Best professional guitarists

[SteveO]

Great post, JT ! When you mention Crapton is that a type O or did you mean Crapton ?...lol

Uh-oh. I'll try and stay short.

Yes, Jimi is, and will always be, the greatest rock guitarist, a fantastic innovator and an actual, genuine, real, great blues player, a league clear of any artschool brit types like Beck, Crapton, Page, all of whom Rory Gallagher beat up on any time I ever saw him. There's too many others between 60-70 to even start mentioning, but Johnny Winter or Duane Allman made Clapton run away to be a pop star by the early 70s.
Then it gets tough. Staying with ROCK guitar (and you have to because otherwise no rock players but Hendrix makes the top twenty guitarists) we run into Yngwie and friends.
Malmsteen showed up 81-82 on the West coast. I was teaching (guitar) fulltime in a store at that moment and we heard about this kid Dingway or whatever and I went yea, uhuh, the next Van Halen.(over-rated)
Then we saw him, someone brought a tape in and said: what is this guy doing? I couldn't play it. Too fast. This was the first time this had ever happened w/a rock player. VHalen and Randy Rhoades, Alvin Lee etc. were good, but not at all difficult to pick up their stuff.
Couldn't touch Malmsteen. Then Vai, Satriani, and the rest of the music college graduates appeared, but after all the G8 stuff was over, they all looked at Yngwie, who could sort of knock them all over if he got excited and really blasted off.
The clones since are countless and don't much like it. These guys are over their heads, musically, all in pursuit of speed! which is utterly ridiculous, as no guitarist is ever going to catch up with Sax or Piano. Well, Scotty Anderson (probably the greatest electric guitarist ever) can get into that speed range. And he's clean. I could go on but my fingers hurt. )