Too Shred or Not to Shred....

[madmax1012]

i started getting into J Mascis recently. i feel like if i heard them sooner in my life, i'd be a better solo guitarist.

[Ancient Astronaught]

Consider Matt Pike's style of soloing, which isn't really shredding, per se, but playing very fast and frenetically, in a chaotic manner.

I love matt pikes soloing style, i agree it isnt "shredding" per se but it is extremely fast and accurate without being too much.

As far as Tosin, i agree he is an amazing player, i saw him and met him while he was playing in Reflux many moons back. But he still is def a "shredder" IMO, over technical, speed based, and his tyle just screams i want to be better than everyone else, and that kills it for me. As far as buckethead, he is the shred king and absolutely boring to see live because of it, especially when he's playing to drum tracks on an ipod because his drummer is 3 hours late....

Now i'm not taking anything away from them, not at all their both amazing musicians. It's just that my taste is from the extreme polar opposite of the heavy music spectrum, i like it slow, ungodly heavy, loud as balls, but still melodic and capturing. But the only guitar player from the "genre" i've ever seen on a guitar magazine was Wino, and that's because he and Matt Pike (whom no longer plays doom IMO) rose out of the doom genre as the "premier guitarists" during this odd Doom revival period we've been going through. The main thing that made me this thread was looking at what i enjoy out of music isn't accepted as mainstream "talent", in mass media about guitar its all about who can solo the best, whose the fastest, who can djent like nobody else. They never talk of the experimentors who branch out and use their guitar as a tone machine not an extension of their ego or tiny 5th member. Now if you guys are into shredding i have absolutely nothing against that as long as you dont hold it against me that i dont, which has come up before, to the point where ive had people offer me 40$ an hour classes so i could learn to shred. Then i remember this article i read years ago about Dino from fear factory meeting Dimebag at Ozzfest when they were both playig the mainstage, and dimebag offered to teach him how to solo for free because he thought dino didnt know how to solo and Dino said no thanks, if i wanted to play like you i would have taught myself how to, you play like you and i'll play like me. Hit me hard and changed my whole view on music.

[theavondon]

Hahaha, man, fuck Dimebag.

And yeah, I wish HoF still ruled.

[MEC]

AA, I'm with you on the slow.
It takes a lot of patience to play that way and is harder to do well than most people realize.

As far as solos go, I have always really liked Kurt Cobain's even though most would say he's not a great guitar player.

[GardenoftheDead]

As far as solos go, I have always really liked Kurt Cobain's even though most would say he's not a great guitar player.

I think the thing with Kurt Cobain is that his solos were always at least memorable, but mostly because it's usually just a piece of the vocal melody.

[madmax1012]

As far as solos go, I have always really liked Kurt Cobain's even though most would say he's not a great guitar player.

I think the thing with Kurt Cobain is that his solos were always at least memorable, but mostly because it's usually just a piece of the vocal melody.

i respect him as a songwriter, but i think hes an overrated guitarist. i'm not saying he sucked, i'm just saying that i don't think he should be considered one of the best guitarists of all time.

[coldbrightsunlight]

I've never heard anyone say he's one of the best guitarists of all time? That would be a crazy thing to say, but I do like his style.

I generally don't like crazy fast guitar playing, it just bores me, and not because it's inherently less emotional (that huge sustain lots of vibrato 80s power ballad thing is far more contrived and less emotive), just because I don't like it. I think it's largely because I dislike solos that aren't improvised, I think ALL solos should be improvised, because that's kinda the whole point? I dunno, I come from sort of a jazz background and I just couldn't handle playing a written solo live. That's why I really love Django Reinhardt, he occasionally does really fast passages, and they're always a part of the greater melodic structure, on the way to something great, and he improvised and didn't play fast ALL THE TIME.

[univalve]

i always hated shredding (=tapping (at least for me in this context)) - since russian circles i absolutely love how shredding can span beautiful chord/harmony sets.

[madmax1012]

i always hated shredding (=tapping (at least for me in this context)) - since russian circles i absolutely love how shredding can span beautiful chord/harmony sets.

i hate tapping because i can't tap. or i just can't make melodic sounding stuff like Dave Knudson. dude is a god.

[jfrey]

Anyone ever listen to / watch Guthrie Govan play?

It's not often you see someone playing slap guitar... or fretless guitar... or playing just about every kind of music better than some of the best people in each individual genre...

[Ancient Astronaught]

As far as solos go, I have always really liked Kurt Cobain's even though most would say he's not a great guitar player.

I think the thing with Kurt Cobain is that his solos were always at least memorable, but mostly because it's usually just a piece of the vocal melody.

I wanted to mention exactly this earlier but wasnt sure how it woud be received. I agree completely with both of these.

AA, I'm with you on the slow.
It takes a lot of patience to play that way and is harder to do well than most people realize.

I agree completely with this also, and this is where im focusing on with my solos, using melodic passages with intermittent "speed picking" style leads transitioning to other melodics parts. It's alot harder to speed pick correctly at 80bpm than 180bpm plus IMO.

[Gearmond]

Anyone ever listen to / watch Guthrie Govan play?

It's not often you see someone playing slap guitar... or fretless guitar... or playing just about every kind of music better than some of the best people in each individual genre...

actually i think govan is an utter hack in every sense of the word with literally zero uniqueness to his style whatsoever.

slap guitar is done better by many acoustic players, and tosin abasi, and he squanders the fretless guitar.

he ticks off every single box on my "stereotypical shredder" list.

[snipelfritz]

I'm definitely more on the slowpoke side of things. I love to improv and I love to just milk one note until it feedbacks. However, throwing in some speedy riffs for contrast can be fun. Of course it depends on the song. If you look at things from a perspective of what will sound good rather than impressive you're doing it right in my book. Cobain, for example, certainly was good, but he wasn't as good as Gilmour(the epitome for melodic playing in my book) and not as good as J. Mascis who takes that heavily melodic style into a heavy context. I do enjoy the occasional fast solo too. Eric Johnson, Steve Vai, Buckethead fall into the "virtuoso" crowd and have all done stuff here and there that I've enjoyed mostly because i like how it sounds and partly because it's impressive. However, I'm usually far more impressed that someone can come up with a fast lick that has great rhythmic variety(rather than straight 16th or 32nd notes) and melodic sense. Coltrane for example played in a way that is impossible to completely comprehend without slowing the passage of time.

In a certain way, playing slower is more difficult than fast because there's a lot more space for you to miss the right timing.

[RR Bigman]

I never got the "fast = not melodic" argument. it's pretty hard to not have a melody, unless you learned guitar from Ornette Colman albums. But anyways, I think it largely comes to down to what you appreciate the most about music in general. Musicianship girl is going to dig Yngwie, while emotional guy is going to like insert-slow-bendy-vibrato-guitarist. That being said, I think that being able to do both is a great advantage even if you don't use them. Just stepping out of your comfort zone every once in a while is a great thing as a musician (sure is getting guitar world column in here).

[Adoom]

Shredding as in copping scales in some Steve Vai sense where there's speed and all that, not my thing. I'm all about the song. I could give a fuck how good the guys playing it are at their instruments.

Matt Pike does awesome solos. He really gets into the groove of the song and pulls out some wild shit. Django was forever in the pocket, and making beautiful symphonies condensed into seconds rather than just scales.

My "shredding" would mainly be fingerstyle guitar stuff, but I've worked insanely hard not to be any of the Candyrat dudes. Recently moving into more of a jazz mode (TINY PICKS!), I've been doing a lot more 8th and 16th notes lately as well, but that's mainly because my right hand hasn't had to pick anything in about two years (got pretty intense into the fingerstylestuff, and violin) and wouldn't mind having the ability to do little fills in between notes.

Tosin Abasi has some shit I really like, and some shit I really don't.he is, however, astoundingly good at his instrument.

None of these people ('cept Django) will ever be better than Erik Mongrain. Fuck that "Airtap" shit. His other stuff. He has all the precision and technicality of Tosin Abasi, but channels it into making his guitar a band, and his songs beautifully complex. I however, wouldn't consider that "shredding", although it is far beyond my own skills, and the skills of most of the musicians I know.