• The move to the new server is done. There are some software and database maintenance updates in process. This has us passing the hat around to help out. We appreciate any donations. Seriously, even a dollar helps. The payment page may be found here - https://www.audiokarma.org/support.html

Best sounding rock guitarist

One immediatly recognizable tone was/is? Nuno Bettencourt from Extreme. Great player. I wonder what happened to him?
 
Interesting to see Frank Marino on someone's list. I haven't heard him since the 70's. I don't think I've seen Phil Manzanera and Rick Nielsen two of my favorites.
 
The Heart guy was Roger Fisher and yeah he sounded great. If by when they were hot you mean the first time around with Dreamboat Annie / Little Queen / Dog & Butterfly.

Can't really speak for any of their other albums, but on REO's album Nine Lives, Gary Richrath had an absolutely definitive hard-rock tone. Not unique or idiosycratic, but flawless and exemplary in the textbook-example sense.

And some players who started out with unique and tasty tones have over the years drifted into tones that must sound good only to their own ears. Compare Billy Gibbons' sound on anything before, oh some time around the Lake Placid games to anything after. And compare Ted Nugent's tone on his 80s releases to his 70s records. These guys BOTH need a producer who is strong-willed enough to convince them to trust the ears of someone who does not have four decades of stage-level induced tinnitus.
 
Phil Manzanera

Art Kyle said:
Interesting to see Frank Marino on someone's list. I haven't heard him since the 70's. I don't think I've seen Phil Manzanera and Rick Nielsen two of my favorites.
Click to expand...

Art:
I nominated Phil a bit earlier and wanted to acknowledge that it's good to find another fan of his work.
 
Jeff Lynne. Certainly not the greatest...but he knows how to rock! A master of the tasty lick...a good example is ELO's "Zoom", where Jeff eschews walls of overdubbed strings for walls of overdubbed guitars...lotsa tasty licks. Bonus points for his studio expertise. And, kudos must go to Mr. Walter Becker. Started on guitar, switched to bass, back to guitar. Clean, economical, bluesy playing essential to the Steely Dan sound. (And bonus points to any guy who plays in the Dan touring band...Jon Herrington on the '03 tour was tops...perfect duplications of the the style of Denny Dias, "Skunk", and all the studio cats who've punched a clock for Don and Walt over the years.)
 
Love so many guitarists but the stand outs are the ones you hear and know who it is.

Carlos makes you feel it, as did Beck. Instantly recognizable but always unique. Ive never been a fan of 1000 notes a minute just for the sake of speed. Its technically impressive but sonically sterile.

Gilmour and Knopfler are special. Gilmour makes up for any lack of speed with the sweetest bend, sustain, and vibrato. His ear is phenomenal. Knopfler is in ways similar but totally different. No pick always has a special, more human sound to my ear. The thing Knopfler does that I absolutely love are his short phrases and riffs usually under everything else in the mix. Once you hear and listen to what he's doing you cant unhear it.
 
One of, if not the most recognizable guitar opening riff....Hotel California with Don Felder and Joe Walsh...Felder is very underrated in my view.
 
Guitarist as in singular, I vote Robin Trower. No one else sounds like him and he has written almost all of the music he plays. His first 5 albums are mesmerizing.
 
After all this discussion, I present the correct answers: :):)

Carlos Santana
David Gilmore
Mark Knopfler
Stevie Ray Vaughn
Chuck Berry
 
FWIW, I personally have always greatly enjoyed Eric Johnson`s guitar tone and playing style since first hearing him (Cliffs of Dover, I think) on the radio in the very early nineties.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom