Friday, June 27, 2008

What are your favourite guitar solos of all time?

The 4 Best Guitar Solos Of All Time by Johnny Stall

The following is a list of the 4 best guitar solos ever to be played... well, at least in my opinion anyways.

I had the hardest time writing this because with all of the amazing music in the world, how the heck do you pick the top 4? What was even harder for me was to put them in order!

I have been working on this for days now and even though I have whittled the list down to 4, I still couldn't decide on the order to place each song in. So instead of numbering them from 1 to 4, I decided just to tell you my favorite and leave the rest of them un-numbered. I know, I know... I wussed out! But sit down and try it yourself someday and then see how hard it is.

You probably wont agree with my choices and that's ok because we all have different tastes. In fact, if everyone agreed with my picks, I would be worried. That's the beauty of music... we love what we think sounds good, what makes us feel good and what makes us jump out of our chair and play some air guitar.

Could you imagine if we all felt the same, liked the same music and had the same opinions? How boring would that be?

So here are my choices, the songs and guitar solos that send shivers up and down my spine every time I hear them. If you don't agree, that's ok. These are my picks... go make your own.

My favorite guitar solo of all time:

Eruption by Van Halen:

Written and performed by Eddie Van Halen on the Van Halen album. I picked this as my favorite of all because it's the one that I always, no matter where and when I hear it, have this urge to play some serious air guitar. I remember being blown away the first time that I heard this because a sound like that was never heard before. That one song inspired myself and many other young kids to pick up the guitar.

The strangest part of this track was that it wasn't even supposed to be on the album. Eddie was in the studio practicing one of the solos that he liked to do live because he had a gig on the weekend. His producer walked in and heard him playing and told him that he wanted to put it on the album. They recorded one take of the solo and that's what you hear on the album.

Honorable mentions:

Freebird by Lynyrd Skynyrd:

Starting off as a ballad, Freebird then turns into an up-tempo guitar boogie. My favorite parts of the song are the slide guitar solo at the beginning and the 3 guitars that solo for nearly a full 5 minutes at the end of the song.

Another cool fact about this song is the lyrics at the start of the song. "If I leave here tomorrow would you still remember me?" was a question that a girlfriend of Skynrd guitarist Allen Collins asked him when she realized that music would always come before her in his life. Allen wrote those lyrics down and then were used in Freebird and recorded on their Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd album.

All Along The Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix Experience:

Jimi took a tape of the Bob Dylan song into the studio one day and immediately started recording a bunch of takes. Becoming more dissatisfied as the song went on, Jimi kept overdubbing more and more guitar parts. When you sit down and listen to the finished version, which is on the Electric Ladyland album, it's hard to imagine that this song started out as an acoustic ballad.

Stairway To Heaven by Led Zeppelin:

From the famous Led Zeppelin IV album, this is the song that you usually see at the top of all of the "best guitar solos" lists. When you see videos of this song being played, you will see Jimmy Page playing a double neck Gibson guitar during the song. When recording the song for the album, Jimmy actually used a 1958 Fender Telecaster, Harmony acoustic guitar and Fender Electric 12-string.

Another interesting fact about "Stairway" was that it never was released as a single, which turned out to be a great marketing move. Just to get their own copy of "Stairway", fans were more than willing to shell out the cash for the whole album. It was a great investment anyways because the entire album is amazing.

There you have it, in my humble opinion, the 4 best guitar solos of all time. I have a much bigger list that I could have revealed here but because this is an article and not a book, I have kept it down to 4. Plus it really doesn't matter what my choices are, anything that I would have picked wouldn't be able to do justice to all of the great guitar players in the history of modern music. I'm just grateful that I've had the chance to experience all of their music.

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1 comment:

  1. you have written a good post and liked you blogs on Music

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