When I was beginning my study of the guitar, it was the mid 1980’s, and the individuals pictured on the front of the guitar magazines of the day were “shredders.” A shredder is an individual who plays really, really fast. The most well-known shredders at the time were Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen, though there were many second-tier shredders as well. The opinions page at guitar magazines was filled with letters about how one shredder could outshred another shredder with one hand tied behind his back, etc. Yes indeed. Those were the days of THE HARD ROCK GUITARIST! Please note that when describing THE HARD ROCK GUITARIST, I am including myself during the first three years of my guitardom.
THE HARD ROCK GUITARIST’S GUIDE TO GUITAR PLAYING:
1. Volume=genital size=heavy metal chicks factor.
2. Fast wiggly fingers=self-confidence=heavy metal chicks factor.
3. Big bendy note=passion=heavy metal chicks factor.
4. Scrunched up face=angst=heavy metal chicks factor.
For THE HARD ROCK GUITARIST, the world is divided into three types of people: people you can screw, people who may screw you and roadies. The delicate dance of the guitarist is attempting to get as close as possible to the first category while trying to avoid the second at all costs and insuring that the third has remembered that you only eat Oreos on Thursdays. THE HARD ROCK GUITARIST appears unkempt, unaffected and unconcerned with assorted lawyers. The lawyers keep the people in the second category busy and ignore the first, which enables the guitarist to do the opposite.
The evolution of the guitarist from supporting musician to GOD is something that, as a guitarist, I have spent a fair amount of time studying over the past couple of decades. Here is the chronological GUITAR GOD tree (with the reason for GOD status):
1. Robert Johnson (posthumously elevated to GOD status about 20 years ago because his recordings were reissued and some heavy metal guys thought it was cool to list him as an influence, although, when pressed, they didn't actually know any of his songs but since he shook hands with Satan he must be cool).
2. Jeff Beck- a similar case to the one above. Some HARD ROCK GUITARISTS saw FAMOUS HARD ROCK GUITARISTS list him as an influence and thought he must be cool if Slash said "No guitarist ever blew me away until I heard Jeff Beck." (No one listens to him but everyone thinks they should and thinks everyone else does).
3. Eric Clapton- blues player who played loud. (Leslie tremolo effect on White Room).
Also 3. Jimmy Page- blues player who played louder. (Stairway to Heaven).
Also 3. Jimi Hendrix- blues player who played the loudest and made love to his amplifier. (Burned his guitar at The Monterey Jazz Festival).
6. Ritchie Blackmore- blues player. (Smoke on the Water).
7. Eddie Van Halen- mostly blues player who popularized the technique of using both hands to press down strings on the neck of the guitar instead of fretting notes with one hand and picking with the other. He did this two-handed tapping thing really, really fast. (The really, really fast tapping thing).
Also 7. Angus Young (of AC/DC)- blues player. (Evil snarl and chords played at the very bottom of the guitar to maximize the natural overtones of the open strings of the instrument and make it sound very, very angry).
9. Randy Rhodes- fast blues player who also used the 6th degree of the scale, making him a Dorian player (the Dorian scale contains seven notes, whereas the blues scale (THE HARD ROCK GUITARIST’S scale of choice), contains only six, so he used more notes). (Ozzy association and larger note palette).
10. The Shredders. The abovementioned shredders used all of the notes available to them through incorporating the scales that jazz players use in their super-amplified music, and they played those notes as fast as humanly possible.
Honorable mention: David Gilmour (produces music that is rarely listened to without chemical refreshment).
So, what we have here boils down to a very simple equation (using HARD ROCK GUITARIST logic): the amount of heavy metal chicks you get depends on the amount of notes you play OR the speed at which you play them OR the volume at which you play those notes OR upon other HARD ROCK GUITARISTS citing you as an influence OR upon coming up with the guitar riff (a riff is a short jazz or rock musical idea, what a classical musician would call a motive) that will become an anthem.
Since most HARD ROCK GUITARISTS will not write an anthem, they concentrate on the other possible avenues to Groupie Paradise. Anthems are all about songwriting and songwriters are people who can string together a few rhyming lines and a memorable melody. THE HARD ROCK GUITARIST has no time for things like songwriting, since THE HARD ROCK GUITARIST sees the song as merely the container for the guitar solo. I saw a cover of a guitar magazine about fifteen years ago that said, "Today, Songwriting is almost as important as guitar playing, believe it or not." A given for most people, blasphemy for THE HARD ROCK GUITARIST.
THE HARD ROCK GUITARIST does not notice whether or not any of the above guitarists were part of great songwriting teams. There's no need. Jimi. Randy. Eddie. What do you think of? You think about a spotlight shining like A Beacon From The Almighty, upon a sweaty, grimacing figure, right hand sawing away and left hand invisible without stop-motion photography. You don't stop to wonder how the solo to Running with the Devil or Crazy Train would sound if it was played by itself to an empty auditorium. You just think of the fingers. Those wicked, wriggling fingers, going faster and faster and faster and faster....
And, atop the landscape of discarded Ibanez guitars and Music Man amplifiers, we come to Mt. Malmsteen.
A concise exposition of Yngwie Malmsteen’s music is impossible, but suffice it to say that he is responsible for an entire generation of music. You may not have heard of him, but any sufficiently geekish HARD ROCK GUITARIST will have a cassette tape of his stuff tucked away in some inconspicuous corner of their guitar practice area. No one could play faster. And, (and this was the horrifying part to THE HARD ROCK GUITARIST), by the early ‘90’s, no one cared. So, after twenty years of worship at The Altar of Shreddom, a generation of disillusioned guitarists threw away their complex scale diagrams and said, "Who gives a crap? I can't play any faster than Malmsteen, and no one likes him, so what are my chances?” So they decided it didn't even matter if they tuned their guitars at all, and we got...
Nirvana.
For the next fifteen years THE HARD ROCK GUITARIST focused solely on playing with as much volume as possible, discarding dexterity for destruction, and not worrying about extraneous nonsense like making sure there were six strings on his guitar.
In recent years, thanks largely to YouTube, this seems to be changing. Videos of young guitarslingers performing acrobatic guitar-related feats pop up on YouTube every day. Will this usher in a new Golden Age of Shreddom for THE HARD ROCK GUITARIST? Only time will tell.