The 21st century is still young but has already borne witness to some of the most spectacular lead guitar moments in the history of the instrument.
Here, Total Guitar have whittled down the greatest and the good to a top 30, featuring a cast of players who continue to push the boundaries of what the instrument can do, who demonstrate how the foundational practices of blues guitar remain eternal, with still more yet to be explored.
And then those who are simply 21st-century guitar heroes doing 21st-century guitar hero things. Y'know, blowing our minds, sending us back to the woodshed, but first pressing ‘pause’ then ‘rewind’ to hear just what they did and how they did it.
Ahead is Total Guitar editors' top 30 – the reader vote put Greta Van Fleet at no. 1. But first, here are entries 60-31…
60-31.
- 60. Twilight Surfer – Julian Lage
- 59. I’ll Tell You Someday – Plini
- 58. Interstate 80 – Tom Morello ft. Slash
- 57. Winner Takes All – Nita Strauss
- 56. Grinder – Gary Clark Jr.
- 55. Time Warp – Brad Paisley
- 54. Aesthetics Of Hate – Machine Head
- 53. Valley Of Fire – Jason Becker
- 52. The Hunter – Mastodon
- 51. Get Out Of My Yard – Paul Gilbert
- 50. In Too Deep – Sum 41
- 49. I Want My Crown – Eric Gales ft. Joe Bonamassa
- 48. Razor’s Edge – Dream Theater
- 47. Make It Wit Chu – Queens Of The Stone Age
- 46. Invisible Monster – Dream Theater
- 45. Little Pretty – Steve Vai
- 44. A Gunshot To The Head Of Trepidation – Trivium
- 43. Darkest Hour – Zakk Wylde
- 42. Lazaretto – Jack White
- 41. In Repair – John Mayer
- 40. Sick Sad Little World – Incubus
- 39. Holiday – Green Day
- 38. Hey Hey Rise Up – Pink Floyd
- 37. Atlas, Rise! – Metallica
- 36. Super Colossal – Joe Satriani
- 35. Psychosocial – Slipknot
- 34. Ego Death – Polyphia ft. Steve Vai
- 33. Like A Stone – Audioslave
- 32. There Was A Time – Guns N’ Roses
- 31. The Weight Of Dreams – Greta Van Fleet
30. Mammoth VH – Mr Ed (2021)
We wondered whether Wolfgang Van Halen would steer clear of tapping to avoid comparisons with his dad, but Mammoth WVH’s opening song gave a clear answer. Pointedly titled Mr. Ed, it exploded onto the stage with tapped harmonics and a sequence based on the Hot For Teacher patterns.
Wolfgang keeps alive the family tradition of sounding like he’s falling down the stairs and landing on his feet; the opening tapped harmonics ring with such force you can feel the string thumping against the fretwire.
Wolf beats out a quarter-note triplet with his tapping finger and fits the rest of the phrase into the gaps, another family secret. We’re just glad there’s still a Van Halen lighting up the fingerboard.
29. Velvet Revolver – Slither (2004)
Signalled by the crack of a snare drum, the jewel in Velvet Revolver’s debut has Slash at his Slashiest: full of nonchalant swagger and absolutely bristling to destroy 16 bars in the spotlight with a blazing wah-fest.
As with a great majority of his solos, this one’s built from blues-inspired licks, sped up and fed through a hard rock filter – and a cranked Marshall amp. Limber alternate picking and hammer-on/pull-off patterns allow him one to build up speed around the D minor pentatonic shape that the solo calls home.
But, much of that signature sound comes through at the apex of his bends, where a muscular vibrato and some furious Cry Baby action imparts attitude in buckets.
28. The Strokes – Last Nite (2001)
In the solo-less wasteland that was the early noughties, Albert Hammond Jr. gave us this absolute pearl. At the time we were grateful for any scraps we could get, but Last Nite still sounds great 20 years later, a shining example of the solo you can sing. Simple without being simplistic, Hammond creates hooks by repeating ideas with slight variations.
The punk rock snarl comes from playing C minor pentatonic over a C major chord sequence, and the tremolo picked doublestops at the end build to a fine frenzy while keeping the loose vibe going.
Hammond is a big fan of his Strat’s middle pickup, but contemporary footage shows him on his bridge pickup for Last Nite, the switch possibly knocked by his furious picking hand.
27. Buddy Guy – I Let My Guitar Do The Talking (2022)
If you’re searching for evidence to suggest that Strats and Cry Babies could hold the secret to eternal youth, then look no further. Cut when the living legend of Chicago blues was 86 years young, this wah-fuelled, funked-flavoured throwdown does exactly as its title suggests at every given opportunity in what is surely one of the most life-affirming lead guitar performances of the century.
With bluesy licks throughout, Buddy delivers a no-holds-barred workout, showing off just how athletically he can still get about the fretboard. His signature Dunlop BG95 Cry Baby helps conjure up oodles of open vowel-like sounds, while Buddy’s peerless phrasing humanises that talking Strat of his even further.
26. Melanie Faye – It’s a Moot Point (2020)
In the viral videos that made her name, the then 19-year-old Faye sat beneath a Hendrix poster delivering jazzy chord-melody neo-soul parts. For It’s a Moot Point, she makes Hendrix-like use of octave effects, but the phrasing is entirely her own: surprising, staccato phrases that weave together to create a killer melody.
It helps that she has built herself both a deep groove and a beautiful chord progression to play over, so her rhythmic invention feels perfect, and she can really make the most of the chord changes underneath.
Since being rocketed to social media fame, Faye has released only one EP, but this outstanding display of musicality has everything we love about R’n’B guitar.
25. Big Wreck – Ghosts (2014)
Supposedly, after Albert King heard David Bowie’s Let’s Dance, he told Stevie Ray Vaughan: “I heard you on the radio, playing my licks.” If SRV could hear Ghosts, he might say something similar to Big Wreck’s Ian Thornley. The note choice, use of space, tone, and vibrato are all straight from Stevie’s Let’s Dance playbook, and it’s done so well we’d never dream of complaining.
At 2:52, Thornley pulls out a sly diminished run that reveals his Berklee College of Music roots. This flash of jazz sets up the outro solo, with its fatter tone and frequent use of outside notes. But while the expensive notes scratch our brains, it’s the epic vibrato that blooms into feedback at 5:35 that really raises goosebumps.
24. Tedeschi Trucks Band – Midnight In Harlem (2011)
Widely hailed as the greatest slide guitarist on the planet, Derek Trucks’ soulful outro solo in Midnight In Harlem is exemplary for its expressive storytelling capabilities. The phrase, “It’s not what you play, but how you play it,” rings true as Trucks uses everything at his fingertips to up the emotional stakes and bring the track home in tear-jerking style.
With his guitar tuned to open E, he expands upon touchstone phrases in different areas of the neck to bring out different tones, building up momentum before taking a climactic trip to the fretboard’s edge. For that untouchably pure tone, Trucks relies on his Gibson SGs, boutique tube amps and glass medicine bottle slides.
23. Molly Tuttle – She'll Change (2021)
Bluegrass has always been blessed with astonishing flatpickers, and Molly Tuttle is the latest and greatest of them. As fleet and agile as a gazelle, Molly weaves playfully around the song’s melody, simultaneously tuneful and terrifying. The Crooked Tree album saw Molly returning to stripped-down bluegrass roots, and her open-string ideas show her mastery of the genre.
As the solo works up through the fretboard, she blurs the line between strumming and crosspicking at points. Unlike some crosspickers who rest their fingers on the body, Molly’s picking hand floats freely, and she gets a broader range of tones because she can easily change where she is picking mid-phrase.
22. Steven Wilson ft. Guthrie Govan – Drive Home (2013)
Guthrie Govan has created many of the greatest solos released over the last two decades, but it’s on Steven Wilson’s track Drive Home that he showcases his more minimalistic side.
“I remember Steven saying he imagined a guitar solo that was ‘soaring’,” Guthrie told Total Guitar. “That was the only adjective I got and started thinking about ways to do that. I used one of Steven’s guitars, which I’d never played before, because it had a sustainer pickup in it, and after having fun with it for a few minutes I asked, ‘Can I use this for my solo, just to see what happens?’ So I did.
“I insisted on doing about 90 takes as I always do, and everyone loved take one, so that’s what you hear on the record.”
21. Butch Walker – Out In The Open (2020)
Butch rarely goes in for guitar histrionics, whether on his own albums or the ones he’s produced for the likes of Fall Out Boy and Weezer, but he went in blazing this time. The song is already emotional by the time the solo begins, and Butch releases it all in a stunning catharsis.
Starting from sparse phrases with plenty of space, over the course of a minute Walker shows he is equally adept at crafting guitar melodies as vocal ones. He builds to a cascading legato run that wouldn’t disgrace Andy Timmons, and he’s still not done.
As the track fades, he emphasises long, crying bends and melodic phrases enhanced by his tasteful use of delay. We think Walker should put solos on more of his records.
20. The Darkness – I Believe In A Thing Called Love (2002)
A perfect pair of guitar-toting siblings, much like their heroes in AC/DC, Justin and Dan Hawkins have very different personalities both in person and on guitar. There are a number of songs which allow for comparisons to be drawn, and none better than breakout hit I Believe In A Thing Called Love, which saw them go head-to-head over its two main solos.
It’s younger brother Dan who first steps up to the challenge after the second chorus, running through some E major scale ideas around the bottom of the neck before heading up higher for some unison bends and bluesy ideas around the 9th fret – which would be the relative minor pentatonic three frets down from the major position found at the 12th fret.
Dan is typically known as the less flamboyant persona out of the pair, and his contributions are more laid-back than Justin’s solo, which begins after the final chorus and lives in more of a bluesy world.
Justin starts his solo with a minor 7th to octave bend up at the 15th fret, also harmonised up a major 3rd before some minor pentatonic lines around the 12th fret. Then there’s a climbing run on the high E, fretting notes from the E major scale while pedalling against the open string, starting down at the 4th fret and eventually ending at the very top of his black Gibson Les Paul Standard’s neck on the 22nd fret where there’s one final whole tone bend up to the root.
This kind of single-string idea can also be heard on tracks like AC/DC’s Thunderstruck and Iron Maiden’s Wasted Years, and is an effective tool for making something sound a lot more complicated than it actually is, allowing guitarists to incorporate some wide intervallic leaps against what often tends to be the key centre.
For the outro of the song, the band head back into the main riff – which is built off the first six notes of the E major scale, and then there’s one final flurry of notes from Justin using hammer-ons and pull-offs before its closing stab. Neither solo would sound quite as good without the other, which is what makes this track such an enduring celebration of their contrasting yet perfectly complementary personalities as musicians.
“I enjoy listening to Dan’s lead work because he does things that I’d never think of,” Justin once told TG. “He probably likes my stuff for the same reason. We know how to enjoy each other’s playing and not see it as a competition. It’s all about whatever’s best for the song, and it takes a while to learn that I think. Make sure the song works, otherwise nobody will listen and it might be totally pointless.”
19. Steve Vai – Little Pretty (2022)
The standout track from last year’s Inviolate album, Little Pretty is notable for many reasons, perhaps firstly for the American guitar hero ditching the Ibanez models he’s most associated with for a very different kind of guitar – a Gretsch hollowbody.
And though there’s no whammy bar to abuse, that doesn’t stop Vai from pulling magic out of the proverbial hat, playing to each chord in a stunning display of slippery slides, powerful bends and fusion-esque ideas.
Most impressively of all is how he links all these different passages into something unique and coherent, snaking through the changes with effortless ease and fearless bravado. Nearly five decades into his career, he’s still melting minds.
18. John Mayer – In Repair (2006)
Every tune on the Continuum album is bursting with the kind of tastefully minimalist soloing that inspired a whole new generation of ‘feel’ players, but In Repair houses some of Mayer’s most delicious and most under-celebrated licks of all time.
After setting up the track’s experimental organ-like tones with the help of an EHX POG and a Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler, Mayer looked to the tried and true tones of his heavily relic’d ‘Black One’ Strat for the expertly-paced, soulful main solo.
The icing on the blues-pop cake comes in the final minute as Mayer layers sweet Allman Brothers-style guitarmonies with yet more devastatingly slick improv work to send the outro soaring into the ether.
17. Opeth – Windowpane (2003)
Opeth leader Mikael Åkerfeldt made a bold move with the band’s 2003 album Damnation, eschewing their death metal roots for ’70s prog rock worship – as illustrated by the opening track Windowpane, in which Åkerfeldt shines as a soloist. The opening lines in F# are perfectly constructed to fit the song, almost as lyrical as the vocals themselves.
In this, Åkerfeldt was inspired by Andy Latimer, guitarist for English progressive rock pioneers Camel. Latimer’s forte was to tell stories through moody and modal leads, targeting specific notes to create and release tension. “It’s a sound that I almost tried to copy,” Åkerfeldt once told us. “I wanted to sound as close to him as I could.”
16. Avenged Sevenfold – Bat Country (2005)
The Californian quintet’s third album City Of Evil heralded a time of great musical exploration which saw them moving away from the heavier metalcore sounds of earlier years.
One thing that hadn’t changed, however, was the face-melting guitar acrobatics from lead axeman Synyster Gates, who by this point in the band’s career had already established himself as arguably the most accomplished shredder in the New Wave Of American Heavy Metal.
By this point in the band’s career, Synyster Gates had already established himself as arguably the most accomplished shredder in the New Wave Of American Heavy Metal
The solo in Bat Country begins with stinging unison bends on the higher strings in the key of D minor and a quick burst in the first position of the minor pentatonic scale at the 10th fret.
The unison bends repeat once more, this time with a divebomb in the gap where the rest of the musicians cut out, before Gates begins his onslaught of extreme bends and introduces more chromatic ideas as the lead sections builds and builds in tension.
Instead of simply concluding the solo there, rhythm player Zacky Vengeance then joins him for a classical-inspired harmonised section in D minor, with the guitar duo turning their Schecters into a baroque duet that seemingly comes out of nowhere. The element of surprise is key here.
15. John Petrucci – Damage Control (2005)
Featured on Suspended Animation, the Dream Theater maestro’s solo debut, Damage Control has a white-knuckle ride of a guitar solo begins in familiar enough territory: with a bluesy pentatonic-based lick, anchored around the 5th fret. But, as is the joy with many a Petrucci solo, it then unfolds across the entire length and breadth of the fretboard with a full minute of whiplashing plot twists and rapidly shifting techniques.
From expressive bends to warp-speed shred patterns, it’s such a riotously fun listen because it sounds like Trooch himself is having the time of his life joyriding around the neck of one of his humbucker-equipped Music Man signatures. The rest of his scorching lead tone comes from an overdriven Mesa/Boogie with added distortion and a little delay for good measure.
With his faultless coordination and levels of speed and stamina that mere mortals can only dream of, it’s easy to think of Trooch as some kind of guitar deity. But even he has a few tricks up his sleeve to make playing solos as challenging as this one a little more manageable, and he’ll typically hoist his guitar up over his left knee for extra purchase when tearing it up live.
14. Cardinal Black – Tell Me How It Feels (2022)
For years, Chris Buck has captivated a hefty online audience with his stellar Friday Fretworks YouTube series. But for the Welsh six-string phenom, things really skyrocketed when he brought his buttery rich tones and vocal-inspired phrasing to his new band Cardinal Black’s neo-soul debut January Came Close, featuring standout track Tell Me How It Feels.
“It was our first single, so it was our introduction to the world,” Chris says. “We didn’t really exist as a band as far as anyone knew. We’d certainly never gigged, so it was one of the rare occasions in my life of recording where I’ve had a totally blank canvas.
“The solo took shape relatively quickly. We were at Rockfield in South Wales recording bass and drums for an EP. As you inevitably do, we had a couple of hours left at the end of the last day, so we thought we might as well have a stab at some of the guitar stuff! Everything was set up and ready to go, but I knew I had a relatively finite amount of time to actually record this solo. Generally speaking, that brings the best out of you because you don’t overthink. If I’d gone into it having road tested it for two years, it probably wouldn’t have emerged quite so spontaneously.
“A lot of the guitar players that I’ve grown up aspiring to play like – whether it’s Slash, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton or Derek Trucks – they’re guys where the solos are great, but they’re very much within the context of a song, and they’re there to serve its development. That’s always been at the forefront of my thinking when it comes to constructing solos.
“My mother was big into pop music, soul and Motown, so I grew up with a lot of Otis Redding and Sam Cooke. Outside of that, there’d be Ella Fitzgerald and my grandfather was turning me onto Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra and the crooners, so great vocalists have always been a big part of my inspiration. Vocalists don’t think in terms of modes or boxes or pentatonic shapes. It doesn’t work like that. Vocalists think linearly and that’s what I was trying to copy in some shape or form.
“I used my Goldtop Revstar. I really love that guitar. I remember seeing them after they were released in a guitar shop in Cardiff and liking the fact that it was a relatively simply appointed guitar. I thought it was unusual for a guitar to be released that wasn’t derived from a Les Paul, Strat or Tele. That instantly connected with me, and there’s something to be said for developing a sound and there being a rather unusual guitar at the front and centre of it.
“The Victory V140 was the amplifier, running into a Zilla 1x12 speaker cabinet. The only two effects pedals we used were the ThorpyFX Gunshot as an overdrive, and then the Mythos Golden Fleece as a fuzz. The delay was added with plugins.”
13. Van Halen – China Town (2012)
Van Halen only released one full studio album in the 21st century, but that was all Eddie needed to show he was still a force. The furious tempo in China Town brings to mind VH classics Hot For Teacher and I’m The One, although without their signature swing. The solo’s opening horse impersonation, followed by signature three-note-per-string sequences, leave no one in any doubt about who is playing.
The licks that follow are all from the playbook of the first six VH albums, but delivered with such fire that no one could object. There’s a dissonant sequence that sounds like a nightmare version of Panama. Eddie’s newly developed 5150 III amps gave him more gain than he’d ever had, but the tone is instantly identifiable as the guy who played Eruption.
Indeed, for the second half of the solo he kicks into a phrase reminiscent of the picked phrases from that legendary solo, showing it was every inch as powerful when placed inside a song. Just as you think Eddie has no new ideas, though, the solo climaxes with tapped, chromatically descending trills played in octave unison with the bass – a feat made possible by Wolfgang Van Halen, who also masterminded the album.
12. Nick Johnston – Atomic Mind (2014)
The title track from Nick Johnston’s third album was the song that changed his life and introduced him to the wider world as one of the rising stars of instrumental guitar. Unlike a lot of virtuoso players, however, his dedication to melody and harmony over technique is what established the Schecter signature artist as one of the most tasteful players in the game.
That’s not to say he chose to sit back and embrace a more simplistic approach for the entirety of Atomic Mind. With the warp-speed legato runs introduced for the main solo section in Bb minor three minutes in, there is a nod to the slippery brilliance of rock fusion masters like Guthrie Govan and Richie Kotzen.
“I had been working on blending chromatics with some of my legato parts for a few years before this record was recorded,” Nick says. “So you can hear some of the faster lines borrowing some of those ideas. I’m basically playing with a 6/8 feel over a couple of simple powerchords, which gave me so much freedom with how I wanted to approach the solo rhythmically. Everything was wide open, and the final take was something that had the right energy, intensity and feel I was after.”
11. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Eddie (2022)
In the mid-’90s, ’80s rock was about as cool as illegally parking in a disabled bay. This was a matter of some consternation to Eddie Van Halen, who complained to Guitar World in 1996 that none of the new rockstars would acknowledge Van Halen’s influence.
Eddie would be highly vindicated to see the world of today, then: Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready regularly covering Eruption in concert, Wolfgang performing Van Halen covers with Nirvana’s drummer, and perhaps biggest of all, the Red Hot Chili Peppers releasing a song called Eddie.
John Frusciante has admitted he struggled to find the right balance between his own sound and Eddie’s. “I was trying for a while, and I wasn’t happy with anything I was doing,” he told Guitar Player last year. “I was either going too far in the Eddie Van Halen direction, to where it was too busy and there was too much two-hand tapping and it didn’t sound like me, or I was just doing it and it only sounded like me… in a song about Eddie Van Halen.”
Finding this balance wasn’t helped by the difficulty of inviting comparisons to hard rock’s greatest ever soloist. John told Total Guitar: “You’re basically saying to people, ‘Think about Eddie Van Halen.’ And then when it comes to this long guitar solo at the end, you’re going, ‘Now watch this!’ And I did not like that idea.”
Frusciante considered dropping the solo altogether, but the balance he found is perfect. He admitted his favourite parts of Eddie’s style weren’t always the fast licks, but “playing in a way that feels spontaneous, or when you hear feedback because he recorded his parts in the same room as his amplifier. To this day, those things give me chills.”
For the first solo in Eddie, John recorded next to his amp, his Strat humming with feedback the whole way. He taps briefly before moving into a pitch-wheel effect similar to Eddie’s lick on Beat It. By using his favourite Strat, though, the vibe remains undeniably Frusciante. One moment there’s an Eddie-esque pinched harmonic, and the next the feedback shrieks out of control in a distinctly RHCP way.
The outro solo sees Frusciante attacking his whammy bar with abandon, along with more sustaining, harmonic feedback. He wisely keeps his use of tapping limited, creating melodic phrases with bends and taps as Eddie did on Panama.
As Eddie did on the early VH albums, John delivered the entire solo in one take: “I stopped being self-conscious about the idea that the song was about Eddie and just did what was natural. We were recording, and I took maybe a 15-minute break. And when I came back in, I just did the whole thing.”
The solo is filled with blazing pentatonic licks, but they’re clearly Frusciante’s pentatonic licks. Wisely steering clear of aping Eddie’s ideas, John instead captures the spirit of Van Halen: wild abandon, a dangerously cranked amp, and a deep love of guitar.
10. Polyphia – Playing God (2022)
Of late, few names have impressed the guitar community as much as Polyphia duo Tim Henson and Scott LePage, and Playing God is one of their most daring innovations, as they ditched their usual Ibanez AZ electric guitars for a new nylon string signature guitar – the TOD10N electro-acoustic.
The opening solo uses ideas from the E harmonic minor and diminished scales, all linked together by many a passing tone in order to emphasise the track’s jazzy, Al Di Meola-esque feel.
For the closing leads, Henson and LePage run through some octave-based lines that, thanks to a healthy dose of delay, almost feel like wide-interval synthesizer arpeggios. Henson noted how it forced him to brush up on every technique from hybrid and selective picking to hammer-ons. It’s not for the faint-hearted.
9. The White Stripes – Ball And Biscuit (2003)
Jack White’s genius is almost underwhelming when you analyse it: a Whammy pedal, a Big Muff, and the minor pentatonic scale. But to break it down to those components gives no sense of what a revelation he was to hear.
There’s a definite nod to Hendrix at the start – that opening lick is essentially Voodoo Child up an octave – but his startling timing and unexpected octave leaps quickly leave the realm of the familiar. From 2:03-2:05 he makes his guitar sound like it’s been recorded backwards, and his trademark stuttering picking tells us we’re not in the Mississippi Delta anymore.
Then he jerks the Whammy pedal back to normal pitch, creating a divebomb just as surprising as when Hendrix first performed them. If it didn’t end with a classic turnaround, we’d probably forget entirely that we were hearing 12-bar blues.
8. Muse – Reapers (2021)
You could make a top 20 list just of Matt Bellamy’s 21st century solos, but Reapers boasts an intro that outdoes most guitar solos for drama, sounding like a dystopian Hot For Teacher. After the first chorus, Matt introduces Eddie to Tom Morello, developing the intro lick with Whammy-pedal octave shifts.
With a less inventive guitarist, you’d wonder if anything was left for the main solo; with Bellamy, you just hold your breath. He enters with a Kaoss Pad divebomb and dissonant Whammy pedal lines, and builds into the mother of all pickslides, enhanced with stereo panning.
From there he dives into Whammy-powered trills straight from the Morello playbook, following that with a sequence of angular licks that show Jack White isn’t the only one who can make blues sound quirky. He transposes a three-note repeating lick into unexpected places, creating melodic hooks out of thin air.
Even as stadium-conquering rock overlords, Muse have maintained a level of indie rock credibility, and as the solo drops down to just bass and drums, Bellamy shows those roots. In other hands, that might be a moment of epic vibrato and leather-trouser posturing, but Bellamy’s tone and attack keep things more Nigel Godrich than Nigel Tufnel.
From there, we’re into the final section, which is also the easiest to play, because Bellamy knows melody trumps wizardry every time. Hitting top gear, he leaps up an octave and starts tremolo picking for the last few bars. Reapers has all the elements that make Matt Bellamy great.
7. Alter Bridge – Blackbird (2007)
The greatest tag-team solo since the glory days of Thin Lizzy saw Myles Kennedy and Mark Tremonti trading blows over a brooding groove in 6/8. Kennedy’s Diezel Herbert tone contrasts with Tremonti’s spitting Dual Rectifier, so there’s no doubt who’s playing what. Kennedy takes first blood with a uni-vibe-drenched melody.
With plenty of time to stretch out, Myles holds his opening notes for up to two bars each, luxuriating in the sustain from his PRS singlecut. On his second time round the chord progression, he builds a melody based on the underlying guitar part, including some colourful outside notes. He ends his solo rising to some screaming bends, ready for Tremonti’s takeover.
Mark’s opening punch sees the entire band rise dynamically. While he might have been tempted to go full shred, he wisely holds back with long, singing vibrato. There’s a brief but gnarly legato run at 5:29, with Mark’s signature Morley wah pedal adding drama.
Even then, he returns to melodic phrases that echo what the band are playing underneath, delivering epic, sustained notes as the music reaches its headiest point. The shred proper doesn’t arrive until the last four seconds, a tremolo-picked finale that paves the way for Kennedy’s soaring vocals to return.
For all that this was hailed as the return of the guitar hero at the time, the emphasis here from both players is on melody and dramatic vibrato – it’s more Michael Schenker than Yngwie Malmsteen. Shred was back, but this time, it was tasteful.
6. Joe Bonamassa – Sloe Gin (2007)
If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about the art of long-form soloing, the last three minutes of this title track from Bonamassa’s sixth album is as informative as it gets. Sloe Gin was written in the ’70s by producer Bob Ezrin and composer Michael Kamen (both of whom worked with Pink Floyd), and it was Bonamassa’s producer Kevin Shirley who suggested covering it.
This would quickly become one of Joe’s signature anthems and ultimately his most performed live track, partly thanks to its elongated solo section which provided the perfect bedrock for the guitarist to tell a story through the Les Paul in his hands.
For the most part, the solo is played in various positions of the D minor pentatonic scale, with some extra colour from the added 2nds and 9ths
Back in 2011, Joe told Total Guitar that he used an Iced Tea Sunburst ’59 reissue Les Paul for the recordings, through “my Two-Rock Custom Signature Reverb, the Marshall Silver Jubilee and a small pedalboard with a DD-3 delay, a wah and maybe a TC chorus box”.
For the most part, the solo is played in various positions of the D minor pentatonic scale, with some extra colour from the added 2nds and 9ths thrown in here and there. The lines are more understated to begin with and slowly build in tension, with some aggressive bends and faster runs thrown in as the solo section progresses. Some descending diads thrown in right at the end help bring it all to a close, with a dramatic low E struck hard as his parting gift.
5. Afrique Victime – Mdou Moctar
Although blues evolved in 19th-century America, its roots are in Africa. Enslaved people brought their musical traditions with them when they were transported to America. Musical traditions from across the continent combined and evolved into the blues.
Afrique Victime sees the next stage of that evolution, as Niger’s Mdou Moctar combines electric blues tones and phrasing with the rhythms and harmony of Tuareg berber music. The resulting ‘desert blues’ is psychedelic and mesmerising. The propulsive rhythms underneath clearly inspire Moctar’s freewheeling improvisation.
It’s not just the fusion of styles that are rarely heard together: Moctar’s technique is original by itself. He doesn’t use a plectrum, picking almost exclusively with his index finger. On his alternate-picked runs, he catches the string with his nail on the downstroke and flesh on the upstroke, creating contrasting tones. He also plays overhand surprisingly often, which is partly showboating but also creates wild bends and chaotic runs. He taps with his fretting hand while sliding down the neck, producing almost random sequences comparable to Joe Satriani’s robot impressions.
Some of Moctar’s sound is familiar – Hendrix is an obvious reference – but there’s also the excitement of hearing something genuinely innovative. There’s the tangible excitement of musicians who know they’re breaking new ground, too. “I want to keep the sound as a very traditional sound. Because if you listen to my guitar, how I touch the guitar, it is so different,” he told TG. “It is very traditional; it’s not guitar! It is… Something!”
4. Jeff Beck – Hammerhead
From the latter part of Beck’s trailblazing career, Hammerhead features one his greatest riffs and some of his most spectacular lead playing. The inspiration for the song came from Beck’s frequent collaborator and keyboardist Jan Hammer, most notably his theme tune for hit television show Miami Vice.
And after some scratchy Hendrix-inspired wah work, its main theme in D Mixolydian soon erupts with Beck sticking with minimalistic ideas during the verses using notes from the minor pentatonic and Dorian scales. The second verses brings with it added tension thanks to the major 7th played, belonging to the harmonic minor scale found in the same position.
The main solo begins just before the three-minute mark, Beck improvising in the effortlessly off-the-cuff style he was well known for – effectively talking through his instrument with no barriers in between and making it all up as he goes along – incorporating bluesy bends, whammy bar stunts and screaming higher notes over Tal Wilkenfeld’s rock-solid bass grooves.
Best of all, there’s not a single idea that feels out of place or overly thought-out, proving that Beck was truly at home when improvising, saying what he needed to say in that particular moment in time. For the final section of the solo, he ventures high up the neck, using his Strat’s whammy bar to throttle the sustaining notes ringing out before one big minor 7th to unison bend as the song’s main theme reintroduces itself once again.
3. Guthrie Govan – Waves (2006)
Before his debut album, Erotic Cakes, Govan was a guitar-playing Rory Bremner, capable of flawlessly impersonating any guitarist you could mention. It was a joy to discover he was also capable of sounding like no one else. On Waves, Guthrie delivers a turn of shred that justifies his other reputation as probably the most technically-complete electric guitarist on the planet.
For Waves, Guthrie was trying to make a fretted guitar sound fretless, hence the huge number of slides. The incredibly smooth neck pickup tone almost recalls a monophonic synth, but it’s remarkable how relatively little gain he uses.
In 25 seconds, Guthrie delivers more notes than B.B. King played on entire albums, but it never seems like he’s showing off so much as revelling in the joy of playing
The amp on this was almost certainly a Cornford MK50H II, which Guthrie endorsed at the time – a rock amp but not a high-gain one by modern standards. Most guitarists would cower in fear from attempting anything with that tone, let alone Guthrie’s snaking, alien legato.
Incredibly, it appears to be completely improvised: every live performance of Waves has featured a unique solo section. In 25 seconds, Guthrie delivers more notes than B.B. King played on entire albums, but it never seems like he’s showing off so much as revelling in the joy of playing.
At 0:58 he screams out of an ascending run into a huge bend, and you barely catch a breath before he’s off again, kicking up clouds of dust like a musical Road Runner. There are chromatic notes, fiery blues scale licks, and nods to Jeff Beck with the whammy bar, all announcing the end of Guthrie the sessioneer and the arrival of Guthrie the guitar hero.
2. Eric Gales ft. Joe Bonamassa – I Want My Crown (2021)
What happens when two of the greatest blues players on earth go head-to-head? A pentatonic explosion is the only correct answer. The fireworks heard on the lead single from Gales’ Crown album, produced by Josh Smith and Joe Bonamassa himself, made it Total Guitar’s solo of the year in 2021. And in the time that’s passed since then, our affections – and that of the wide blues community – have only grown warmer for this powerful conversation in Ab minor between two highly gifted virtuoso players.
It starts very simply, with Bonamassa kicking things off with a minor 7th to root bend which naturally flows into some 1st-position pentatonics, but then he dazzles with a chromatic bebop line that snakes around higher up the neck. Gales then roars in with his Cry Baby shaping some jaw-dropping runs that splice Mixolydian ideas with some more Eastern-sounding flavours from the Phrygian Dominant mode.
With the ball back in his court, Bonamassa once again finds himself in 1st position, however this time he’s an octave up and using some aggressive bends that build on the tension introduced by Gales, who then adds an octave layer to his next part of the trade-off, building the musical dialogue further still.
Never one to be upstaged, Bonamassa responds by throwing in one of his infamous two note per-string runs at supersonic speeds, which prompts Gales to up his game and together they lead the song to its final chorus. Modern blues has never sounded so electrifying.
1. Extreme – Rise (2023)
So we arrive here at the number one spot in our list – and for our money, this really is where it’s at right now! Nuno Bettencourt’s solo on Extreme’s comeback single Rise is a technical tour de force, 55 seconds of sublime shredding that have taken the guitar world by storm, and, let’s be honest, caused a fair few jaws to drop in sheer excitement.
As Nuno tells Total Guitar: “When Rise came out, we thought, ‘OK, decent song, decent guitar solo’, but the reaction that it got was something else. When Rick Beato posted his video breaking down the solo, and he’s saying that Steve Lukather’s calling, and his brother is calling and Phil X is calling saying, ‘Have you heard the Nuno solo?’, it was really surreal for me.
“It’s that scenario that you fantasise about as a kid. He’s saying things like, ‘Other than Eddie, he’s the guy!’ You’re like, ‘OK, hold on a second!’ I had people I admire texting me, like Phil Collen from Def Leppard, Brian May reaching out and talking about it. You have to take a step back and go ‘What’s actually happening here?’”
What is actually happening on the recording is off-the-charts. Bettencourt attributes the solo's impact to its introduction on video, in which he is performing it and we are watching – and this act of witnessing the performance makes it all the more powerful.
Maybe he is onto something. But there is more to it than that. There is some clever studio trickery. Listen again to the denouement. There's some sleight of hand via an octaver.
“The flurry at the end, it almost sounds like these harmonics are happening which I think is making people even think it’s better than it is,” said Bettencourt. “It’s just an octave up at like 20 or 30 per cent to make it grow.”
Listen to the front-end of the solo. There is an MXR Phase 90 that got punched in after the fact, because the day it was getting tracked, Eddie Van Halen just happened to visit the studio. It was the first time he had ever used the orange box on record, out of the fear that he was guilty of trying to crib Eddie's style. “From 1978 onward, from the day we heard Eruption, he owns the Phase 90. It’s not MXR, it’s an Edward Phase 90,” said Bettencourt.
But there is also the attitude, and the guts to go with the flow even though the showpiece solo begins with a mistake. The lesson here is just because you fluff the start of a solo doesn't mean it won't turn out great.
“If you really want to break it down, I think it’s the first note I play, I miss the whole string completely, I was so excited,” he admits. “It made a sound that I’ve never even heard before, like a kick drum mixed with a guitar note mixed with a car accident!”
