100 greatest guitar solos:

I figure that since I have spent so many hours trying to learn many of these solos, I’d throw in my 2 cents on this list of 100 greatest guitar solos that Sandefur and other bloggers have been discussing. This list obviously is skewed towards the more popular, i.e. heavy airplay songs, that have cool guitar solos. Just look at the #1 guitar solo—Stairway to Heaven. I love both Zeppelin and Jimmy Page and no doubt that solo is one of his better ones, but it also happens to be the one song that has gotten the most airplay of all time. If I were to look at Zeppelin’s vast catalog, I could probably find better solos of his, for instance, the one to my favorite Zeppelin Song, Ten Years Gone.

But in looking how the results were tabulated, this sort of makes sense. This list resulted from a poll taken by Guitar World’s readers; thus it would tend to be skewed towards the more popular material. But any list that doesn’t even include one of the world's greatest rock guitarists—Steve Morse—is problematic to me. Morse’s material tends to be instrumental (no vocals) and some instrumental stuff did make it to this list—Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson, Jeff Beck—but it’s all instrumental stuff that has also received radio airplay (Morse's hasn't). The strange thing is, Morse “ended up winning Guitar Player magazine's readers poll for Best Overall Guitarist five years in a row (he then became ineligible, allowing other guitarists a shot at the title).” This was a number of years ago—I guess the younger generation is ignorant.

Another problem with the poll—Kurt Cobain has two solos in there. Now I like his music, I think he was a good songwriter and put a lot of emotion into his songs—but a good guitarist he wasn’t.

Finally, Jeff Beck’s Cause we’ve Ended as Lovers is only # 99 on the list; it should be in the top 10.