Steve Hackett duking it out with Paul Gilbert and Nuno Bettencourt

[cdwillis]

Funny how Gilbert covered Lamb Lies Down on Broadway on the Gilbert Hotel album and everyone is acting like it's some competition. I remember reading or watching some thing with Paul talking about how he learned some apreggios/licks from listening to Hackett.

[atomic charvel guy]

Doesn't dungeons and dragons come with a dream theatre cd in every game? I heard that somewhere. Dum, de dum dum..... here come the Petrucci flames, better get the tan excellerator out.-lol

[SpiralArchitect]

I agree with you ACG, I can't think of someone more boring and irrelevant as John Petrooooochey, I'd rather listen to someone getting stung by africanized honeybees! C'mon petrucci fanboys! let's hear it!


I personally totally dig Steve Hackett, Steve did a guest on a Gordian Knot cd along with bill bruford and paul masvidal of cynic, which Gordian Knot is Sean Malone's band, also from Cynic. Anyhow it's quite amazing, and I enjoy that stuff alot, however WTF is this darktown stuff, some people just write crap, every band and artist has this problem, but once again, all down to personal taste

[atomic charvel guy]

You're dead on balls accurate with it coming down to personal taste, and mine is tasty guitar sprinkled with flash and some mouthfulls of chicklets as you get knocked out by the player . The fretboard karate gets old quick, not that I don't like rippin' guitar, it just has to be a certain way to get me losin' it. My perfect guitar player would be Jeff Beck and Warren demartini fused with a little of a lot of others-lol. Warren wailed the piss out of me when I saw him a couple of months ago with Endbat, he still has it. I think Paercy makes him play better than the the dude from Love hate. they were fukkin' great.

[excon]

I enjoyed watching both Genesis videos. I like classic rock as much as heavy metal, and I like a broad range of both. Compairing Hackett to Gilbert is like compairing apples to oranges. Both styles require different knowledge of music and technique. However, I’ve heard Hackett was using sweep picking and two handed tapping in the early ’70s which is long before most of our heavy metal heroes made names for themselves. They know where they got their ideas from. Some of them will even admit it.

[SEEGERMANY]

If there ever was a thread that deserved a "BIG RED", this is it!

[nor]

I like every player named in this thread. However, Steve Hackett holds a special place for me. When I got married (fifteen years ago), I recorded my own tracks for the march and premarch.

Premarch - Horizons (Steve Hackett)
March - Wedding March from Flash Gordon (Queen)
---
The 70's prog guitar movement was the catalyst for VH and the 80's shread fest. Hollsworth, Howe, Hackett, McGlaughlin, Trower, Lifeson, Livgren, DiMiola, Zappa - spread generously over a base of Beck, Page, Clapton, Lee, Nugent, Montrose, Blackmore, Frehley, Frampton, etc...

There are soooo many worthless guitarists out there to bag on. Why waste time comparing the ones who matter?

[markb]

Well I fuckin hate Dream Theater. I like prog metal, and still hate them. But I give John Petrucci all the credit in the world. At a time when it was totally unfashionable, guitaristically incorrect and so on to shred, this guy came out and said up yours to the world and started belting out 64th notes all over the place. Good for him.

People blame 'seattle' for the anti shred thing. Such a smokescreen. The seattle bands played solos left and right (xcept Nirvana) . It was the guitar community in general that went anti shred, turned on itself. A continent full of rock guitarists who looked down on fast aggressive guitar playing. Rock guitarists fer chrissakes, WTF is that??? Petrucci looked at all these fucking silly women , shook his head and went out and did his thing.

[atomic charvel guy]

The bar was raised too high, and not everyone can do psycho sweeps and 8 finger tapping , triple reverse drop kick with a twist while playing 2.4 thousand notes per milli second on your head and using your feet to
fret the nortes, etc. And there was a large backlash.
I don't think you can bring the instrument too much farther than a guy like Steve Vai can , I mean the fukkin' guy can make it do anything he wants it to. the overall control over the instrument boggles my mind when he plays.

[AdRock]

The bar was raised too high, and not everyone can do psycho sweeps and 8 finger tapping , triple reverse drop kick with a twist while playing 2.4 thousand notes per milli second on your head and using your feet to
fret the nortes, etc. And there was a large backlash.
I don't think you can bring the instrument too much farther than a guy like Steve Vai can , I mean the fukkin' guy can make it do anything he wants it to. the overall control over the instrument boggles my mind when he plays.

+1

[AlexL]

...When I got married (fifteen years ago), I recorded my own tracks for the march and premarch.

March - Wedding March from Flash Gordon (Queen)

OMG, that's so cool.

I played guitar in my wedding (one song, while one of my groomsman sang), but recording yourself and playing it back for part of the ceremony is something I've never heard of before. Great idea.

And the wedding march from Flash Gordon? That, my friend, is awesome.

Wish I would have been invited, ya bastard!


- E.

[jwoods986]

markb and Tommy are right on, IMO. Grunge had solos. Cantrell played solos in most AIC songs, Pearl Jam had some long solos on Evenflow and Alive, for example. Grunge did kill off glam (which isn't a bad thing) and there was a shredding backlash. But as Tommy said, I think it was because guitar playing had gotten so out of hand, so these bands just brought it back down to earth a bit. I know because I fell victim to the shred.

I graduated HS in '90, so I was learning guitar in the late 80s, and was hooked on all the shred guys - Gilbert, Yngwie, Vai, V. Moore, Kotzen, Becker, etc. In my mind, I was going to be the next "Shrapnel guy" - and by 18, so I practiced all the "psycho sweep, 8 finger tapping, while doing a back-flip, and bending your girlfriend over" stuff
I got pretty good but by my senior year, I think I just realized that I'm not at that level. So I started losing interest in guitar and about two years after HS (end of '92), pretty much stopped playing until I picked it up again in '02. What inspired me was going out with friends and seeing a huge local cover band in DC, Gonzo's Nose. They would pack most places they played and people followed them to whatever bar they played. They played cheesy 80s stuff - 8675309, My Sharona, etc., but they packed the house, people were into it, and they made good money. So I'm watching these guys and thinking, "holy crap, I can play this stuff". And it made me realize that playing guitar is about enjoyment, love of the instrument, the music, etc., not trying to be the next Shrapnel shredder. Which would bore most people to tears anyway. So I started playing again, learning actual songs (I think I knew one complete song in HS), and enjoying it. I still like to work on stuff that pushes me but not at the expense of everything else. My $.02, I'm done

IMO, soloing disappeared when nu-metal hit in the late 90s.

[excon]

I agree with the above post. There can be a lot of beauty, genius, and big bucks in simplicity. Just turn on the radio.

[markb]

Well there wouldn't be anything worse than a world where there were only shredders and nothing else. And some of the shredders are beyond the 'keep practicing' BS, as it becomes a question of natural motor skills and genetics, which is kind of a turn off. I just like how Petrucci went out there and said, I am going to play solos. Long and complicated ones even. Cuz at the time, solos were frowned upon, really.

A shred backlash was predictable, because the same rule applies to any trend in rock music: everything begins as something cool, and ends as a farce.