Guitarist
Guitarist
A guitarist (or a guitar player) is a person who plays the guitar. Guitarists may play a variety of guitar family instruments such as classical guitars, acoustic guitars, electric guitars, and bass guitars. Some guitarists accompany themselves on the guitar by singing or playing the harmonica.
Techniques
The guitarist may employ any of several methods for sounding the guitar, including finger picking, depending on the type of strings used (either nylon or steel), and including strumming with the fingers, or a guitar pick made of bone, horn, plastic, metal, felt, leather, or paper, and melodic flatpicking and finger-picking.
The guitarist may also employ various methods for selecting notes and chords, including fingering, thumbing, the barre (a finger lying across many or all strings at a particular fret), and 'bottleneck' or steel-guitar slides, usually made of glass or metal. These left- and right-hand techniques may be intermixed in performance.
Notable guitarists
Rock, heavy metal, jazz and country
Several magazines and websites have compiled what they intend as lists of the greatest guitarists—for example The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time by Rolling Stone magazine, or 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time by Guitar World magazine.
- Rolling StoneIn 2003, *Rolling Stone
- magazine published a list called The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. This list included 100 guitarists whom the magazine editor
- In describing the list to readers, Paul MacInnes from British newspaper *The Guardian
- wrote, "Surprisingly enough for an American magazine, the top 10 is fair jam-packed with Yanks," though he also noted three exceptions in the top 10.[2] The online magazine *
- criticized the list for introducing some allegedly undeserving guitarists while forgetting some artists the writer considered perhaps more worthy, such as
- In 2011, Rolling Stone updated the list, which this time was chosen by a panel of guitarists and other experts with the top 5 consisting ofJimi Hendrix,Eric Clapton,Jimmy Page,Keith RichardsandJeff Beck. Artists who had not been included in the previous list were added.Rory Gallagher, for example, was ranked in 57th place.[4]The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time is mentioned in many biographies about artists who appear in the list.[5]
- Guitar World
- TIME and othersFollowing the death ofLes Paul, *TIME
- website presented their list of 10 greatest artists in
Other genres
There are many classical guitarists listed as notable in their respective epochs.
In recent decades, the most "notable classical and cross genre" guitarist was Paco de Lucía, one of the first flamenco guitarists to have successfully crossed over into other genres of music such as classical and jazz. Richard Chapman and Eric Clapton, authors of Guitar: Music, History, Players, describe de Lucía as a "titanic figure in the world of flamenco guitar",[12] and Dennis Koster, author of Guitar Atlas, Flamenco, has referred to de Lucía as "one of history's greatest guitarists.".[13][14] Another classical guitarist who has enjoyed great success is Tommy Emmanuel.