. Here’s my list of Most Innovative Rock Guitarists. I’ve placed them in a somewhat chronological order, because this makes more sense than rating them among each other.I start from the beginning of the sixties counterculture. Chuck Berry and the others are great fun and entertainment of course, but don’t have my fascination as much as the list of artists below.

1 Jimi Hendrix – Similar like the Rolling Stone list I appreciate him a lot, but for a reason not mentioned in the review by Pete Townshend. Of course Hendrix’ fame and reputation is because of his viruose fast playing technique, hit powerful performance art technique with setting the instrument on fire or play Vietnam bombing with it, but what’s mostly overseen is it’s highly use of extended techniques. Jimi was left handed, which means he played his stratocaster upside down. This upside down situation allowed him to lay rhytmic guitar and also being able to use the tremolo arm at the same time with his wrist. He also was the first who used the pickup switches to alter the feedback and sustaining sound and he pulled out two valves out of his amp to enrich the driven sound.

2 Pete Townshend – I’m not a fan of Townshend as well as The Who, except for their song My Generation and a few others, but he’s in because he trashed his guitars on stage. One of the best decisions a guitarist has ever made, although it initially happened accidentally out of wildness and not as an artistic statement.

3 Syd Barrett – Barrett was the first who began playing music with the stomp boxes. By putting multiple effect pedals in a serie he created a new sonic spectrum together with his zippo lighter. This can be viewed clearly on Interstellar Overdrive played live in the video of Tonite Let’s Make Love in London.

4 & 5 Jad & David Fair – as completely clarified in David’s How to Play Guitar article. No further explanation needed.

6 Rhys Chatham – as explained in my interview about his Guitar Trio (1977). Based on the works of LaMonte Young with who Chatham had worked, Chatham translated LaMonte’s vision to the guitar and became the first musician who succeeded in managing an auditory illusion by crossing the border with a louder than acceptable sound with electric guitars. What you hear is a distorted perception of the actual played sound.

7 Glenn Branca – Chatham’s nephew. If Chatham is the light, than Branca is the dark. The Yin and Yang of guitar noise. Branca, being part of Chatham’s band when Guitar Trio was first played, felt strongly attracted to what Chatham was doing and afterwards copied it in an alternate way. The works of Branca may seem very similar Chatham’s G3, but Branca also adopted the works of Harry Partch in his symphonies and explored the first steps of amplified 3rd Bridge guitars in his music as well as some self built table string instruments.

8 & 9 Lee Ranaldo & Thurston Moore – Same story as Branca related to Chatham. Ranaldo and Moore learned the techniques of Branca. After starting Sonic Youth they began exploring it much further than their teacher had done. They perfectioned the 3^rd Bridge screwdriver technique and combined it with an excellent sliding technique. Besides playing with these extended techniques they also took the field of research on alternate tunings up to a level not done before, using Branca’s tunings in it as well as playing on intuition to achieve a new sonic palette.

10 Bradford Reed – Reed was so smart to reject the original guitar and built one of his own design for the playing technique he had thought out. Reed plays with drumsticks, pencils and movable 3^rd bridges on a double neck table guitar.

11 Ash Bowie & Dave Brylawski – Both of the band Polvo. Similar like Ranaldo and Moore Bowie and Brylawski worked on alternate tuned guitars. I saw them on Primavera Sound Festival 2008 and I couldn’t follow any step they took on their fretboard in relation to eachother. Polvo is one of the most underrated guitar bands of the past 40 years.

12 Ichirou Agata – of the band Melt-Banana has a room filling field of effect pedals which infra structure is more difficult to understand than the inside of a computer. He’s circuit bending and guitar playing at the same time. Barrett’s set up to infinity.

13 Brian Gibson – of Lightning Bolt. Actually a bass player, but his instrument is employed with one banjo string functioning as a guitar string. He plays bass solo’s as well as guitar solo’s at the same time sounding like a complete band.

14 & 15 Jason Sanford & Mark Pearson – of the band Neptune. Sanford and Pearson have built baritone guitars out of VCR casings and other trash parts. These instruments have drumsticks functioning as movable 3^rd bridges to reach supersuitable overtones. They combine this alternate playing technique with an outstanding performance as well as a presentation of their guitar sculptures. Like Chatham said to me: ‘A true heavy metal band. The music is very heavy, played with distortions and instruments are made of metal.’

Back to home

Back to the table of contents