This list of Guitar World's 10 essential classic metal albums is part of a much larger feature — Guitar World's 100 Essential Guitar Albums — which you'll be seeing in the weeks ahead.

For the time being, we'll start you off with these 10 masterpieces from guys named Tipton, Hammett, Young and Slash.

And, to help you get into the spirit of the music on this list, we thought you could use some inspiration:

INSPIRATIONAL VERSE:"I'm on the highway to hell!"— "Highway to Hell," AC/DC

INSPIRATIONAL LICK:"Iron Man," Black Sabbath

THE LOOK: Leather trousers, demin jacket and long, unwashed hair. Shirt optional.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE:

• Guitar: Gibson Les Paul, Gibson Flying V
• Amps: Marshall JCM800 (with 4x12 full stack, dude!)
• Effects: Rangemaster Treble Booster, DOD 250 Overdrive/Preamp, Dunlop Cry Baby Wah, MXR Flanger, MXR Phase 90

This list of Guitar World's 10 essential classic rock guitar albums is part of a much larger feature — Guitar World's 100 Essential Guitar Albums — which you'll be seeing in the weeks ahead.

For the time being, we'll start you off with these 10 masterpieces from guys named Harrison, Townshend, Hendrix and Gilmour.

And, to help you get into the spirit of the music on this list, we thought you could use some inspiration:

INSPIRATIONAL VERSE:"Pick up my guitar and play, just like yesterday."— "Won't Get Fooled Again," The Who

INSPIRATIONAL LICK:"Ain't Talkin' About Love" (intro), Van Halen

THE LOOK:Then: Fluffy, long Goldilocks tresses. Now: Gray hair, big wallet. Timeless: Tight-fitting flares revealing dubious "trouser snake," flouncy shirt, fringe, cocaine-spoon neck pandant ...

TOOLS OF THE TRADE:

• Guitar: Vintage Les Pauls, Strats, etc.
• Amps: Marshall Plexis
• Effects: Echoplex, Cry Baby wah, analog phaser, flanger, fuzz and delay

To some people, shred guitar is about one thing, and one thing only: the need for speed. The yearn to burn. The desire for fire.

Just the word itself can conjure glorious images of long-haired, pointy-guitar-wielding metalmen, fingers scaling fretboards with dazzling dexterity and furious speed, melody and musicality by damned. And indeed, during the shred zeitgeist of the 1980s, it seemed as if guitarists built up bpms the way Russia and the U.S. stockpiled nukes.

But in fact shred was around well before the Eighties, and it has continued to thrive in the decades since. Because shred guitar is about more than just velocity, or how many notes you can squeeze into a bar of music. And it doesn't necessarily require the use of distortion, electricity or, is some cases, even a pick.

In the following gallery, we present 30 great players from the Golden Era, the Old-School Era and the Modern Era of shred, along with the album and song that best exemplifies their shredding skills.

As these entries attest, shred is about pushing boundaries, exploring the great guitar unknown and, basically, doing really cool stuff that's never been done before. Of course, a bit of sheer, unadulterated fret-burning speed doesn't hurt either.

NOTE: Once again, the photo gallery below is divided into three eras — the Golden Era, the Modern Era and the Old School era — each of which contains 10 albums. The gallery is arranged in that order.

Enjoy!

Has any piece of musical equipment proliferated more, or more rapidly, than the humble electric guitar effect unit?

Though there is no official tally, suffice it to say that thousands of stomp boxes, effect devices and processors have been created for the electric guitar over the past 60 years (and that’s not including rackmount effects). Conceivably, more than half of those devices are distortion, fuzz and overdrive effects.

So how did we come up with a list of the top 50 electric guitar effects of all time? Actually, it was easy, as most of these stomp boxes and devices turn up in the pages of this magazine on a regular basis every time we ask artists what they use in the studio and onstage.

Other effects got the nod for being the first of their kind (like the DeArmond Tremolo Control, which dates back to the Forties and was the first optional effect device) while a few passed muster for being undeniably cool or influential — even if they’re so rare that it will cost you a few thousand bucks to score one on eBay.

Popularity also was a critical factor in our choices, although we generally passed over a few best-selling reissues or boutique clones in favor of the real deal. So even though the Bubba Bob Buttcrack Tube Overdrive may sound more soulful than an original Tube Screamer, if it’s little more than a copy with slightly upgraded components, it didn’t make the cut.

If you love effects like we do, we hope you'll find this top-50 list a useful guide to discovering the classic effect boxes that have shaped the guitar sounds of rock, metal, blues, punk and many other styles. And if you're like us, it will undoubtedly compel you to plunk down a chunk of cash for a collectible pedal or two on eBay. Don't say you weren't warned.

When someone is widely hailed as the greatest guitar player ever, how do you step up and cover one of his songs?

Have you ever noticed that the ratio of Metallica tribute albums to Hendrix tribute albums is something like 20 to 1? When's the last time you heard someone say, "Yeah, he played it better than Hendrix," without a clearly present sarcastic tone?

With the handful of Hendrix covers that have been done — or attempted, we should say in most cases — artists seem to take one of two routes: the highly-ill-advised-if-your-initials-aren't-SRV route of taking on the song head-on and trying to one-up the master, or simply deconstructing the song to an almost unrecognizable form.

Whatever the case, a good Hendrix cover is a rarity, and that's why we've taken it upon ourselves to compile for you the 10 best covers of Jimi Hendrix songs.

Of course, if you still have to have the original, you can always pick up the recent Hendrix issue of Guitar World, which features our guide to the 100 greatest Hendrix performances of all time.

10. Living Colour, "Crosstown Traffic"

Recorded for the 1993 tribute album, Stone Free: A Tribute to Jimi Hendrix, this take on "Crosstown Traffic" by Living Colour — or as they're known in the States, Living Color (We're joking, of course) — stays more or less faithful to the original.

Certainly among lead players in 1993, Vernon Reid was among the most qualified of a batch of young, up-and-coming guitarists to put his spin on this Electric Ladyland cut.

09. Emmylou Harris, "May This Be Love"

"May This Be Love" is one of the best things about Emmylou Harris' super-atmospheric 1995 album, Wrecking Ball. Harris, who had built her rep as a country star, enlisted producer Daniel Lanois (U2) and took some chances in terms of direction and eclectic song choices.

Thus the presence of a Hendrix track sandwiched between songs composed by Lucinda Williams and Gillian Welch. Harris and Lanois (who plays guitar on the track) devised their own highly satisfying arrangement — and it works.

08. Derek & The Dominoes, "Little Wing"

There was a strong mutual admiration between Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, so it's not surprising that after Hendrix started covering "Sunshine of Your Love" in concerts within weeks of its release, Clapton would one day return the favor by putting his own spin on one of Jimi's most touching guitar moments, "Little Wing."

Sadly, this cover wasn't released until shortly after Hendrix passed away, but it remains a fitting tribute to a lost friend.

07. The Pretenders, “Room Full of Mirrors”

Kudos to the Pretenders for choosing an offbeat Hendrix song to cover — “Room Full of Mirrors,” from Hendrix’s posthumously released Rainbow Bridge album (1971).

Their approach was brilliant: They pulled it out of the mists of relative obscurity, brushed it off, made it sound perfectly current for 1986, yet made sure it still sounded like a Hendrix song, injecting it with several nods to the original version, particularly in terms of guitar technique and sound.

Maybe Chrissie Hynde and guitarist Robbie McIntosh felt Stevie Ray Vaughan was claiming the Hendrix catalog as his own private playground ...

06. Devo, "R U Experienced"

Hendrix purists might not have been too pleased with Devo's deconstruction — or devolution, rather — of this Hendrix classic, but Akron, Ohio's strangest sons certainly get points for originality.

While Hendrix was all about feel and feedback, Devo were (and are) a band that thrived on metronomic precision and instrumental clarity, traits that heavily informed their re-arrangement of "Are You Experienced?," which was done for no other reason than to tip a "sacred cow" in the back catalog of their record label, Warner Bros.

If you listen closely, you may notice Devo also appropriated the chorus melody from "Third Stone From the Sun" as a guitar solo.

05. Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, “Little Wing / Third Stone From the Sun”

As a teenager, Vaughan must’ve heard the brief guitar solo at the fadeout of “Little Wing,” the Axis: Bold As Love classic, and thought, “I want more!” So he took matters into his own hands, stripping away the lyrics and arranging the tune as a dynamic instrumental piece.

Its variation of voicings, attack and effects already make it one of the highlights of his catalog. He went a step further, however, latching it on to his spin on Hendrix’s “Third Stone From the Sun,” a study in feedback control and — when performed live — how to swing your poor Strat around by its vibrato bar.

04. Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Fire"

Moreso than guitar chops, energy is essential to a good Hendrix cover, and energy is something the Chili Peppers had in spades back in the mid-'80s.

While the Chilis' cover of "Fire" appeared on their 1989 album Mother's Milk— their first album to feature John Frusciante — the guitar playing on "Fire" is unmistakably that of Hilel Slovak. While it took until the end of the '80s for their version of "Fire" to be released, the band were playing the song live as early an 1983.

03. Jeff Beck and Seal, “Manic Depression”

It’s hard to believe Jeff Beck is only a few degrees separated from the Bravo TV show Project Runway, but it’s true; in the early ‘90s, Beck recorded a few tunes with Project Runway host Heidi Klum’s ex-husband, Seal. The best of the batch is this manic version of “Manic Depression” from Stone Free, the aforementioned 1993 Hendrix tribute album.

Perhaps feeling the version they’d originally concocted was a little too close to the original, they added a powerful breakdown section that allowed Beck and his Strat to throw everything but the kitchen sink into the mix. It’s a fitting tribute from one over-the-top ‘60s guitar god to another. Well designed, indeed.

02. The Cure, "Purple Haze"

If you heard this cover of "Purple Haze" with no context, it would be well over a minute into the song before you would have any clue this was a Jimi Hendrix cover.

Of course, anyone who thought Robert Smith & Co. would launch right into a fiery, tritone-laced rendition of arguably Hendrix's most famous song clearly had never heard Disingegration— which, according to Kyle from South Park, is the best album ever.

This synth-laden cut takes the No. 2 spot for being bold enough to push Hendrix's catalog into new territory, instead of trying to outdo the man. A nearly impossible feat, unless you're our choice for No. 1 ...

01. Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble, “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)”

Stevie Ray Vaughan was to Jimi Hendrix in the ‘80s what the Byrds were to Bob Dylan in the ‘60s: He was the artist most associated with interpreting and updating Hendrix’s songs, adding a fair share of his own personality and flavor.

In his epic rendering of “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return),” that flavor came in the form of a little Texas BBQ rub — lightning-fast, open-position runs in E, rhythmic changes and different Strat pickup settings as the song rolled on.

Besides being the centerpiece of his 1984 album, Couldn’t Stand the Weather, it was a highlight of his live shows throughout that decade. Rarely has anyone kept an audience so riveted without ever straying too far from a simple — albeit Texas-sized — E chord.

Honorable Mentions: Sting, "Little Wing"; Buddy Guy, "Red House"; Ozzy Osbourne, "Purple Haze"; Michael Winslow, "Star Spangled Banner"; John Mayer, "Bold As Love"

Despite the diversity of George Harrison's many pursuits during his 58 years on earth — racing, gardening, Indian religion and culture, film making and anything remotely associated with ukeleles, Mel Brooks or Monty Python — he'll go down in history as one fourth of the Beatles.

[[ Poll: What Was George Harrison's Coolest Beatles-Era Guitar? ]]

But, notwithstanding his contributions to the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed act in the history of popular music, Harrison had a successful solo career that proved he was more than just a silent partner to John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

The guitarist released 10 studio albums between 1970 and 2002, an experimental electronic album, a soundtrack album and two live albums (including The Concert for Bangladesh), plus some non-album singles, including the sadly overlooked "Cheer Down" (1989).

Today, the anniversary of his death in 2001, we're ranking his 10 serious studio albums. This list doesn't include his two "while the Beatles were still together" albums, 1968's Wonderwall Music and 1969's Electronic Sound. (Although, even if we were to include them, they'd wind up as No. 12 — Electronic Sound— and 11 — Wonderwall Music— anyway. So there!)

Check out the photo gallery below to see how we've ranked his 10 albums.

Damian Fanelli is the online managing editor at Guitar World. Follow him on Twittah.

Welcome to Guitar World's roundup of the top 20 reissued/remastered or archival releases of 2013.

The common theme of these 20 albums is easy to follow: They all feature classic or well-known songs that have been repackaged and presented anew, but with a twist, whether it be in the form of previously unreleased live versions, expanded liner notes, alternate versions, demos, remasters, etc.

Music fans were treated to a host of strong box sets, reissues and remasters in 2013, including the outstanding deluxe, 20th-anniversary edition of Nirvana's In Utero and the 30th-anniversary edition of Stevie Ray Vaughan's Texas Flood.

While you're in a "looking back" mood, be sure to check out two other lists, namely Guitar World's Top 30 Albums of 2013 and Brad Tolinski's Top 10 Albums of 2013.

The origin of guitar distortion goes back to the earliest electrified blues guitarists.

They didn’t care that their primitive tube amps were breaking up and distorting, as long as they were loud. Soon, blues guitarists grew quite fond of those nasty, gnarly distorted tones, and they sought to replicate them by any means necessary.

Enter the overdrive pedal. Designed to push an amp to the brink, the overdrive pedal allows players to summon singing sustain, compelling crunch, and glorious grit at any volume level, giving guitarists the bite and balls they need for genuine blues-approved tone.

While a handful of purists prefer to plug a guitar straight into an amp, most blues guitarists these days have a handful of overdrive, distortion and even fuzz boxes in their rigs.

Thanks to the proliferation of boutique pedal builders over the past 20 years, there are easily more than a thousand distortion devices available to help guitarists find their signature blues sound.

The following pedals are the top 10 classics and modern marvels that get our mojo working when we spank that plank and crank up the volume.

10. Way Huge Pork Loin

By blending modern soft-clipping BiFET overdrive and classic clean “British” preamp tone pathways, the Pork Loin allows players to dial in raw, raunchy tones that never lose bottom-end clarity or definition. The Pork Loin plays a massive role in Joe Bonamassa’s bigger-than-life modern blues sound.

9. Klon Centaur

The Klon Centaur’s legendary clean boost transforms a guitar’s natural tone the same way a livestock farmer turns a piglet into a prize-winning porker—by making it bigger, fatter, juicier, meatier and more muscular.

Centaur designer Bill Finnegan discontinued production several years ago, driving prices for used Klons well above $1,000, but he’s trying to bring a similar pedal to the market again with the same hand-selected parts, attention to detail and signature sound that the numerous “klones” have failed to match.

8. PaulC Audio Tim

Thanks to its impressive tonal range and expressive touch sensitivity, the Tim is a favorite of tube amp aficionados who don’t want to sacrifice the dynamic response of their favorite amps but need more gain and tonal-shaping capabilities. With the EQ controls set at 12 o’clock, it provides some of the most transparent clean boost and overdrive tones available.

7. Fulltone Full-Drive 2

Fulltone makes an impressive variety of incredible overdrive, distortion and fuzz pedals, including the OCD, PlimSoul and Fat-Boost FB-3, but when it comes to the blues, most guitarists choose the Fulltone Full-Drive 2.

With separate overdrive and boost footswitches and mini toggle switches for selecting clean boost, midrange emphasis, MOSFET clipping and more, the Full-Drive 2 is a versatile overdrive pedal that makes it easy to dial in your own signature blues tones.

6. Ibanez TS-808 Tube Screamer

Thanks to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s use of an Ibanez Tube Screamer (he replaced the TS-808 with a TS-9 and TS-10 later in his career), this pedal has gone on to become the best-selling and most copied overdrive pedal of all time.

The Tube Screamer’s output boost and signature midrange hump, along with a characteristic warmth that the TS-808’s successors lack, make it ideal for playing fat, aggressive solos that destroy everything else in its path.

5. Electro-Harmonix Big Muff π

Most staunch traditionalists think that the raunchy fuzz tones of a Big Muff π are a little too furry and furious for the blues, but that hasn’t stopped a new generation of blues-inspired players from using one. The Big Muff is a key element of 21st century blues as envisioned by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys and Jack White of the White Stripes, the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather.

4. Dallas-Arbiter Rangemaster Treble Booster

Eric Clapton’s alleged use of a Dallas-Arbiter Rangemaster Treble Booster on John Mayall’s legendary Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton album remains the source of much controversy, but the Rangemaster was also a key element of Rory Gallagher’s late-Sixties rig that similarly redefined blues guitar tone during the British blues revival, thanks to its marvelous midrange and gritty germanium transistor grind.

Numerous clones are available today, including the Analog Man Beano Boost and Keeley Java Boost.

3. Boss BD-2 Blues Driver

Not since the late Seventies, when the Ibanez Tube Screamer and Boss OD-1 made their debut, has a mass-produced overdrive pedal won over the great unwashed and cork-sniffing tone snobs alike. The BD-2 delivers a wide variety of overdrive tones, from creamy to crunchy, with personality that ranges from retro smooth to modern blues-rock raunch.

2. Blackstone Appliances MOSFET Overdrive

This pedal’s nameplate and crinkle finish may have the retro-cool vibe of a Thirties toaster, but underneath the hood lies a modern circuit that uses small-signal MOSFETs and an unconventional input stage to cook up distortion and overdrive with rich harmonic overtones that will melt your face off like a million-watt microwave.

“It’s heavy stuff, not the sound of a popcorn machine,” says Billy Gibbons, who used the Blackstone in tasteful excess on several new ZZ Top tunes.

Blackstone photo by William Baeck, williambaeck.com

1. Analog Man King of Tone

With a two-year waiting list, the Analog Man King of Tone is one of the most sought-after overdrive pedals, and for a very good reason: it provides a clean boost that preserves a guitar’s tone, making it sound bigger, badder and more bodacious, with just the right amount of natural-sounding distortion.

Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Gary Clark Jr. and Buddy Miller are just a handful of the pros who have discovered that the King of Tone truly rules.

Last year brought us a shiny new Van Halen album — the first, in fact, to feature David Lee Roth behind the mic since 1984.

That means the bar was set pretty high for 2013 — at least in terms of major rock events.

Luckily, Black Sabbath came along with a killer of a reunion album (OK, partial reunion) called 13, the band's first studio release to feature Ozzy Osbourne since 1978.

Truth be told, 2013 was a fairly strong year for guitar-centric releases. We got to hear new riffs and/or blinding runs by guys named Tony Iommi, Joe Satriani, Guthrie Govan and John Petrucci. We also were treated to a double dose of Buddy Guy, a touch of Richie Kotzen (and Billy Sheehan), some Warren Haynes, Steven Wilson, Brad Paisley, Chris Broderick, Dave Mustaine and more.

If there's one thing to take away from the 30 albums below, it's this: The guitar is very much alive and well in 2013. It survived the rise of the keyboard in the '80s and the overwhelming bass-barrage of electronic dance music of the early 21st century and shows no signs of waning in relevancy.

Whether you're still plugging into a vintage Vox AC30 with your trusty Strat or just got your hands on an Axe FX and a new Ibanez eight-string, the guitar isn't going away any time soon.

Below, check out Guitar World's picks for the 30 best studio albums of 2013, as chosen by the editorial staff.

Look out for our upcoming year-end lists of 2013's best reissues/box sets/archival releases, plus rock books and more. In the meantime, check out Guitar World Editor-in-Chief Brad Tolinski's picks for the 10 Best Albums of the Year.

See you next year!

Many guitar players — at some point — can't help but fall under the spell of the sounds found on classic rock albums of the mid- to late '60s.

Players like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend and Robby Krieger were synonymous with wah, fuzz, univibe and/or tremolo. Throw George Harrison and Brian Jones into the mix and you get sitars and other sound- (and mind-) altering effects. They were always experimenting, changing things up, trying to outdo each other.

Modern players who are obsessed with classic '60s rock sounds can glue their eyes to eBay, waiting for pricey, hard-to-find vintage gear to show up. Or they can check out these five easy-to-find, modern effect pedals, as chosen by a group of Guitar World staffers including Gear Editor Paul Riario.

Vox V846-HW Hand-Wired Wah Wah

Stop, children, what's that sound? ... Well, if we're talking about the '60s (and we are), it's probably Jimi Hendrix playing "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" on a Fender Strat through a Vox V846 Wah Wah pedal.

Vox actually created the first wah pedal in the '60s, spawning an army of imitators that continues to grow, NAMM after NAMM. Back in the day, the Vox wah and its competitors found their way into the hands — or in this case, the feet — of countless top-notch rock guitarists, from Hendrix to Jeff Beck to Jimmy Page to Eric Clapton. But again, Vox was there first.

In 2011, the company issued its V846-HW Hand-Wired Wah Wah Pedal, which does a fine job of capturing the tone, feel and weight of the original Vox pedal. Every component in the new model — inductors, resistors, capacitors and the potentiometer — is carefully selected. And like its name suggests, each unit features hand-wired turret board construction with no printed circuit boards. The only difference is a true bypass, a handy update for modern players.

MSRP: $329 | Check out this pedal at voxamps.com.

Dunlop Jimi Hendrix Fuzz Face Distortion

The '60s may have started out clean, but by the end of the decade there were some pretty gnarly distortion and fuzz sounds filling clubs and arenas around the world.

Among the most distinctive fuzz tones of the late '60s undoubtedly belonged to Jimi Hendrix, who utilized a Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face to add that extra layer of dirt to his already gritty brand of hard blues. Unless you're quick on the draw with your eBay bids or simply owned one back in the day, you won't have much luck finding Hendrix's original fuzz source these days, but fortunately Dunlop has produced a faithful replica in the Dunlop Jimi Hendrix Fuzz Face.

Hand-wired and built around a BC108 silicon transistor, the Hendrix Fuzz Face is nothing less than a meticulous reproduction of the original pedal, one you'll need if you'll want to summon your inner-voodoo child.

And if a Tone Bender is more your thing, check out the OC81D Williams Vintage Tone MK11 Professional, as used by Ben King, the current Yardbirds guitarist.

MSRP: $257 | Check out this pedal at jimdunlop.com.

Electro-Harmonix Ravish Sitar

You're in a '60s cover band. The rowdy, drunken audience is clamoring for your "Paint It, Black" / "Norwegian Wood" medley. Do you just play the sitar parts on your Fender Esquire and smile knowingly, like, "Yeah, I know these notes were originally played on a sitar, but what the hell am I supposed to do?" Well, yes, you could do that. But you also could check out Electro-Harmonix's new Ravish Sitar pedal.

As we say in the 2013 Guitar World Buyer's Guide, it's the "world's best sitar emulation for guitar. With the Ravish Sitar pedal, Electro-Harmonix has streamlined the essence of the sitar into a compact enclosure that offers a polyphonic lead voice a tunable sympathetic string drones that dramatically react to your playing with adjustable timbre."

And besides all that, guitarists can finally tackle "Bangla Dhun," Ravi Shankar's 15-minute Indian-music recital that kicks off The Concert for Bangladhesh. Or not!

MSRP: $319 | Check out this pedal at exh.com.

Dry Bell Vibe Machine V-1

You'll find vibe effects all over the music of Jimi Hendrix and Procol Harem's Robin Trower, a fact that, in and of itself, makes a good vibe pedal an essential part of any '60s guitar rig.

There's no shortage of great vibe units to choose from, but for our money, the Dry Bell Vibe Machine is the top of the heap. Not only is it among the more compact options, it allows for maximum tone control with its "Bright" switch, avoiding the sound-dampening side effects of some of the other pedals on the market.

If you want to nail that Hendrix-at-Woodstock tone, adding this little beauty in your arsenal certainly can't hurt. What it can't help? Your nerves playing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in front of a few hundred-thousand fans.

MSRP: $295 | Check out this pedal at drybell.com.

Fulltone Supa-Trem 1

As Guitar World has said in past reviews, Fulltone's Supa-Trem 1 is a tremolo pedal that lives up to its name. As you can tell by the photo in the gallery below, it's a simple, basic, gimmick-free effect that inadvertently captures the look of '60s pedals while working hard to capture the sound.

From personal experience, it's also a rugged pedal that can take a licking and keep on waving. It features a footswitchable Half/Full speed footswitch that stays in tempo and lets you channel some authentic-sounding Leslie-like moves. Another footswitch lets you choose between "Soft" smooth wavering or "Hard" square-wave machine-gun stutter. There's also an internal trimmer to fine tune the feel of the waveform.

As a side note, '60s rocker John Fogerty uses one of these pedals today to recreate his powerful CCR-era tremolo effects.

MSRP: $219 | Check out this pedal at fulltone.com.

Can't get enough gear? Check out the 2013 Guitar World Buyer's Guide. It's available now at the Guitar World Online Store.

Once upon a time, the mere act of strapping on an electric guitar and cranking up an amplifier marked one as an outsider, a rebellious badass who refused to live by the laws of a "decent" society.

But today's cookie-cutter rockers and forgettable pop janglers make studying for the priesthood seem like an edgier pursuit than playing guitar in a band.

Guitar World thought it might be instructive to salute some genuine rock weirdos — 25 individuals whose unique personalities and/or playing styles have been dictated not by popular trends, market research firms or knit-capped A&R guys, but by an all-consuming need to express themselves to the fullest.

Some have crashed and burned, especially when LSD was involved, and you probably wouldn't want to invite most them to dinner. But they're all colorful characters whose flying freak flags have contributed much to rock's rich tapestry.

Syd Barrett

Numerous books have been written about the late Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd's original leader and rock's first serious acid casualty. His madcap antics range from the amusing (fixing Pat Boone with a murderous stare during an interview on Boone's TV show; styling his hair with Brylcreem and crushed Mandrax tablets) to the psychotic (locking a girlfriend in a bedroom for days with nothing to eat but crackers).

An incredibly inventive guitarist who combined an unorthodox slide technique with various echo units to create a truly "interstellar" sound, Syd unfortunately became synonymous with "losing one's shit entirely."

Hasil Adkins

The wildest one-man band in the history of recorded music, the late Hasil Adkins cranked out warped rockabilly paeans to sex, dancing and decapitation for many decades.

A manic-depressive lover man whose diet consisted entirely of meat, nicotine and endless cups of coffee, the Haze liked to scare visitors to his rural Appalachian abode with his collection of mannequin heads, and had been known to send unsolicited copies of his new records to the White House.

True connoisseurs of weirdness (including the Cramps, who covered Hasil's "She Said") worshiped his every primal clang and growl.

Buckethead

This reclusive, robotic guitarist (whose personal brand of shred encompasses the most out-there elements of art rock, heavy metal, hip-hop and free jazz) is never seen in public without a white mask on his face or a fried-chicken bucket on his head.

According to legend, the latter helps him harness the spirits of all slain and martyred chickens, without which he is powerless.

Buckethead has visited Disneyland hundreds of times (He even claims to have jammed with Haunted Mansion house band) and dreams of building his own surreal theme park, Bucketheadland. For more on that, head here.

Roky Erickson

Guitarist and founding member of the world's first psychedelic band, the 13th Floor Elevators, Erickson has claimed at times to be from Mars, and his songs are filled with convincing references to aliens, demons and reincarnation.

Busted for pot in 1969, he tried to beat the rap by pleading insanity. Although his habit of tripping four to five times a day might have already qualified Erickson for the nuthouse, the ensuing three-year incarceration (complete with Thorazine and shock treatments) in Texas' Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane certainly didn't help.

Roky recorded prolifically in the Seventies and Eighties, but he currently spends most of his time at home.

Roy Wood

The very definition of "weird beard," Wood has always cut a uniquely hirsute figure in the world of English rock. A worrying number of his songs for Sixties psych-pop legends the Move dealt with paranoia, insanity and mental anguish and allegedly resulted from the band's manager instructing Wood to "write about what you know."

An inventive guitarist capable of everything from shuddering power chords to delicate classical filigrees, Wood spent much of the Seventies cranking out Phil Spector-meets-Sha-Na-Na Fifties pastiches with Wizzard, doubtless scarring countless impressionable youngsters for life with his hideous glam-clown makeup.

Ace Frehley

Like the man himself, former Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley's playing remains maddeningly unpredictable — to this day, he can sound like a teenager who's just picked up his first electric — but he always injected Kiss with a jolt of electricity.

Ace's coked-out 1978 self-titled solo LP perfectly encapsulates his "life is one big joke" philosophy, but it's also one of the great bonehead rock albums of all time, right up there with the first Ramones record and Foghat Live.

Glenn Ross Campbell

The visionary behind Sixties garage-psych ravers the Misunderstood, Campbell could barely play a chord on a six-string guitar. But armed with a pedal steel and a fuzz box, he produced a mind-blowing squall that sounded like the missing link between Jeff Beck's work with the Yardbirds and Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced.

Inspired by his spiritually oriented mother, Campbell and his band toyed with the vibrational effects of feedback and light, sending unsuspecting audiences in to a communal trance with the sensory overload of their powerful performances. Sadly the Vietnam War draft destroyed the band after it had waxed only a handful of tracks.

Zal Cleminson

A visual cross between the Joker of Batman fame and Ronald McDonald, Cleminson was the musical lynchpin of Scottish glam terrorists the Sensation Alex Harvey Band.

Cleminson's contorted, grease-painted mug, green Lurex body stocking and synchronized dance moves invariably provoked an avalanche of catcalls and projectiles from audiences who didn't appreciate the SAHB's theatrical bent — ditto the band's "talent show" routine, wherein Cleminson recited Shakespeare while tap-dancing.

But his deft fretwork and monstrously fat sound endeared him to mid-Seventies rock fans with a taste for something beyond the usual arena fodder.

Dave Davies

Slashing his speakers to create that distorted "You Really Got Me" sound, Davies has clearly been thinking outside the box from the early Kinks days onward.

In the late Seventies, Davies became deeply interested in telepathy and mental visualization, and claims to have used these concepts to energize or heal concert audiences many times since then. In 1982, he was telepathically contacted by "five distinct intelligences" from another dimension, who significantly enhanced his consciousness and taught him the principles of "etheric magnetism."

Davies loves to scan the skies for UFOs, and extraterrestrial elements abound on Purusha and the Spiritual Planet, the techno/dance/New Age record he recorded in 1998 with is son Russell.

Euronymous

The mustachioed fret-mangler for Mayhem, Norway's original black metal band, Euronymous spent most of his downtime concocting explosive potions in his home laboratory, or presiding over pagan rituals and orgies in the basement of Hell, his Oslo record store.

When Mayhem's lead singer blew his own brains out with a shotgun, the guitarist harvested the scattered grey matter from the suicide scene, then gleefully ate it in a stew of ham, vegetables and paprika. The accumulated bad karma finally caught up with Euronymous in 1993, when he was stabbed to death by Count Grishnackh of rival black metal purveyors Burzum.

Link Wray

An intimidating enigma in dark shades, greasy pompadour and a black leather jacket, Link waxed guitar instrumentals so pungently crude, one of 'em (the 1958 hit "Rumble") was even banned on numerous radio station for being "too suggestive."

After losing a lung in his twenties to tuberculosis, Link let his cheap-ass guitars do most of the talking — or swearing, as the case may be. In the Fifties, he freaked out more than a few studio engineers with his primitive fuzz tone, achieved by punching holes in the speaker of his Premier amplifier.

Peter Green

The tastiest guitarist to emerge from the British blues boom of the Sixties, Peter Green was also the most troubled.

Originally a brash and arrogant player, the Fleetwood Mac founder decimated his ego with numerous LSD binges and became deeply uncomfortable with is modicum of fame and fortune. He gave most of his money and belonging away to charity — and unsuccessfully tried to convince his bandmates to do the same — and took to wearing flowing robes and crucifixes.

Green left the band in 1970 and was later institutionalized, where his schizophrenia was only worsened by repeated shock treatments. Although he still records and performs, the psychic scars from his ordeal remain.

Paul Leary

Ever the straight man to Gibby Haynes' psychotic jester, Leary gave up his stockbroker ambitions to wreak sonic vengeance on the world as the Butthole Surfers' lead guitarist.

With his permanently dilated pupils and Rockettes-style leg kicks — and, for a brief period, a hot-pink "sideways Mohawk"— Leary would have been the resident freak in any other band, but he was typically overshadowed by Haynes' lysergic meltdowns and the Buttholes' collection of surgical-training films.

Still, there was no denying the potency of Leary's bad-trip guitar grind, or his propensity for smashing and setting fire to his instruments at the beginning of a show. As he explained to Guitar World in 1991, "Why wait for the end, you know?"

Bryan Gregory

No one who saw Bryan Gregory onstage with the Cramps will forget the arresting spectacle of the stick-thin guitarist coaxing scorching feedback from a polka-dot Flying V (several years before Randy Rhoads wielded one!) while wiggling his ass and flicking lit cigarettes into the crowd.

With his pockmarked skin, viciously pointy fingernails and impossibly long bleached fringe, Gregory looked like a Times Square hooker returned from the dead, thus accomplishing the impressive feat of making bandmates Lux Interior and Poison Ivy seem positively normal.

Gregory allegedly left the band to join a snake-handling cult, though the Cramps have always maintained that his exit was drug related.

Wes Borland

It's one thing to put on a mask or makeup when everybody else in your band is doing it; it's another thing entirely to dress up as a randy satyr or acid-crazed monkey when the rest of your bandmates are all backward-baseball cap-wearin' slobs.

In Limp Bizkit, Borland's individualism extended not just to bizarre getups and mind-bending guitar noise but also to his very public discomfort with the band's dumbed-down shtick. Wes also has channeled his ADD-fueled energy into considerably more twisted projects like Goatslayer, Big Dumb Face and Eat the Day.

Jeff "Skunk" Baxter

Worried about American coming under missile attack from evildoers in faraway lands? No doubt you'll sleep easier knowing Jeff "Skunk" Baxter is counseling our elected officials on missile defense. That's right - he beret-wearing former Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan guitarist currently works for the U.S. Department of Defense as an adviser to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.

Baxter apparently immersed himself in defense manuals and technical weapons texts while his bandmates were out partying, and now peppers his interviews with anecdotes that begin, "When I was in Afghanistan — well, I can't tell you why I was in Afghanistan, but when I was in Afghanistan..."

Robert Quine

The unlikeliest guitar hero to emerge from the New York City punk scene, the bald, bearded and bespectacled Quine looked more like a lawyer than a lead guitarist — before joining Richard Hell & the Voidoids, he'd actually spent three years writing tax law for Prentice Hall Publishing.

But Quine's musical presence was commanding as hell, and his ability to whip off the most mind-bendingly surreal solos without breaking a sweat won him work with such notorious hard-to-please figures as John Zorn, Tom Waits and Lou Reed.

And on Reed's The Blue Mask, Quine did something no guitarist has accomplished before or since: get a killer tone out of Peavey Bandit amplifier.

Tawl Ross

A sorely underrated player in the annals of P-Funkdom, rhythm guitarist Lucius "Tawl" Ross turned on George Clinton to the high-energy sounds of fellow Detroiters and the Stooges and the MC5, and his distorted, protopunk riffs perfectly complimented Eddie Hazel's freaky leads on the first three Funkadelic albums.

Tawl's voyage on the Mothership came to an abrupt ending 1971, following a tête-à-tête he'd had with his long-dead mother while tripping on a winning combination of raw speed and at least six hits of pure LSD. Though he briefly resurfaced int he Nineties, Tawl Ross essentially remains the Syd Barrett of funk.

Skip Spence

The West Coast psychedelic scene's answer to Syd Barrett, Alexander "Skip" Spence was a free spirit who took a serious wrong turn in 1968 during the recording of Moby Grape's second album: believing a bandmate to be possessed by Satan, Skip tried to "save" him with a fire ax.

After a stint in New York City's Bellevue Hospital, he wrote and played everything on Oar, a thoroughly deranged amalgam of folk, blues and psychedelia that's since become a cult classic. Unfortunately, Oar marked his last period of prolonged semi-lucidity; doomed to battle schizophrenia and substance abuse issues, Skip was in and out of various institutions until his death from cancer in 1999.

Ricky Wilson

Everyone associates B-52's with Fred Schneider's campy bark and the bewigged antics of Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson, but these perennial new wave faces wouldn't have gone far without the twangy licks of Cindy's guitarist brother, Ricky.

Heavily influenced by the disparate likes of Captain Beefheart and Joni Mitchell, Ricky (who allegedly learned guitar by playing along to TV commercials) used a variety of weird-ass tunings on his old Mosrite, dispensing with the D and G strings entirely.

At a time when Dire Straits and Van Halen ruled the rock roost, Ricky's thrift shop, surf-meets-spaghetti western sound was a total revelation.

Hound Dog Taylor

Born with six fingers on each hand, Theodore Roosevelt "Hound Dog" Taylor once drunkenly tried to remove his extra digits with a razor blade. Thankfully, he was only partially successful, leaving his left hand intact to execute his wild Elmore James-in-crystal meth slide runs.

Despite his clownish stage persona, Hound Dog loved to fight with his bandmates, and even wounded HouseRockers guitarist Brewer Phillips with a handgun when one dissing session got out of hand. A devotee of $50 pawnshop guitars and busted amps, Hound Dog rarely practiced, and he never performed sober. "When I die," he sagely predicted, "they'll say, 'He couldn't play shit, but he sure made it sound good!'"

Marc Bolan

He claimed to know only five chords, but nobody ever whipped a Les Paul with as much effete elan as the TRex main man. The bisexual elf's Freudian fixation on guitar flagellation began during his stint with mod provocateurs John's Children (wherein he routinely beat his ax with chains during live shows) and continued long after he'd morphed from acoustic folkie to high-heeled glam warrior.

Bolan's weirdo credentials were more confirmed by his impressive string of gibberish-laden hits — songs like "Metal Guru,""Hot Love" and "Telegram Sam" so brilliantly walked the line between genius and idiocy, no one is sure to this day which is which.

Jim Martin

"I'm from outer space and I'm here to kill you all," was a favorite between-song threat of the erstwhile Faith No More guitarist, and frankly it wasn't hard to believe him.

With his Furry Freak Brother beard and man — the latter gradually turning into an unsightly "reverse Mohawk," thanks to pattern baldness — his penchant for wearing several pairs of sunglasses at once and his unapologetic love for classic rock, "Big Sick Ugly Jim" always seemed the odd man out in the groundbreaking funk-metal band.

Since parting ways with FNM in 1994, the reclusive Martin as lent his searing tones to a handful of projects but his main interest seems to be growing giant pumpkins that tip the scales at well over 800 pounds.

Bobby Beausoleil

The pretty boy of the Manson Family (Charles, not Marilyn), Beausoleil was a talented musician who played rhythm guitar in Arthur Lee's Love, back when they were still known as the Grass Roots. In 1967, Beausoleil landed a gig playing guitar and sitar for the Magick Powerhouse of Oz, and 11-piece rock band formed by filmmaker Kenneth Anger to provide soundtrack to his occult film Lucifer Rising.

After a headed argument, Beausoleil stole Anger's car, camera equipment and 1,600 feet of his film — the latter of which he gave to Manson, who buried it in the desert and demanded $10,000 in ransom. While in prison, Beausoleil has built a wide array of electronic instruments, including the Syntar, a stringless, digital, touch-controlled guitar.

Angus Young

Angus is such an established member of the rock pantheon, most of us don't even flinch when AC/DC's diminutive lead axman duck-walks across the stage in full schoolboy drag, despite the fact the dude is several decades past his 16th birthday.

But how's this for a job description: not only do you sport a velvet jacket-shorts-and-cap look on a nightly basis but you do it while playing impossibly loud blues licks, punctuating each performance with a striptease and a full moon of the audience. If that isn't a weird way to make your living for nearly 30 years, we don't know what is.

Before he wielded the hammer of the gods — and a Les Paul — as a member of mighty Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page was a Telecaster-wielding Yardbird.

Today we turn our attention to Page's best guitar work with his former band.

Fortunately, we don't have very far to look, since Page recorded only one album with the band — 1967's Little Games— plus a few non-album singles and B-sides, all of which have wound up on deluxe versions of Little Games over the decades.

While the band's Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck eras enjoyed decent chart success — from "For Your Love" to "Heart Full of Soul" to "Shapes of Things"— its Page-fronted version managed to fly under the radar until imploding in 1968. (Even "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago," which featured Beck and Page, only reached Number 30.)

Check out our five choices for Page's best guitar work as a Yardbird. This list was compiled with the input of Guitar World Editor-in-Chief Brad Tolinski, author of Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page. If you're interested in Page's Yardbirds days — not to mention his Led Zeppelin days — you might want to check out the book, which is available now at the Guitar World Online Store.

P.S.: I'd like to award an "honorable mention" to a lesser-known Yardbirds track from 1968 called "Avron Knows," which features Page playing a Tele with a simply beautiful fuzz tone. The recording, which is incomplete (And I don't think Page and the boys will be gathering to finish it anytime soon), wasn't released until a few years ago on the Cumular Limit album.

On that note, enjoy!


"Think About It," B-side of "Goodnight Sweet Josephine"

If the guitar solo on "Think About It" sounds familiar, that's because Page borrowed and re-purposed it a year later when recording "Dazed and Confused" with Led Zeppelin. The guitar solo makes this the Yardbirds' most Zeppelin-like track, and it's easily the most shred-centric solo in the band's catalog. Be sure to check out Aerosmith's cover of this tune, which can be found on their Night in the Ruts album.

"Happenings Ten Years Time Ago," A-side of a 1966 single

"Happenings Ten Years Time Ago" was the first Yardbirds single to feature Page, who — this time around — shares the guitar spotlight with Beck. There are only three Beck/Page-era Yardbirds recordings — "Happenings,""Psycho Daisies" and "Stroll On.""Happenings Ten Years Time Ago" is a mini-masterpiece, what Tolinski calls "a tour de force of guitar invention and orchestration ... a moody slice of psychedelia with nightmarish overtones." That's John Paul Jones on bass, by the way. You can hear Beck's voice during the mid-song ranty interlude.

"White Summer," from Little Games

This acoustic instrumental track is the precursor to Led Zeppelin's "Black Mountain Side," and Page often performed the two songs as a medley during early Led Zeppelin tours. It's interesting to note that during the Yardbirds' final days as a touring band, Page performed this song with an electric guitar, as heard on Live Yardbirds: Featuring Jimmy Page. Said Page: "I used a special tuning for [the song]; the low string down to D, then A, D, G, A and D. It’s like a modal tuning, a sitar tuning, in fact."

"Smile On Me," from Little Games

"Smile On Me" is the closest the Page-era Yardbirds got to straight-ahead (and spaced-out) blues.

"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor," from Little Games

From Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page:

BRAD TOLINSKI: Those ringing guitar parts and suspended chords on "Tinker, Tailor" are almost like a precursor to "The Song Remains the Same."

JIMMY PAGE: Well, it could be, except I've got two or three different demo versions, each with different guitar approaches. What is somewhat funny is I presented [producer] Mickie [Most] with the poppiest version. Here I am talking about shooting ourselves in the foot by doing pop stuff, but I really sort of enabled the situation by coming up with parts that were intentionally quite catchy. I guess I still had that instinct from doing sessions for all those years!"

Note that Page is playing guitar with a violin bow during the solo, a sound that would turn up on the first Led Zeppelin album.

"Avron Knows," from Cumular Limit

As mentioned above, here's the incomplete "Avron Knows." Check out Page's fuzzed-out Tele tone!

It’s probably not a coincidence that effects such as wah pedals and fuzz boxes started appearing en masse about the same time that recreational drugs like marijuana and LSD became popular with rock musicians.

Indeed, it would take the mind of an incredibly stoned individual — someone deprived of exposure to the sun’s rays, fed a diet of lukewarm Mountain Dew and stale frozen pizza and kept awake for days by snorting lines of Instant Maxwell House — to even conceive of the idea for some of the music industry’s many audio oddities.

In salute to effect innovators like Electro-Harmonix’s Mike Matthews and Zachary Vex of Z.Vex (both of whom may be as straight and unpolluted as an Iowa highway, for all we know), we present to you our selections for the strangest and most wonderful guitar effects ever unleashed upon the unsuspecting public.

Plugging into one of the following effects is like discovering an ancient Mayan city of gold on the tip of your fingernail while your cat pontificates, in Lebanese, about Proust. Or whacking yourself in the head really hard with a sledgehammer.

To find out more about these pedals (and hear more audio examples), check out Discofreq’s FX Site or Tonefrenzy.com. If you’d like to take a crack at building your own, visit DIYstompboxes.com.

Note that, since it's unusual to come across two or three of these effects, let alone all 10, we do not have consistent photos or videos of the effects presented below. Luckily, there's this thing called YouTube.com. We tried to find the most to-the-point and least-annoying video for each effect. (We admit we really love the video for Number 5, the Maestro Rover!)

Enjoy!

Who is the greatest guitarist on the planet?

On the face of it, that question is a no-brainer: It's Hendrix. Or Clapton. Or Page. Or Beck. Or ... is it?

In 2010, as Guitar World was celebrating its 30th anniversary, we picked 30 guitarists and asked them to name their guitar heroes — and the results will surprise you.

ANGUS YOUNG by Joe Perry

Apart from the usual suspects—Page, Clapton, Beck, Hendrix and Peter Green—one of my favorite guitarists is Angus Young. I first saw him when AC/DC opened up for Aerosmith in the Seventies. They played about 25 dates with us, and I was just overwhelmed by his energy and ability to do his acrobatics without missing a note. He definitely had an influence on me inasmuch as his solos always had a purpose. Instead of using all the traditional tricks, he found a way to get inside those licks and be inventive. My favorite AC/DC song is probably “Sin City.”

For me, the essence of a good guitarist is someone who plays what the song calls for. It’s about listening to the music as a whole and then doing what you need to do. Sometimes it’s not even what you play; it’s what you don’t play. Which brings us back to Angus Young.

CHUCK BERRY by Angus Young

When I was growing up, everyone used to rave about Clapton, saying he was a guitar genius and stuff like that. Well, even on a bad night, Chuck Berry is a lot better than Clapton will ever be.

Rock music has been around since the days when Chuck Berry put it all together. He combined the blues, country and rockabilly, and put his own poetry on top, and that became rock and roll. And it’s been hanging in there.

AC/DC’s whole career has been playing rock and roll, and I’m sure you still get a lot of people tuning in to bands like us and the Stones. Younger bands will be plugging into it and taking it into the next realm. There’s always going to be another generation that will take it and give it to a new, younger audience, so I think it will just keep going on.

STEVE VAI by Tom Morello

Some instrumental guitar players are lost in a muso fog. Steve Vai is not one of them. He’s an artist, and one of the greats.

I’ve certainly learned from him, especially from his work ethic. I started playing guitar very late, when I was 17 years old. I felt really behind, and when I read about Steve’s practice regimen it really encouraged me. It also nearly killed me! While doing my college studies I was also practicing eight hours a day to amass the kind of technique that I admired in players like him and Randy Rhoads.

Once, Steve was doing a presentation at GIT, and he asked me to do it with him. He told me he’d also invited Steve Lukather, Stanley Jordan, Joe Satriani. I said, “No, bro, it sounds like it’s gonna be a shred-off.” But he said, “We’re not even gonna play; we’re just gonna discuss our craft.” So I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

A couple of days before the event, he says to me, “Just bring your amp and guitar along in case we have to demonstrate techniques.” So of course, I get there for soundcheck, and my worst nightmare has come true: it was six of us in a row with our guitars, and it was nonstop shredding the whole time.

TONY IOMMI by James Hetfield

As far as being a riff-and-rhythm guy, my favorite guitarist is Tony Iommi. He inspired me to want to play heavy. I admired other rhythm players, like AC/DC’s Malcolm Young, who’d just stay in the back and hold it down, and the Scorpions’ Rudy Schenker, who has a lot of percussiveness in his playing. I also liked Rush’s Alex Lifeson—people wouldn’t think of him as a rhythm player, but he comes up with some pretty amazing offbeat things.

But Iommi is the main man. To me, he seemed like one of those quiet geniuses. At one time he was the frontman of Black Sabbath, and Ozzy was off to one side; at that time, the riff was more important than the vocals. Tony can go from the heaviest minor-key doom riff to a happy mode, and it will still sound heavy. Metallica can’t do happy, but Tony can pull it off. My favorite Black Sabbath track is “Into the Void.”

ERIC CLAPTON by Eddie Van Halen

Clapton was it. I knew every note he played. Mammoth—me, Alex Van Halen and a bass player we knew—were the junior Cream.

Being limited gear-wise forced me to find my own voice on the guitar. That’s why Eric Clapton’s live jams with Cream were such an influence on me. Back in ’68, he was pretty much just using natural distortion on those live tracks on Wheels of Fire and Goodbye. I had no money and couldn’t afford a fuzz box or a wah-wah or a ring modulator, or whatever Hendrix had in his whole rig. I just plugged straight into an amp and turned it up to 11. So in order to get a different or unique sound, I had to learn to squeeze it out of the strings with just my fingers. I never had a guitar lesson in my life, except from listening to Eric Clapton records.

JIM McCARTY by Ted Nugent

I discovered the most powerful musical influence of my entire life when I played the Walled Lake Casino outside of Detroit. It was either 1959 or 1960. My band the Lourdes opened up for Martha & the Vandellas, Gene Pitney, and Billy Lee & the Rivieras, who went on to become Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels. Their guitarist was Jim McCarty, who played a Gibson Byrdland through a Fender Twin.

Standing there watching McCarty rip into his leads, I thought, Dear god in heaven, what is that? It was so outrageous, so noisy, yet so musical and so rhythmical. I realized that simply playing a song would never do again.

After I heard him play, I went on a gee-hah to get a Byrdland and a Fender Twin amp—because of the crispness, the thickness, the style of his playing. It was about using all the fingers, all the strings, all the time. That’s where the multirhythmic patterns on my song “Stranglehold” come from, with all the grace rhythms, all the counter-rhythms, all the pedal tones that never stop. I’m playing multiple parts on the guitar by using various incremental touches to each string. And that’s because of McCarty.

KEITH RICHARDS by Steven Van Zandt

The British invasion of 1964 to 1966 turned Americans on to our own rock and roll pioneers and blues players. I grew up on Keith Richards, and his lead on the Stones’ versions of Chuck Berry songs helped reinvent the guitar for Beck, Clapton and Jimmy Page. I always felt that you go through that muso phase and stay there or get out. I went out the other end. I didn’t want to be a virtuoso for a minute. So I came full circle to the fact that the guitar solo must serve the song—that’s more important.

JIMMY HERRING by Alex Skolnick

Some may not know Jimmy Herring’s name, but they will know the bands that he’s played with: the Allman Brothers, the Grateful Dead, Widespread Panic, and Jazz Is Dead. He’s a hero of the jam-band scene, which is kind of funny, as stylistically he’s very influenced by jazz.

Jimmy has his own band called Aquarium Rescue Unit, who operate on a level similar to [jazz-fusion group] Weather Report. Having said that, although people like the Dave Matthews Band and Bruce Hornsby took them out on tour and begged their own label to sign them, Aquarium Rescue Unit never got a decent record deal and eventually disbanded [in 1997]. They reunited in 2005 and have played somewhat sporadically since then.

Jimmy is an incredible player. He has the bluesiness of Warren Haynes or Johnny Winter and the vocabulary of John Scofield, with an element of Steve Morse thrown in. If that sounds appealing, then track down a copy of Aquarium Rescue Unit’s 1993 album, Mirrors of Embarrassment. Play it, and you’ll wonder why you’ve never heard of him until now.

RITCHIE BLACKMORE by Phil Collen

The first gig I ever went to was Deep Purple, during their Machine Head period. They played “Highway Star,” and it blew me away. And that’s when I decided to start playing guitar.

Ritchie Blackmore was a huge influence because he was flashy. I love really flashy lead guitar playing, and Blackmore’s technique is great. It’s aggressive. When he hit a chord, it was like being punched in the face. I don’t really care about finger picking, and acoustic doesn’t satisfy me. It’s electric, screaming loud rock that I love.

As far as what he’s doing now [playing Renaissance-style music with Blackmore’s Night], I honestly respect him. The fact that he’s still playing and is passionate about it is great, even if it is a bit wonky and weird. He can take liberties. He’s Ritchie Blackmore.

GLENN TIPTON & K.K. DOWNING by Zakk Wylde

When I think of underrated guitarists, I go for some of the guys in really big bands, the ones who get overshadowed by the achievements of their band act. For instance, when Journey is mentioned, you think of great songs and amazing vocals. But who ever praises Neal Schon? And that guy can play up a storm.

That’s why I pick Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing from Judas Priest. It’s two guitarists, yes, but you always think of them as one. They are the ultimate twin guitarists in metal—they go together. Just listen to the amazing riffs they’ve come up with over the years. And these guys can shred with the best.

Tipton and Downing have influenced generations of young guitarists, but a lot of the time these kids don’t even realize that what they’re playing all started with Judas Priest. Tipton and Downing have also given metal a subtlety that’s often overlooked. Both appreciate that sometimes you are most effective when you back off the pedal a little. You don’t need to be blazing all the time.

They’ve worked together for so long that each immediately understands what to do in a song. Sometimes Tipton is soloing and Downing is riffing, and then they’ll change over—it’s not like one does the lead work and the other does the rhythm. This is also what they introduced into metal: the idea of not only being a great lead player but also being prepared to let the other man have the spotlight when it matters to the music.

Without Tipton and Downing, metal would be very different. That’s why I have such a high regard for them. In my book, they rule.

LESLIE WEST by Martin Barre

Leslie West made a big impression on me when Mountain supported Jethro Tull on a long U.S. tour during the early Seventies. In those days, opening acts weren’t too friendly, and it all became a bit competitive, but Mountain were lovely guys, and we really hit it off. They were such a great band. I loved Leslie’s larger-than-life style, they had great songs, and they were so incredibly tight. In that last respect, they taught Jethro Tull a lot about being a band.

I know of at least three people that were affected by Leslie’s playing style—myself, John McLaughlin and Mick Ralphs [of Mott the Hoople and Bad Company]—but I’m sure there are plenty more. Leslie has such recognizable tone, and I love the melodic way he plays; every note counts. He never resorts to the pyrotechnic approach or feels the need to be overly clever. If you want a good starting off point for a beginner, go with Climbing! [1970] or Nantucket Sleighride [1971]. I still love what Mountain did with “Theme from an Imaginary Western.” My goodness, they brought that to life, especially onstage.

JEFF BECK by David Gilmour

I’m sort of horribly, pathetically fannish about Jeff. Ever since “Hi Ho Silver Lining” came out [in 1967] when I was 20-odd years old, I’ve revered him and his playing. In many ways he is just the best guitar player. And 40-something years since he came to prominence in the Yardbirds, he is still the only person pushing forward in that way. He’s never retreading old ground; he’s always looking for a new challenge.

Jeff’s scarily brilliant. He’s a tightrope walker. I’m not. I like to cover all my bases and make myself secure with a great band, with the music all rehearsed. I just walk out there, and if I didn’t even play anything it would still sound great. Jeff’s different. He’s out there mining that seam.

JIMI HENDRIX by Joe Satriani

The first thing that really flipped me out was hearing “The Wind Cries Mary” on the radio. Before that, I was a drummer, and I started from watching the Rolling Stones and the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. But as soon as I heard Hendrix, that was it.

What made him great was his choice of notes. When you hear “Machine Gun” from Live at the Fillmore, you have no idea what’s going to happen in the next few minutes. You’re totally unprepared. With “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return),” you can’t believe how perfect a performance it is, and it’s just a blues thing in E.

Unfortunately, the Seventies were a hellish period for many great players, if you look at Hendrix’s comrades, it was a rough road. But look at someone like Jeff Beck—he just gets better and better. I saw him a month ago in Oakland, and I was just in tears standing at the side of the stage listening to him playing “Where Were You.” Nowadays, as a guitarist you want to celebrate what you’ve been able to play, which goes back to quoting other great players, but you also feel a responsibility not to copy those people. In my mind, when I’m playing, my heroes are sitting on my shoulders.

BRIAN MAY by Steve Vai

I don’t think enough is really said about the brilliance of Brian May’s guitar playing, in the sense that it’s overshadowed by the greatness of the music itself. The Queen II album was one of those pivotal moments that just nailed me to the wall.

He’s probably one of the top identifiable guitar players, even more so than Beck, Page and Clapton. They’re all so identifiable, but Brian May had such a tone in his head and in his fingers. It speaks volumes. His contribution to orchestrated guitars is unprecedented. There was nothing like it before him. To me, it was like when Edward Van Halen came along and reshaped the sound of electric guitar. That’s what I heard in Brian May’s playing. It’s something that’s inherent in the brain of the guitar player.

I remember working with Frank Zappa for the first time. I had just moved out to Los Angeles, and nobody knew me. I was 21. I went to the Rainbow Bar & Grill, and Brian May was there. I couldn’t believe it. I mustered up every little bit of courage and went up to him and said, “Thank you so much for everything you’ve done. I play guitar. I’m here in town with Frank Zappa.” He said, “Oh, really? Why don’t you come down to our rehearsal?”

I went down, and he brought me up on the stage, and he let me play the guitar—the guitar that he built with his dad [the “Red Special”]. I couldn’t even believe that I was touching this instrument! He was so kind and so warm, and for who? This kid, you know? And I played his guitar, and it sounded like Steve Vai. Then when he played it, it sounded just like Brian May. It was very apparent to me that his tone is in his fingers and his head.

He’s a class act from head to toe, and it shows in his playing. I can listen to any player and pantomime their sound, but I can’t do Brian May. He’s just walking on higher ground.

MARTY FRIEDMAN by Jason Becker

When I was 16 years old, I sent a demo tape to Mike Varney of Shrapnel Records. He called me and said I should go and meet Marty.

I went to Marty’s tiny apartment in San Francisco. We started jamming, without amps. That moment changed my life. What he was doing was so new to me. The unique bends, vibrato, exotic scales, phrasing and timing were fascinating to me. And then it hit me: he was a lot better than I was. I started to sweat. I tried to play my best stuff, but my musical mind had already shifted. I knew I wanted to learn from this guy.

Marty was very complimentary of my technique and the melodies on my demo tape. He started coming over to record his songs on my four-track. He taught me the second harmonies and counterpoint lines. Once he saw that I was a sponge for learning, he started incorporating some of my ideas. I feel like every day that I jammed or wrote with Marty was like taking lessons for a year. He taught by example, and with his influence I learned how to be my own unique creative artist. Even to this day, when I am composing and I get stuck, I think to myself, What would Marty do?

EDDIE VAN HALEN by Richie Kotzen

This is kind of embarrassing, but the first time I heard Eddie Van Halen was on the solo for Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” I was like, “Man, that’s unbelievable. Who is this guitar player?” I asked around and found out it was Eddie Van Halen. Then I ended up getting some Van Halen records, and after that I just really wanted to play like him.

He didn’t sound like any other guitar player, but it was more about the way that he played the notes. Everyone talks about Van Halen’s sound, but it really has to do with his timing, his rhythm style and his phrasing. It’s more about that to me than the amp or whatever guitar he’s using.

The first time I saw Eddie play, I had the best possible seat. Because we had the same guitar tech, I was able to watch him from this little room under the stage, where he goes to change guitars or do whatever. It was pretty incredible.

YNGWIE MALMSTEEN by George Lynch

Every little microevolution of the guitar that came along in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties influenced me. The number of people I didn’t appreciate is probably a much smaller list.

Yngwie is one of those players that had a huge impact on me. His neoclassical style was just mind-blowing to me. I was raised as a blues player and learned my chops in the late Sixties, early Seventies, so it was all incredibly new to me. Just the ferocity of it was mesmerizing. The ease with which he does it was fascinating, too.

Ultimately, guitar-driven Eighties music had wound itself to the point of absurdity and inaccessibility. I mean, how many people can actually appreciate that kind of music? It’s just an elitist speed contest. But Yngwie created the trend. On a pure playing level, players that create music that touches people are always viable. And that’s why he’s still around and a lot of the other guys aren’t.

MICK TAYLOR by Slash

Mick Taylor had the biggest influence on me without me even knowing it. My favorite Stones records were Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers. Those three were major to me because I was exposed to those records as a kid when they first came out. Mick Taylor played on a couple of those records and went on to play with the Stones for a couple more. As I got older and started playing guitar, I always gravitated to his style.

People always mention Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Angus Young…all the obvious ones. But there are guys like Mick Taylor and Joe Walsh that were as important. Mick Taylor had a really cool, round-toned bluesy sort of thing that I thought was really effective.

One of the greatest Mick Taylor solos is on “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking?” from Sticky Fingers. It’s the kind of stuff that’s almost like old Eric Clapton—it’s very simple stuff, but it’s about how the notes are placed and how you approach them. The new guard of guitarists always forgets about doing simplistic and very effective guitar playing that speaks to you. It’s not all about two-handed tapping.

RANDY RHOADS by Frank Hannon

I was always a big fan of Randy. In 1980, when Ozzy’s Blizzard of Ozz came out, some friends of mine went to see him perform in Oakland and came back raving, saying, “Man, we saw this guitarist today, and he was better than Eddie Van Halen!”

This was a few years before we started Tesla. I was already playing guitar and was a big fan of Eddie Van Halen. So we went down to the local record store and got the album, and I was infatuated from day one. Randy was doing everything that Van Halen did, and more. It was the classical knowledge that he was incorporating into the guitar. The arrangements on “Crazy Train” and “Mr. Crowley” were unbelievable. I think a lot of the soloing on Van Halen tracks were improvised, which is cool. Randy took it a step further. His discipline probably came from his mother who taught him at her music school [Musonia School of Music in North Hollywood]. When I was a kid I would read the guitar magazines, and he would always mention that his mother was a big influence.

I went to visit the school, and I met Randy’s brother, Kelle, and his mother Delores, who is nicknamed “Dee.” “Dee” was also the title of an acoustic song on Blizzard of Ozz, which was a big influence on me. If you listen to my acoustic solo on “Love Song” it’s really inspired by that. I played that for Dee when I met her recently. She loves meeting fans, and she told me some stories about Randy. She said that his favorite song was [the Big Band swing tune] “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” how he found his first guitar in his father’s closet, and how when he was in London recording Diary of a Madman he would spend all his downtime studying classical music at a university. She just lit up when she talked about Randy. I have a video of that meeting on my web site.

ZAKK WYLDE by Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal

I first heard Zakk in 1986, when he was with a New Jersey band called Zyris. The next thing I knew, he was playing with Ozzy. Like Zakk, I had been a huge Randy Rhoads fan, so I was very happy that Ozzy picked Zakk to be his guitarist.

When you hear Zakk’s playing, you know right away that it’s him, with that distinctive use of harmonic vibrato on the lower string. Before he came along, every time you saw a blond-haired guitarist kicking a Les Paul’s ass you thought of John Sykes. Now you also think of Zakk. In addition, he’s very diverse stylistically, with the southern rock of Pride and Glory [Wylde’s early Nineties group], the singer-songwriter style of his Book of Shadows album [1996] and, of course, what he does with Black Label Society.

I met Zakk for the first time about a year and a half ago; he was a guest on my friend’s TV show. His visit to the studio was supposed to last for three hours, but he ended up staying for 14. Besides being a phenomenal musician, Zakk’s as good-hearted as I expected. I hope that some day we can do it again.

B.B. KING by Billy Gibbons

My favorite guitarist is B.B. King. His album Live at the Regal, recorded in 1964, remains a classic. The electricity, the crackling atmosphere… Plus, it’s a great sound, recorded with a full band, horns and piano, and a rabid audience thrown in.

B.B.’s distinctive one-note style, his sustain and attack, that kind of call-and-response thing between the vocals and the solos… He’s taken for granted now, which means he’s underrated. Obviously, he’s a maestro entertainer rather than a blues purist, though he can be that too. He’s a former cotton picker, but he remains so self-effacing, plus he has a great sense of humor, lyrically and in life. He’s got class.

MALCOLM YOUNG by Scott Ian

Malcolm Young has got to be the most unsung, underrated guitar hero of all time. He’s the backbone of AC/DC, the greatest rock band ever, and has written some of the most amazing riffs you’ll hear. This is the man responsible for more great rock moments than any other guitarist you can name. Is Malcolm Young the greatest rhythm guitarist in the world? No contest.

I recall being given one of his guitar picks recently after a gig on the band’s current tour, and it was half worn down. But you know what’s astonishing? Apparently that pick was used on just one song during the band’s set that night. Malcolm gets through a pick for every song because he hits the strings so hard. It’s amazing. The man is truly a one-off.

When I first started to listen to AC /DC, it was Angus who caught my attention. He was the lead guitarist and got all the glory. But in about 1979, when I began to get into guitar playing in a serious way, I gravitated toward Malcolm. I was listening to what he did, because he was the guy writing the music. I now appreciate just how incredible he is. He’s a songwriter, not a shredder, but without him what would AC /DC sound like?

If you’ve never heard him play—and can there be anyone on the planet who hasn’t heard Malcolm Young?—then go and listen to the opening chords of “Back in Black.” If that doesn’t move you, then you have no soul. The other songs I’d strongly recommend are “Riff Raff” and “Beating Around the Bush.” The way he takes straight blues riffs and siphons them though the AC/DC sensibility is a lesson to all guitarists.

GEORGE HARRISON by Elliot Easton

I was 10 years old when the Beatles played the Ed Sullivan Show [in February 1964], and I was already playing a little guitar. To see George Harrison there, standing off to the side, looking down at his guitar while he played his licks—to my impressionable mind it defined what a lead guitarist was.

I knew right then what I wanted to do with my life: I wanted to be like the guy in the middle—the guy looking down at his guitar and playing all the little fills and solos. Harrison taught me about short solos and hooks, and what a hook is. All those mid-Sixties Beatles tracks—whether it was “Day Tripper” or “Ticket to Ride” or whatever—they all start with a guitar lick that you wait to come around again in the chorus. That’s where I learned to do that.

ULI JON ROTH by Kirk Hammett

Around the time of Metallica’s Death Magnetic sessions, I began listening again to some of the rock music of my teens, and it inspired me all over again. I’d forgotten how much those guitarists meant to me.

Uli Jon Roth is one of those players. When I started listening to him again, I realized that I can still learn a lot from him. I love his choice of notes, the attitude behind his playing and the way his solos “up” the level of his songs. He took Scorpions to a totally different level. After his solos, you’re left there shaking your head. It’s like being sideswiped by a truck.

The track I love the most is the one I play every night, “The Sails of Charon,” from Taken by Force. The opening motif is just great. It’s spooky sounding, exotic. It’s very old-school heavy metal. People in the audience who know the song recognize that I’m flying the flag for that old-school metal, and they come to me and say, “Bro, ‘Sails of Charon’ rules!” There are a lot more Uli Roth fans out there than I expected.

NEIL YOUNG by Nancy Wilson

Neil is identifiable whether he’s playing acoustic or electric guitar. For acoustic he has a completely unique type of tuning, detuning, attack and release. He plays a song called “Bandit,” from the Greendale album, and there’s a live version of it that’s incredible. He chooses a specific guitar that can be detuned on the low string down to a C and picks the particular gauge of string that will rattle in the perfect way. It sounds so wrong that it’s right. I think nobody in the world would do that on purpose except for Neil Young.

He has a monstrous electric guitar sound, too, and on “Cinnamon Girl” he recorded what is probably the best one-note guitar solo ever. He puts more feeling into one note than anyone else. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Of course, it’s his tone that makes all the difference. Touch sensitivity accounts for about 90 percent of everything. Neil has such expressive playing that he can play a onenote solo and make it memorable for decades, for generations.

FRANK ZAPPA by Dweezil Zappa

I was never intimidated by my father’s technique. I think most guitar players are just excited to see somebody do something they didn’t think was possible. We’d sit and play together, but what Frank was doing was musical. I couldn’t grasp it at a young age—it was too sophisticated for me. He’d show me inversions of chords and composition devices—moving triads around the neck and stuff. It sounded neat, but I didn’t always understand what was happening musically.

I do the Zappa Plays Zappa tour because I want to get Frank’s music more into the public eye. I want him to be better understood. I think there are a lot of misconceptions about his music and him as a person. First of all, Frank was really a composer who used a rock band like an orchestra. He could hear stuff in his head and just write it down. I didn’t have a musical background; I was just a guy who learned things by ear—more a guitar player than a musician. The first thing I learned was the incredibly fast passage toward the end of “The Black Page.” It took me a good five or six months, and I had to totally change my picking technique in order to play this thing. I’d have to play it really slow for hours and hours and hours. I definitely think Frank would enjoy that we go to such great lengths to get it right with Zappa Plays Zappa.

PETE TOWNSHEND by Ace Frehley

I got all my rhythm work from listening to Pete Townshend and Keith Richards. I think Pete is a wizard when it comes to chords. He can play the same chord in, like, 20 different positions, doing inversions, suspensions… Just listen to Tommy. I’m a huge fan.

Pete has a great right hand as well as a great left hand. “Tattoo” is a great picking song, but of course he’s known best for his power strumming, like on “Pinball Wizard,” and his power chords, like on “My Generation” and the chord that opens “I Can See for Miles.” His rhythm work was just amazing.

The first time I saw the Who was the same day I saw Cream for the first time. They were both performing at a Murray the K show in Manhattan. [The revue-style show, presented by disc jockey Murray Kaufman, was called Music in the Fifth Dimension and presented at the RKO Theater from March 25 to April 2, 1967.] I was cutting school, and a friend and I snuck into the show and got down in front. It was the Who’s first New York show. I think the headliner was Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels.

I saw the Who perform again, at the Fillmore East, in 1968, the day after Martin Luther King got shot. [The civil rights leader was assassinated on April 4, 1968.] The Who weren’t going to play because they were worried about riots, and I believe they ended up doing a short show. Ironically, Paul Stanley [Frehley’s former Kiss coguitarist] was there too, but we didn’t know each other at the time.

ALVIN LEE by Mick Mars

Sometimes I feel I should’ve been true to myself as a guitar player and stuck with the blues. All bullshit aside, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, Alvin Lee, Jimi Hendrix…that stuff was the total shit for me. I was brought up on those players, and they all influenced me in one way or another.

When Bloomfield started getting too countrified for my liking, that’s when I discovered Alvin Lee and Ten Years After. Alvin brought a real explosive side to the blues. Some people said they couldn’t handle it, but I thought he was great.

PETER GREEN by Rich Robinson

Growing up in America, you couldn’t help but hear Fleetwood Mac’s [mid-Seventies breakthrough albums] Rumours and Fleetwood Mac on the radio all the time. And it was by getting into these records that I started to explore the Peter Green legacy. Obviously, he’d left Fleetwood Mac long before these were done, but I was influenced enough by them to want to know more about what the band had done before. And that’s when I discovered the amazing talent of the man.

His playing is just so moving. Listen to what he achieves on “Oh Well” and “Rattlesnake Shake,” and it is stunning. What he does is so interesting because he doesn’t overplay. Green understands that simplicity could hold the key to the blues.

It makes him so authentic. To my mind, Peter Green is the finest white man I’ve ever heard playing blues guitar. That’s a bold statement when you consider some of the other greats, but I genuinely believe this to be true. His playing has the soul and passion of the blues. And yet he never seems to get the recognition enjoyed by people like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page. Perhaps that’s because he’s so understated. If you check out something like “I Need Your Love So Bad,” what you hear is a guitarist prepared to submerge his own ego for the sake of the song. He gets the mood exactly right. He was never flamboyant like the others I just mentioned. As a result, he’s often overlooked in the list of guitar greats.

He also has such an incredible range. You can’t ever claim that one particular song defined him in the way that you can with Hendrix.

When the Black Crowes recorded and toured with Jimmy Page, he told us so many Peter Green stories. It was clear that Jimmy loves the man’s talent. And if he’s good enough for a giant like Jimmy to acclaim, then it reinforces my adoration.

RON ASHETON by Kim Thayil

It was the Seventies when I first heard the Stooges. By then, all the albums by the New York Dolls, the Stooges and the MC5 were out of print. You could only find them in used-record stores, and the nearest was six miles away. I’d check out their racks, and once in a while I got lucky.

The Stooges’ Funhouse album was one that I found. There’s some crazy stuff on side two—some really great, aggressive rock solos. Ron has a particular gritty, sleazy sound with the groove that he lays down. And the dueling improvisations with saxophone made for some cool jazz noise rock.

The Stooges didn’t do as much of that 12-bar blues stuff. They just hit a groove and then hypnotically beat you over the head with it. They just stayed with that riff for a long time. Of course, there is a lot of blues in what Ron did, but there’s something a lot looser, too, and it was freer and it utilized chaos. It was something that was definitely not present in FM rock or Top 40 at the time. “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” “TV Eye,” “Loose,” “Down on the Street”…

They’re all amazing. If rock should be about anything, it should be about freedom and rebellion, and not the stupid requirements that would be imposed upon you by the record company—like professionalism. I mean, it’s good for a person to know their damn instrument, or else you can’t come up with inventive ideas, but not to be bound by the patterns on the fretboard.

Musicians can still be a little fuzzy when it comes to describing the sound of fuzz.

Some guitarists will tell you it sounds like a 2,000-pound bee trapped in a sturdy metal box — perhaps with a potentiometer installed somewhere behind the wings. And while many fuzz guitar tunes and tones did (and do) make the most of the original fuzz "buzz" sound, fuzz actually has many facets, many sides, many fuzz faces, if you will.

Here are 10 songs — compiled by several members of the Guitar World staff — that we feel represent a wide spectrum of fuzz sounds and cover a lot of stomping ground. These songs are presented in no particular order. I repeat: These songs are presented in no particular order!

If you want to track down any of these tracks, you'll find all 10 original album covers in the photo gallery below.

For more fuzz box info, check out Chris Gill's Guitar World feature on "How to Buy a Fuzz Box: A Guide for the First-Time Buyer." And if you've still got stompbox fever, check out our guide to "The Top 50 Stomp Boxes, Devices and Processors of All Time." Enjoy!

The Ventures, "The 2000 Pound Bee"

Let's start at the beginning, namely "The 2000 Pound Bee," a 1962 track by the Ventures, the best-selling instrumental band of all time. While no one (including us) wants to make the claim that this is the first song to feature intentional fuzz guitar (as in, fuzz as the result of an effect pedal, as opposed to a busted speaker cone), it is commonly accepted to be exactly that (Although we must mention that it's not necessarily true). The Ventures were always ahead of the curve when it came to weird effects, as best demonstrated by their very "out there" 1964 album, The Ventures In Space. That's Nokie Edwards playing the fun, fuzzy riff, by the way.

The Yardbirds, "Heart Full of Soul"

And to think these guys originally tried to play this classic guitar riff on a sitar! Seriously, why bother? Jeff Beck's tone on this mid-1965 hit single pretty much exemplifies the still-much-sought-after mid-'60s "fuzz" and/or "buzz" tone. Oddly enough, Beck used a fuzz box to recreate the tone of a sitar, the very instrument that didn't cut it in the first place. Beck is playing an MKI Tone Bender pedal on this track.

The Doors, "When the Music's Over"

Back to California we go, with the Doors' 11-minute-long "When the Music's Over," a standout track from 1967's Stange Days. "Fuzz distortion was all we had," Doors guitarist Robby Krieger has said in past interviews. "We didn't have overdrive on our amps." In a Guitar Player magazine interview, he added that the fuzz was created by recording direct and cranking the gain/overdriving tube input on the mixing board. Regardless of how he achieved the fuzz tone on this track, it is beautiful, bizarre and creepy all at once!

Iron Butterfly, "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"

Let's stay in the '60s a bit longer with an extended visit to the garden of life, aka "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" from Iron Butterfly's super-psycho 1968 album of the same bizarre name. Yes, that sentence was a mouthful — and this 17-minute-long track is an earful of pretty much every late-'60s psychedelic-rock cliche. You have the lengthy drum solo, the spooky church-organ-style keyboards, the arguably meaningless lyrics and, of course, the fuzz guitar. This time, the fuzz is courtesy of an original Mosrite Fuzzrite — and teenage guitarist Erik Braunn. For more about the Fuzzrite, check out this site.

The Guess Who, "American Woman"

Don't worry — we'll return to '60s (We have to; we haven't mentioned Jimi Hendrix and his Fuzz Face yet). However, let's take a brief detour to early 1970, and up north to lovely Canada, home of the Guess Who, a band that scored a major hit with this tune about women from "south of the border." The song is noteworthy for Randy Bachman's unique, creamy, sustaining, neck-pickup tone (or "cow tone," as Ozzy Osbourne might say). For more about Bachman's adjective-laden "American Woman" tone (and how it came to be that way), check out this website.

Jimi Hendrix, "Foxy Lady"

You knew this was coming! "Foxy Lady"— or pretty much any track from Jimi Hendrix's debut album, Are You Experienced?— is a prime example of Hendrix playing his Fender Strat through a germanium Fuzz Face pedal (a Fuzz Face using germanium transistors.) Most germanium pedals simply reflect the qualities of a vintage tube amp, but in super-cranked mode, providing a warm sound when the speaker breaks up. It's a "rounder" distortion, as heard on "Foxy Lady." It's not at all what you hear on the Yardbirds'"Heart Full of Soul" or "Over Under Sideways Down." These days, Jim Dunlop makes a faithful reproduction of a slightly-later Hendrix pedal — his 1969/'70 Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face, which was built around a BC108 silicon transistor. For more about the new Hendrix Fuzz Face, head here.

Jeff Beck, "Beck's Bolero"

Yes, it's Jeff Beck again, this time as a solo act, still fuzzing away. "Beck's Bolero"— released in March 1967 — was the B-side of Beck's first single, "Hi Ho Silver Lining" (which features the mop-topped guitarist on vocals — a true rarity). The brief but powerful instrumental features Beck and Jimmy Page on guitar (Beck on lead, of course), John Paul Jones on bass, Nicky Hopkins on piano and Keith Moon on drums. It was recorded in mid-1966, before there was a Led Zeppelin — and before Beck had even left the Yardbirds. Although we'll try to verify this the next time we speak to Beck, it is widely believed he used a Mk.II/Supa Fuzz pedal on this song.

Smashing Pumpkins, "Cherub Rock"

We haven't mentioned the Big Muff yet! Enter "Cherub Rock" by Smashing Pumpkins, a killer song in general and a perfect example of the sound of an early Big Muff. The rest of the Billy Corgan's recording chain is most likely a Strat and a Marshall amp; but the Big Muff is doing the talking here.

Beastie Boys, "Sabotage"

Here's a curve ball for you, direct from New York City! It's "Sabotage" by the Beastie Boys, which makes this list on the merits of its fuzz bass sound, which is absolutely killer — and nearly as cool as the song's mustache-heavy music video. As heard in other fuzz-bass-centric tunes, including the Beatles'"Think for Yourself," the bottom end gets a bit lost, but the gains (no pun intended) are many. The bass was played through a Black Cat Superfuzz unit, which was based (again, no pun ...) on a 1970s Univox Superfuzz. Like its inspiration, the Black Cat truly pounces and shrieks! Insert your own cat-related puns here.

The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"

We'll wrap things up with a classic from 1965: "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones. The famous fuzz riff with the almost-trombone-like tone is played by the maestro, Keith Richards, who happens to be playing through a Maestro Fuzztone FZ-1, a pedal made by Gibson/Norlin. The Maestro, which had a tone and fuzz potentiometer, plus a push on/off footswitch, was probably the best-known early commercial distortion circuit. The massive success of "Satisfaction" led to increased interest in fuzz pedals and sound research — not to mention stories like the one you're just finishing reading now.

Damian Fanelli is the online managing editor at Guitar World. Here he is playing a Tele through a Tone Bender clone on the Blue Meanies' version of "Heart Full of Soul."

Below, check out the latest photo gallery of Guitar World magazine covers. This time, we "cover" 2008 through the present — 2014.

Because we're in a "completist" mood, this photo gallery also includes all the different variations of certain covers, including four different versions of an Eddie Van Halen cover from 2009.

We hope you enjoy this trip through GW's recent history. Because this gallery will go through 2014, you'll have to wait till 2015 for the next one!

If you're in the mood for more, be sure to check out our photo gallery of every Guitar World magazine cover from 1980 to 1986, from 1987 to 1993, from 1994 to 2000 and from 2001 to 2007.

NOTE: Remember, you can click on each photo to take a closer look.

On the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' arrival in the United States (and legendary February 1964 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show), Guitar World celebrates the 50 best guitar moments from the band's hit-making history.

The Beatles were such talented songwriters that it’s easy to overlook the fact that their music has some great — and occasionally groundbreaking — guitar work.

In assembling this list, we looked beyond our personal favorite songs and reflected on where John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney showed their talents as guitarists, whether in a solo, a riff, a technique or by their astute selection of instrument and arrangement.

For some songs, we’ve gone a step further and analyzed the guitar work to give you insights into the magic that makes these moments so special. Enjoy! And be sure to share your thoughts in the comments below or on Facebook!

50. Across the Universe
Let It Be… Naked (2003)

John Lennon considered the Beatles’ recording of this 1967 composition “a lousy track of a great song,” dismissing even his own work on it.

He was too hard on himself: his imperfect acoustic guitar work and vocal delivery effectively work in service of the song’s sincere devotional message, though overdubs of strings, background vocals and electric guitar obscured the delicacy and intimacy of his performance.

The release of Let It Be… Naked in 2003 set the record straight, offering a bare-bones acoustic mix of the track that even Lennon might have approved of.

49. Flying
Magical Mystery Tour (1967)

The strongly pulsing tremolo on the rhythm guitar makes the instrument sound as if it’s riding slightly behind the beat, giving the song a druggy languor appropriate to its title. (In the film Magical Mystery Tour, “Flying” accompanies scenes shot high above the clouds).

The crystalline acoustic guitar that appears about 13 seconds in lends the song a country vibe, culminating in a tasty double-stop lick that lazily meanders down the fretboard. Heavenly.

48. Helter Skelter
The Beatles (1968)

It’s not a stretch to say the Beatles prefigured heavy metal’s doomier side with this 1968 Paul McCartney track.

For this recording, McCartney set aside his bass duties and strapped on his Fender Esquire to deliver the track’s brash rhythm work, while Harrison performed the searing leads on Lucy, the 1957 Les Paul Standard gifted to him by Eric Clapton.

But the best work here is performed by Lennon on, of all things, a bass (either a Fender Bass VI). His sloppy but inspired playing propels the song along and provides its main rhythmic interest.

47. Yesterday
Help! (1965)

McCartney’s melancholy, acoustic guitar–driven ballad marked a symbolic, pivotal point in the Beatles’ career as a band in that it was their first song in which any of the members—three in this case—did not participate in the performance.

McCartney tuned his guitar down one whole step for this song (low to high, D G C F A D) and performed it as if it were in the key of G, with the detuning transposing it down to the concert key of F.

This may have been made for the sake of putting the vocal melody in a more optimal key for McCartney; it certainly made the bass notes sound deeper and richer, while the slackened string tension contributed to the thicker texture of the chord voicings.

46. For You Blue
Let It Be (1970)

Written by Harrison, this seemingly straightforward blues workout in D stands out as a bouncy oddball in the Beatles’ catalog.

Not only is it one of the band’s few forays into 12-bar-blues territory; it also finds Lennon stepping into the uncommon role of lead guitarist, supplying a spirited solo and fills on a Hofner Hawaiian Standard lap-steel guitar in open D tuning.

To make things even weirder, he uses a shotgun shell as a slide. In addition, there’s no bass on the recording; McCartney performed on piano and the song received no overdubs.

45. Free As a Bird
Anthology 1 (1995)

Released in 1995 as a post-mortem Beatles track built upon a John Lennon home demo, “Free As a Bird” makes a valiant attempt to resurrect the spirit of the group’s glory days.

While some will quibble about the lackluster songwriting, it’s hard to find fault with Harrison’s stinging slide work. Starting off with a few restrained lines, Harrison lets his playing soar on the solo, the one moment in which the song truly takes flight.

44. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

Recorded quickly in a single session, this rocking reprise of the album’s opening track features some fiery lead guitar work from Harrison.

Written as a bookend to the album-opening title track, the reprise is both faster and a whole step lower than the original, although halfway through it modulates up a whole step. (Modulation is a technique rarely found in the Beatles compositions, “And I Love Her” being another example from the group’s catalog [see entry 30].)

43. I Will
The Beatles (1968)

This quiet love song, written by McCartney, features only him on lead and harmony vocals, two acoustic guitars and scat-sung “vocal bass,” with Lennon and Starr providing percussion.

McCartney overdubbed, on top of his main, strummed guitar part, a second, melodic part played in a rockabilly lead style reminiscent of Elvis Presley’s lead guitarist Scotty Moore, picking out syncopated, ringing melodies built around a first-position F6 chord shape with decorative, bluesy hammer-ons from the minor third to the major third.

Years later, Cars guitarist Elliot Easton played a similar line on the chorus tags to “My Best Friend’s Girlfriend.”

42. The Ballad of John and Yoko
1967–1970 (1973)

In this 1969 musical telling of Lennon and Yoko Ono’s wedding and honeymoon, Lennon’s acoustic strumming sets up the song’s infectious rhythm, while his electric guitar fills play call-and-response with his vocals.

The track was written and recorded in April of that year, fresh off the sessions for Let It Be, in which the group attempted to get back to their rock and roll roots. That might have inspired Lennon’s musical direction with this track, which he closes with an electric guitar riff reminiscent of Dorsey Burnett’s “Lonesome Tears in My Eyes,” which the Beatles covered early in their career.

41. Yer Blues
The Beatles (1968)

Lennon wrote this 1968 song as a rude sendup of the electric blues boom that had taken London by storm, but the suicidal feelings he expresses were a sincere articulation of how he felt trapped both in his unhappy first marriage and in the Beatles.

Likewise, his primitive two-note solo could be regarded as mocking disdain for the genre’s slick white imitators, but he plays the riff until it’s as raw as his emotions. He would pursue this protopunk style of guitar playing further on his 1970 solo debut, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.

40. Help!
Help!

The Beatles’ mix of acoustic rhythms and electric guitar leads from 1964 through the end of 1965 helped greatly to define the sound of folk-rock.

Written in the midst of his “Bob Dylan phase,” “Help!” shows Lennon continuing to divulge the vulnerability express on previous songs like “No Reply” and “I’m a Loser,” with the acoustic guitar providing the requisite balladeer instrumentation.

Here, Lennon robustly strums out the rhythm on his 1964 Framus Hootenanny 5/024 acoustic 12-string, with Harrison contributing jangly lead lines and three-note descending passages on the choruses with his Gretsch Tennessean.

39. Dear Prudence
The Beatles (1968)

This 1968 composition is arguably one of Lennon’s greatest achievements as a guitarist and demonstrates his development at the time into a bona fide acoustic fingerpicker.

Having recently learned a basic eighth-note Travis-picking-like pattern from British pop star Donovan, Lennon put the newly learned pattern to great use in compositions like “Julia,” “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” and, most brilliantly, “Dear Prudence,” applying it to an ethereal modal chord progression he invented, which he performed in drop-D tuning (low to high, D A D G B E), using the two open D strings (the fourth and sixth) as ringing drones, or pedal tones throughout the majority of the song.

The thumb-picking pattern goes fifth string, fourth string, sixth string, fourth string and repeats consistently through the changing chords, interrupted briefly at the end of each verse.

38. If I Needed Someone
Rubber Soul (1965)

Although the Beatles were rock’s foremost trendsetters, they still were influenced by other artists.

Case in point: George Harrison’s 12-string riff on “If I Needed Someone.” Played in a second-position D-chord shape with a capo on the seventh fret, the line was based on Jim McGuinn’s chiming guitar work in the Byrds’ mesmerizing 1965 track “The Bells of Rhymney.”

In the mid Sixties, Harrison and McGuinn had formed a mutual-admiration society: “If I Needed Someone” featured Harrison’s second Rickenbacker 360/12, a rounded-off 1965 model that resembled McGuinn’s 1964 Rickenbacker 360/12, which McGuinn bought after seeing Harrison’s first Rick in the film A Hard Day’s Night.

37. Day Tripper
1962–1966 (1973)

Lennon and McCartney’s hip-shaking 1965 hit is a thinly veiled ode to “weekend hippies” who embrace the drug counterculture when they’re not pursuing their careers.

McCartney referred to this song and “Drive My Car” (recorded just days earlier) as “songs with jokes in” them, but there’s nothing laughable about this track’s swaggering guitar riff, borrowed from the Temptations’ 1964 hit “My Girl” and given a liberal dose of self-assured attitude.

Lennon reportedly plays the solo, most likely using his Sonic Blue Fender Strat, while Harrison’s guitar parts were probably recorded with his Gretsch Tennessean.

36. Think for Yourself
Rubber Soul (1965)

The Beatles had been interested in creating distorted guitar tones since at least 1964, when they attempted unsuccessfully to use a Gibson Maestro Fuzz-Tone on “She Loves You” and “Don’t Bother Me” (see entry 23).

They were more successful with Harrison’s excellent 1965 composition “Think for Yourself,” for which McCartney plugged his Hofner bass into an early version of the Tone Bender fuzz pedal, created by electronics designer Gary Hurst and eventually marketed by Vox. The result is the harsh-sounding “lead bass” tone that bobs menacingly—and memorably—alongside Harrison’s lead vocal.

35. Mother Nature’s Son
The Beatles (1968)

Throughout this song’s verses, McCartney fools you into thinking that he’s playing more than he actually is by filling out the harmony with his vocal melody.

For example, while the ear hears a very strong D-to-G movement in the first two bars of the verse, all McCartney is actually playing is D to Dsus4; his vocal melody intimates the G chord by moving to B, that chord’s third. The verse also features, in the third and fourth bars, brilliant oblique motion—where one voice moves up or down while one or more other voices remain stationary.

By moving the root of a B minor chord, B, down to the minor seventh, A, and then down to the sixth, Gs, while keeping the notes D and Fs constant above this descending line, McCartney implies a slick progression of Bm D (or Bm7) E9. He does the same thing at the very beginning of the song.

34. Girl
Rubber Soul (1965)

Lennon conjures up this song’s dreamy, Gypsy-like reverie by capoing his Gibson J-160E at the eighth fret, making the guitar sound similar to a mandola.

Harrison furthers the vibe on the third verse, playing a mandolin-like melody on Lennon’s Framus Hootenanny 12-string acoustic. But the crowning touch comes at the coda, when a third acoustic guitar enters, playing a Greek-style melody that’s plucked at the bridge with sharp strokes, making it sound like a bouzouki and further emphasizing the song’s smoky, old-world aura.

The British group the Hollies would copy the effect on their hit “Bus Stop,” recorded at Abbey Road some six months later.

33. Birthday
The Beatles (1968)

Like “I Feel Fine” and “Day Tripper” (see entries 12 and 37), “Birthday” delivers a classic and memorable guitar riff. Whereas those previous two songs veered from the traditional 12-bar blues formula, “Birthday” hews closely to it during its verses.

McCartney and Lennon wrote the song in the studio during an evening session, which included a recess during which the band went back to McCartney’s house to watch a TV broadcast of the 1956 teen film The Girl Can’t Help It. The soundtrack—which included performances by Little Richard, Gene Vincent and other Beatles’ favorites—undoubtedly contributed to the song’s raucous vintage rock-and-roll vibe.

32. One After 909
Let It Be (1969)

This tune had been in the Beatles’ song bag for years, surfacing first as a rickety blues-style shuffle at a March 1963 recording session.

By the time they tackled it again during their January 1969 rooftop performance at Apple, the Beatles were nearly finished as a group, but they were at long last able to breathe life into the tune, revving it up with a rock and roll beat and laying into it like the seasoned performers they were. Harrison delivers a stellar country-rock solo, using his rosewood Telecaster.

31. Norwegian Wood
Rubber Soul (1965)

This acoustic-rock masterpiece, written by Lennon, is not unlike “Here Comes the Sun,” in that it’s a folky chord-melody type of accompaniment that could easily stand on its own as a solo instrumental, with the vocal melody conveniently woven into the chords.

However, unlike “Here Comes the Sun” (see entry 4), the melody sits in the middle, rather than on top, of the chord voicings, and is performed with more full strumming in a flowing 6/8 meter. Lennon performed “Norwegian Wood” as if the song were in the key of D, the verses being in D major and the bridge sections switching the parallel minor key of D minor, and used a capo at the second fret to transpose everything up a whole step, to E major and E minor, respectively.

30. And I Love Her
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

It’s overshadowed by the Beatles’ more innovative songs, but “And I Love Her” demonstrates a leap in the group’s harmonic sophistication and musical arrangement skills.

Harrison performs delicate arpeggiations on his 1964 Ramírez nylon-string classical acoustic, while McCartney subtly propels the song along with his soul-inflected bass work. A modulation from the key of E to F on the solo ramps up the drama and keeps the song from flagging. The final chord, D major—the relative minor of F—delivers surprise and emotional uplift that allows the song to end hopefully, in keeping with the optimism of the lyrics.

29. Not Guilty
Anthology 1 (1995)

Recorded for 1968’s White Album but unissued until the release of Anthology 1 in 1995, this Harrison track was a lyrical response to his fellow Beatles, who felt that their trip to India at his urging to study transcendental meditation had been a waste of time.

It’s hard to understand why this track was abandoned, especially after the group devoted more than 100 attempts to the rhythm track. Harrison’s guitar work is especially superb, from his sinewy lead lines to his sizzling tone, achieved by placing his amp in one of Abbey Road’s echo chambers and cranking it up for maximum effect, while he performed, safe from the volume, in the studio control room.

Harrison eventually re-recorded this song for his self-titled 1979 album.

28. Old Brown Shoe
1967–1970 (1973)

Dishonorably relegated to the B-side of the single “The Ballad of John and Yoko” (see entry 42), this 1969 Harrison composition is one of his best. His stinging guitar work is at times reminiscent of Clapton, especially on the solo, where he plays his rosewood Telecaster through a Leslie cabinet, his preferred effect of the period.

In addition to guitar, Harrison plays organ and, by his own account, the buoyant bass line. “That was me going nuts,” he said of the bass work in a 1987 interview. “I’m doing exactly what I do on the guitar.”

27. Michelle
Rubber Soul (1965)

Another great example of McCartney’s innate gift for songwriting/composing, “Michelle” features, in its intro and elsewhere throughout the song, the previously mentioned standard “minor-drop” progression heard in “And Your Bird Can Sing” and “All My Loving” (see entries 7 and 16).

The song also includes some rather clever and original harmonic twists and turns, such as the use of, in the second bar of the verse progression, the dominant-seven-sharp-nine (7s9) chord pointed out earlier in regard to Harrison’s “Till There Was You” solo, which, in both songs, is voiced “widely,” low to high: 1(root)-5-3(10)-f7-s9. Lennon, by the way, would later also employ this same chord voicing in “Sexy Sadie,” a chord that he, McCartney and Harrison all learned early on from a friend and local guitar-hero in Liverpool named Jim Gretty and dubbed “the Gretty chord.”

26. Cry for a Shadow
Anthology 1 (1995)

In 1961, unknown and looking for a break, the Beatles supported British rock and roll singer Tony Sheridan on a recording date in Hamburg. While there, they recorded two tracks of their own, including this Harrison-Lennon guitar-instrumental written in the style of U.K. pop group the Shadows (hence, the title).

The recording provides early evidence of Lennon’s steady and dynamic rhythm guitar work, as well as McCartney’s melodic skills on the bass, which he had just begun playing. But it’s Harrison who shines, making the most of the trite melody with double-stop licks and generous use of the whammy bar on his Strat-style Futurama electric guitar.

He ends the song with a major sixth—C6, specifically—a voicing that would become a signature Beatles coda on songs like “She Loves You,” “No Reply” and “Help!” (see entry 40).

25. Hey Bulldog
Yellow Submarine (1968)

McCartney’s lead guitar work had characterized most of the great solo guitar moments on the Beatles’ records during 1966 and 1967. But with “Hey Bulldog,” recorded in February 1968, Harrison came charging back with a guitar solo that’s heavier and hairier than just about anything in the group’s catalog.

For the song, he played his red 1964 SG Standard, using a fuzz box (most likely his Tone Bender) to give his sound a snarl befitting the song’s title. Recalls engineer Geoff Emerick, “His amp was turned up really loud, and he used one of his new fuzz boxes, which made his guitar absolutely scream." Equally outstanding is Paul McCartney’s buoyant bass work, which is practically a lead instrument on its own.

24. I’ve Just Seen a Face
Rubber Soul (1965)

Written by McCartney and musically inspired by the skiffle movement that was popular in the U.K. in the late Fifties and early Sixties, this up-tempo knee-slapper features Lennon, Harrison and McCartney all playing acoustic guitars, with Ringo Starr providing percussion (brushed snare drum and overdubbed maracas).

The lyrical instrumental intro features a bass-line chord-melody, played (most likely by Harrison) on a 12-string, which serves to octave-double the bass-line melody, over which McCartney and Lennon flatpick a single-note melody based on double-stops, mostly sixth intervals, played up and down the G and high E strings in a quick, unbroken triplet rhythm, beautifully outlining the underlying chords with ascending and descending note pairs.

23. Don’t Bother Me
With the Beatles (1963)

Harrison’s first solo songwriting effort for the Beatles sounds like nothing else in the group’s catalog. With its moody minor chords, propulsive drum beat and tremolo guitar, this 1964 track has more in common with California surf music than it does the American rock and soul that inspired the Beatles’ music at the time.

The tremolo—provided by Harrison’s Vox AC30—gives the song an air of menace appropriate to the song’s title, and its use here marks the first time the group used an electronic effect on a finished recording.

22. Octopus’s Garden
Abbey Road (1969)

By 1969, George Harrison had put down his sitar to focus on his first love, the guitar. The results are apparent on Abbey Road, which features his most fluid and confident playing to date.

On “Octopus’s Garden,” one of Ringo Starr’s rare Beatles-era tunes, Harrison calls on his country/rockabilly influences for the first time since the band’s pre-psychedelic days. The intro is a slick masterpiece in the major pentatonic scale, the same territory Dickey Betts would later visit on “Blue Sky.” The song’s fun, twangy solo could sit snugly among James Burton’s work on Merle Haggard’s late-Sixties albums.

21. Till There Was You
With the Beatles (1963)

With this charming early cover of a love song from the popular 1957 Broadway musical play and 1962 feature film The Music Man, the Beatles demonstrated their stylistic versatility as they authoritatively breeze through the song’s harmonically sophisticated, jazz-like chord progression.

Harrison’s solo break conveys a musical savvy on par with that of a veteran jazz improviser, as he strongly outlines the underlying chord progression, producing a perfect melodic counterpoint with the bass line by using arpeggios and targeting non-root chord tones, such as the third or ninth, on each chord change.

Also impressive is his incorporation of two-, three- and four-note chords into what would otherwise be a predominantly single-note solo to create jazz-guitar-style chord-melody phrases, as well as his superimposition over the five chord, C7, of a daringly dissonant Gf7s9 chord (voiced, low to high, Gf Df Bf E A), a trick known in the language of jazz as a tritone substitution.

20. Good Morning Good Morning
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

Let’s face it: There aren’t many ferocious, brash and screaming guitar solos in the Beatles’ catalog. That said, Paul McCartney’s razor-sharp solo on “Good Morning Good Morning” is all that and a bag of chips.

The 13-second-long treble fest, played on a Fender Esquire through a Selmer amp, features a strong East Indian vibe, perhaps a nod to George Harrison’s burgeoning fascination with Indian religion and music.

Like its stylistic predecessor, McCartney’s “Taxman” guitar solo (see entry 3), “Good Morning Good Morning” incorporates open-string drone notes and rapid-fire descending hammer-pull slides, mostly along one string, in this case, the B string.

19. I Need You
Help! (1965)

By 1965, the Beatles were making noticeable strides in their arrangements and instrumentation. A prime example is “I Need You,” one of two George Harrison compositions to appear on Help!

The recording represents Harrison’s first use of a volume pedal. The guitar’s dramatic, almost pedal-steel-like volume swells—which frame Harrison’s curt, suspended chords—only add to the song’s wistful lyrical content.

The volume pedal was a step up for the band; the guitar swells heard on “Baby’s in Black,” which was tracked the previous summer, were the result of John Lennon turning the volume knob on Harrison’s 1963 Gretsch Tennessean as Harrison played it.

18. You Can’t Do That
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

On February 25, 1964, the Beatles entered the studio with an exciting new piece of gear: a Fireglo 1963 Rickenbacker 360/12. George Harrison had received the guitar only 17 days earlier when the band was in New York shooting its initial Ed Sullivan Show appearance.

The song’s chiming intro riff, with its middle-finger hammer-ons from a minor third to a major third within the chord, offered a taste of what lay ahead for the guitar, which would see heavy action onstage and in the studio through 1965. John Lennon performed the guitar solo on his new Jetglo 1964 Rickenbacker.

17. Let It Be
Let It Be (1970)

As Beatles obsessives know, there are three versions of George Harrison’s solo for this track: the original, recorded in January 1969 with his rosewood Telecaster (available on 2003’s Let It Be… Naked); the second, recorded the following April with his Tele through a Leslie rotary speaker (released on the single “Let It Be” in 1970); and a third version recorded in January 1970 using his “Lucy” Gibson Les Paul through a Tone Bender (released on Let It Be).

Nice as the first two are, they have nothing on the third, a blistering performance that raises the song’s drama to a higher level of emotion.

16. All My Loving
With the Beatles (1963)

For this pop song’s thumping, quasi–jump blues, rockabilly-style groove, Harrison crafted a convincingly authentic Chet Atkins/Carl Perkins–like solo break that clearly demonstrates his familiarity with that Fifties Nashville style of electric guitar soloing.

Employing hybrid picking (pick-and-fingers technique), the guitarist acknowledges and gravitates toward the underlying chords in his melodic phrases, employing country-style “walk-ups” and “walk-downs” and plucking double-stops (pairs of notes) to sweetly and effectively outline the chord changes with a pleasing thematic continuity.

Lennon contributed an energetic rhythm guitar part, one that he later expressed being rather proud of, which propels the groove with tireless waves of triplet chord strums, similar to those heard in the Crystals’ song “Da Doo Ron Ron.”

15. Ticket to Ride
Help! (1965)

This proto-heavy-metal track was the first Beatles recording to feature McCartney on lead guitar and the last on which George Harrison used his Rickenbacker 12-string. McCartney plays the note-bending fills at the end of the bridges and on the outro, while Harrison plays the song’s arpeggiated riff and Lennon handles rhythm guitar.

But the heaviest part might just be the droning open-string A notes that Harrison overdubbed on the verses, suggestive of the classical Indian music he would begin to explore later that year.

14. Dig a Pony
Let It Be (1970)

The song’s driving, bluesy riff is as durable as any that Muddy Waters ever wrote, but the 1969 recording is also notable for Harrison’s smoky guitar work on his rosewood Telecaster—from the double-stop licks on the verses to his confident and impeccably developed solo.

You can hear Harrison’s signature style beginning to develop here, with the smoothness of his lines pointing toward the fluid slide style he would develop over the following year. His guitar tone is also very similar to that of “Octopus’ Garden” (see entry 22) recorded later that year, for which he may have also used the rosewood Tele.

13. Nowhere Man
Rubber Soul (1965)

According to Harrison, he and Lennon perform the song’s bright, chiming solo together in unison, using their matching Sonic Blue Fender Stratocasters.

Lennon also revealed to guitarist Earl Slick, during the making of Lennon’s 1980 album Double Fantasy, that the solo was recorded through a pair of small amps with a single microphone positioned between them. The Strats’ trebly nature was further accentuated on “Nowhere Man” by boosting the high frequencies via the mixing console.

“We wanted very trebly guitars,” McCartney says. “They’re among the most trebly guitars I’ve ever heard on record.”

12. I Feel Fine
1962–1966 (1973)

Audio feedback was just an annoying electronic phenomenon until the Beatles used it as an attention-getting way to start “I Feel Fine.” The song itself is a rather standard riff rocker inspired by Bobby Parker’s 1961 R&B hit, “Watch Your Step,” but its distinctive intro came about by accident when McCartney played a low A note on his bass as Lennon was leaning his Gibson J-160E acoustic-electric against his amp.

The note set Lennon’s guitar vibrating, and its proximity to the amp caused the sound to feed back. “We went, ‘What’s that? Voodoo!’ ” McCartney recalls. Yes, that too.

11. Blackbird
The Beatles (1968)

McCartney recorded this beautiful song’s gentle, fingerstyle acoustic accompaniment on his Martin D-28.

He creates an elegant, classical-guitar-style chord movement by using two-finger chord shapes exclusively, most of which form 10th intervals on the A and B strings, in conjunction with the open G-string note, which he picks in opposition to the chord shapes and employs as a droning common tone.

His unique fingerpicking technique relies largely on his thumb, which he uses to pick bass notes, and index finger, which he uses for pretty much everything else, employing brushed downstrokes and upstrokes and often brushing across two or more strings.

This often results in notes that are “ghosted,” or barely articulated, a “flaw” that is a testament to his innate musicality—McCartney’s touch is charming and greatly contributes to the overall feel of the song.

10. “Something”
Abbey Road (1969)

Ironically, while the Beatles were breaking apart in 1969, George Harrison was coming into his own as a songwriter and guitarist.

His Abbey Road contribution “Something” is among his finest songs, and his guitar playing here and throughout the album is masterful. Harrison’s mellifluous lead lines, in particular, are more expressive than anything he’d done before, demonstrating his newfound confidence and evolving connection to his instrument and creative muse.

Performed with his “Lucy” 1957 Gibson Les Paul played through a Leslie speaker, the solo simmers as Harrison turns up the heat on his melody and dynamics, then cools it down with bluesy restraint.

“George came into his own on Abbey Road,” says Geoff Emerick, who engineered this and other Abbey Road sessions. “For the first time he was speaking out and doing exactly what he wanted to do. And of course he wrote these beautiful songs and we got a great new guitar sound.”

09. I Want You (She’s So Heavy)
Abbey Road (1969)

John Lennon was composing some of the heaviest rock and roll in the Beatles’ catalog in 1969, and this song—true to its title—is among the most crushing, thanks to an abundance of doubled and overdubbed guitar lines that give it some serious sonic heft.

Lennon wrote the song for Yoko Ono, with whom he was newly in love, and the result is a spellbinding exercise in obsessive repetition, from its lyrics—consisting almost entirely of the title and roughly five other words—to the ominous guitar lines that recur throughout it.

Clocking in at 7:47, the song is also one of the Beatles’ longest.

And although it consists of nothing more than a verse and a chorus repeated several times, it is rhythmically one of their most intricate tunes, switching between 12/8 meter and 4/4 rhythms alternately played bluesy and with a double-time rock beat. Few other artists could have made so much with so little.

08. I’m Only Sleeping
Revolver (1966)

Harrison’s startling backward guitar solo on this Lennon-penned song is one of his greatest guitar moments on 1966’s Revolver.

Over the previous year, he had used an expression pedal to create a volume-swelling sound, similar to a reverse-tape effect, on several tracks, including “Yes It Is” and “I Need You” (see entry 19).

But for “I’m Only Sleeping,” Harrison wanted to hear his guitar truly in reverse, a decision undoubtedly inspired by Lennon’s own retrograde vocals on “Rain,” recorded earlier the same month, April 1966.

Rather than simply improvising guitar lines while the track was played backward, he prepared lead lines and a five-bar solo for the song and had George Martin transcribe them for him in reverse. Harrison then performed the lines while the tape was running back to front.

The result is a solo that surges up from the song’s murky depths, suffusing it with a smeared, surreal, dreamlike ambience. Within a year, Harrison’s idea would be copied by such psychedelic rock acts of the day as the Electric Prunes, who employed it on their 1966 hit “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” and Jimi Hendrix, who used it to great effect on “Castles Made of Sand.”

07. And Your Bird Can Sing
Revolver (1966)

This middle-period Beatles gem, written primarily by Lennon, features Harrison and McCartney on impeccably crafted and performed harmony-lead guitar melodies, a pop-rock arranging approach that was still in its infancy in 1966. (It would later be employed extensively in the southern rock genre by bands such as the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd as well as hard rock and metal acts like Thin Lizzy, Boston and Iron Maiden.)

Together, Harrison and McCartney’s individual single-note harmony lead guitar parts form, for the most part, diatonic (scale-based) third intervals in the key of E. (Lennon performed his rhythm guitar part as if the song were in the key of D, using a capo at the second fret to transpose it up a whole step, as he did on “Norwegian Wood,” “Nowhere Man” and “Julia.”)

The quick half-step and whole-step bends that Harrison and McCartney incorporate into their parts here and there in lock-step fashion are particularly sweet sounding. Heard together, they have the precise intonation of a country pedal-steel part performed by a seasoned Nashville pro.

The harmonized lines that the two guitarists play over the “minor-drop” progression during the song’s bridge section, beginning at 1:05, reveal their musical depth and sophistication and command over harmony beyond the basic “I-IV-V” pop songwriting fodder.

06. A Hard Day’s Night
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

It lasts all of roughly three seconds, but the sustained opening chord to this classic Beatlemania track is one of rock and roll’s greatest and most recognizable musical moments.

Bright and bold as a tolling bell, it loudly announced in 1964 not just the start of the Beatles’ latest album but also the dawning of a cultural transformation that owed nearly everything to the group’s influence.

The song was written to order for the Beatles’ feature-length film debut, A Hard Day’s Night. According to George Martin, “We knew it would open both the film and the soundtrack LP, so we wanted a particularly strong and effective beginning.”

The dense harmonic cluster that Martin and the group created is the result of four instruments sounding simultaneously: Harrison on his 12-string Rickenbacker and Lennon on his Gibson J-160E acoustic, both strumming an Fadd9 chord (with a G on the high E); McCartney on his Hofner 500/1 bass, plucking a D note (probably at the 12th fret of his D string); and Martin on grand piano, playing low D and G notes.

The resulting chord has been described as, technically, G7add9sus4, but to millions of eager listeners in 1964, it was simply the sound of an electrifying new era.

05. Revolution
1966–1970 (1973)

At the time that this 1968 track was recorded, distortion was well established as an electronic effect for guitarists, but no one had ever used it to the extreme that the Beatles did here.

According to Geoff Emerick, Lennon had been attempting to create distortion by cranking up his amp during sessions for “Revolution 1,” the slower version of the song, which the Beatles recorded in May and June of 1968.

Emerick had abetted his efforts by overloading the preamp on the microphone used to record Lennon’s guitar, but even this wasn’t enough for Lennon, who told the engineer, “ ‘No, no, I want that guitar to sound dirtier!”

By the July recording of “Revolution,” Emerick determined that he could distort the signal even more by patching Lennon and Harrison’s guitars directly into the mixing console via direct boxes, overloading the input preamp and sending the signal into a second overloaded preamp.

“I remember walking into the control room when they were cutting that,” recalls Abbey Road engineer Ken Scott, “and there was John, Paul and George, all in the control room, all plugged in—just playing straight through the board. All of the guitar distortion was gotten just by overloading the mic amps in the desk.”

As Emerick himself notes in his 2006 memoir Here, There and Everywhere, it was no mean feat: the overloaded preamps could have caused the studio’s tube-powered mixer to overheat. “I couldn’t help but think: If I was the studio manager and saw this going on, I’d fire myself.”

04. Here Comes the Sun
Abbey Road (1969)

Harrison’s jangly chord-melody playing on this song is exemplary. Using first- and second-position “cowboy” chords with a capo at the seventh fret, the guitarist loosely doubles and supports his catchy, syncopated vocal melody by working it into the top part of his acoustic-guitar accompaniment.

He does this by using a “picky-strummy” technique (similar to what Neil Young would later employ in his song “The Needle and the Damage Done”), in which the pick hand gently swings back and forth over the strings in an unbroken down-up-down-up movement, like a pendulum viewed sideways.

In doing so, Harrison selectively grazes certain strings on various downbeats and eighth-note upbeats, resulting in a seemingly casual mix of full-chord strums, single notes and two-note clusters that form a pleasing stand-alone guitar part that could easily appeal as a solo instrumental performance.

The high register achieved by using the capo so far up the neck—the song is played as if it were in the key of D but sounds in A, a perfect fifth higher—makes the guitar sound almost like a mandolin, an effect similar to that achieved by Bob Dylan on “Blowin’ in the Wind” (also performed capo-7).

Also noteworthy are the ringing and musically compelling arpeggio breaks that punctuate the song in various spots, such as after the first verse (immediately following the lyric “It’s all right”) and during the bridge/interlude section, behind the words “sun, sun, sun, here it comes.”

Harrison employs a highly syncopated “1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2, 1-2” phrasing scheme in the first instance and “1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2” in the latter, creating a rhythmic “hiccup” that resets the song’s eighth-note pulse.

03. Taxman
Revolver (1966)

Bassist Paul McCartney had first demonstrated his six-string talents on 1965’s Help!, where he played lead guitar on several tracks and performed on acoustic guitar for his song “Yesterday.”

But McCartney would truly come into his own as a guitarist with this cut from 1966’s Revolver. His stinging solo, performed on his 1962 Epiphone Casino through his cream-colored 1964 Bassman amp, is a stunningly sophisticated creation, drawn from an Indian-derived Dorian mode and featuring descending pull-offs that recall Jeff Beck’s work on the Yardbirds’ “Shapes of Things,” released earlier that year.

How the solo came to be played by McCartney—and not Harrison, who wrote the song and was the Beatles’ lead guitarist—is a story in itself.

According to Geoff Emerick, Harrison struggled for two hours to craft a solo before producer George Martin suggested he let McCartney give it a try. McCartney’s solo, Emerick says, “was so good that George Martin had me fly it in again during the song’s fadeout.” Portions of it, played backward, were also applied to the Revolver track “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

Apparently, Harrison didn’t feel slighted. At the time of making Revolver, he was ambivalent about his musical ambitions and pondering Indian mysticism, to which he would eventually convert.

“In those days,” he said, “for me to be allowed to do my one song on the album, it was like, ‘Great. I don’t care who plays what. This is my big chance.’ I was pleased to have him play that bit on ‘Taxman.’ If you notice, he did like a little Indian bit on it for me.”

02. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
The Beatles (1968)

“While My Guitar Gently Weeps” has become one of George Harrison’s signature tunes, but when he wrote the song in 1968, he couldn’t get his band mates to take an interest in it.

Frustrated, he asked his pal Eric Clapton to sit in on the recording session for the track, hoping his presence would put the group on its best behavior. Clapton accepted the invitation and delivered a performance that remains a high point in the Beatles’ catalog.

For the session, Clapton played a 1957 Les Paul “Goldtop” that had been refinished in red. He’d purchased the guitar in New York City sometime in the Sixties and in 1968 gifted it to Harrison, who nicknamed it Lucy.

The guitar was already in Harrison’s possession at the time of this recording. When he picked up Clapton to take him to the studio for the Beatles session, the famous guitarist was empty handed. “I didn’t have a guitar,” Clapton recalls. “I just got into the car with him. So he gave me [Lucy] to play.”

Harrison was concerned that Clapton’s solo was “not Beatley enough,” as the group was by the time of this recording well known for its sonic innovation.

During the song’s mixing stage, the group had engineer Chris Thomas send Clapton’s signal through Abbey Road’s ADT—Automatic Double Tracking—tape-delay system and manually alter the speed of the delay throughout Clapton’s performance, making the pitch sound chorused. (The effect is especially noticeable in the final measure of the second middle-eight, after the line “no one alerted you.”) Ironically, while the solo is one of Clapton’s most famous, he was never credited on the recording.

01. “The End”
Abbey Road (1969)

A song called “The End” might seem an ironic place to start a list of the Beatles’ 50 greatest guitar moments. But the round-robin solos that bring the track to its exhilarating peak are without question the group’s most powerful statement expressed through the guitar.

Here, for a mere 35 seconds, three childhood friends and longtime band mates—Paul McCartney, George Harrison and John Lennon—trade licks on a song that represents, musically and literally, the Beatles’ last stand as a rock group before they broke up the following year. “The End” is the grand finale in the medley of tunes that make up much of Abbey Road’s second side.

As such, it’s designed to deliver maximum emotional punch, and it succeeds completely, thanks in great part to the sound of McCartney, Harrison and Lennon rocking out on their guitars, as they did in their first, embryonic attempts to make rock and roll some 12 years earlier.

“They knew they had to finish the album up with something big,” recalls Geoff Emerick, the famed Abbey Road engineer who worked on the 1969 album.

“Originally, they couldn’t decide if John or George would do the solo, and eventually they said, ‘Well, let’s have the three of us do the solo.’ It was Paul’s song, so Paul was gonna go first, followed by George and John. It was unbelievable. And it was all done live and in one take.”

Much of the song’s power comes from the sense that the Beatles are making up their solos spontaneously, playing off one another in the heat of the moment. As it turns out, that’s partly accurate.

“They’d worked out roughly what they were going to do for the solos,” Emerick says, “but the execution of it was just superb. It sounds spontaneous. When they were done, everyone beamed. I think in their minds they went back to their youths and those great memories of working together.”

Photo credit: John Pedin/NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images (from Page 43 of the January 2014 issue of Guitar World)

When a legendary guitarist is invited to play on a recording session, he or she is expected to make a noticeable impact on the song or album being recorded.

Bearing that in mind, Jeff Beck — as a session guitarist — has pretty much never disappointed.

Here are his top 10 guest-session appearances.

10. The Pretenders, “Legalize Me,"Viva El Amor (1999)
(Buy on iTunes)

At first, one wonders if Beck is even playing on this song — until just around the 2:14 mark, when he boldly announces his presence with one of his freakish trademark whammy-bar moves — and it only gets better from there.

In Deep with Andy Aledort Presents How to Play in the Style of Jeff Beck is an exclusive DVD. Guitar World editor and instructor Andy Aledort takes a look at the playing style of the legendary Jeff Beck, showing you the scales and lead lines used by Beck in his groundbreaking solo work. It's available now at the Guitar World Online Store.

09. Toots & The Maytals, “54-46 Was My Number,” True Love (2004)
(Buy on iTunes)

This is from a Toots album that’s packed with guest appearances by big-name guitarists, including Eric Clapton, Trey Anastasio, Bonnie Raitt and Keith Richards. But Beck stands out in a crowd, delivering a cool, weird solo that almost makes it sound like his part was tracked backwards in the mix (It wasn't).

It’s also a nice change of pace to hear him in a reggae setting.

08. Paul Rodgers, “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” Muddy Water Blues: A Tribute to Muddy Waters (1993)
(Buy on iTunes)

Beck’s evil tone on the intro riff alone is enough to earn this tune a spot on this list. It also represents the only slide guitar to be found among these choices.

Beck appears on three songs on this Muddy Waters tribute album by the Bad Company and Free frontman.

07. Paul Jones, “The Dog Presides,” Insane Times (1968)
(Buy on iTunes)

Here’s the Jeff Beck Group-era Beck sounding very much like his former Yardbird self on this song’s opening riff, fills and solo. The recording even features another former Yardbird, Paul Samwell-Smith, on bass.

That’s Paul McCartney on drums, by the way. No one seems to remember the barking dog’s name.

06. Nerada Michael Walden, “Saint and the Rascal,” Garden of Love Light (1976)
(Buy on iTunes)

This catchy, funky instrumental with a strong hook can almost be considered an outtake from Wired, Beck’s classic 1976 album. After all, Nerada Michael Walden played drums on Wired and wrote four songs on the album, including “Play With Me.” So Beck returned the favor by playing with Walden.

05. Jimmy Copley, “Everyday I Have the Blues,” Slap My Hand (2008)

For people who've survived listening to Beck’s over-produced Flash album (1986), it’s a real treat to hear him play with such a small, stripped-down band; in fact, all you really hear are the drums (Copley is a British drummer with impressive credentials) and Beck’s chunky-sounding Strat.

And that’s fine, because you get to hear him turn a simple three-chord blues shuffle into a showcase for his whammy-bar hijinks and out-of-left-field bits and pieces. No video for this one!

04. Rod Stewart, "Infatuation,"Camouflage (1984)
(Buy on iTunes)

Maybe this one will whet your appetite for the album Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart have been working on together in recent months.

Regardless, listen to how Beck contributes something special and unique to what could’ve been just another catchy mid-1980s pop hit. Beck also appears in the video — as does actor Mike Mazurki, who can be spotted in the films Some Like It Hot and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

03. John McLaughlin, “Django,” The Promise (1995)
(Buy on iTunes)

Simply put, this one gives you twice the bang for your buck: You get Jeff Beck trading off with John McLaughlin on a seven-plus-minute rendition of John Lewis’ “Django,” a musical elegy for guitarist Django Rheinhardt.

Beck starts things off with the basic melody, and things pretty much get more and more interesting as the song moves forward.

02. Stanley Clarke, “Hello Jeff,” Journey to Love (1975)
(Buy on iTunes)

When the star of the show — in this case, bassist Stanley Clarke — actually incorporates his session guitarist’s name into the title of the track he played on, you can expect some memorable fretwork. Such is the case on this mid-‘70s instrumental gem, which features impressive playing by everyone involved, including the brilliant Clarke.

01. Roger Waters, “What God Wants, Pt. 3,” Amused to Death (1992)
(Buy on iTunes)

Roger Waters is singing about vultures, bullets and soldiers, when, all of a sudden, a Strat bursts into the mix just before the two-minute mark, playing a powerful, emotional solo.

Is it an outtake from Pink Floyd's The Wall? Nope; it’s one of a handful of Beck-enriched songs from Waters’ Amused to Death album.

Check out Beck’s solo, how he wisely uses every inch of real estate Waters gives him. If nothing else, the song answers the rarely asked question, “What would Pink Floyd have sounded like if Jeff Beck were in the band?”

When you first started playing guitar, it was to get girls, right?

Perhaps you were influenced by the party scene in Animal House where the collegiate folkster attracts a gaggle of swooning females by strumming his acoustic and singing “I Gave My Love a Cherry."

Of course, there are plenty of other songs that work just as well, and rock a bit harder. We've compiled the 10 listed below to help you up your game.

Seriously, though: If you intend to add these pieces to your act, God love you, but don’t blame us if you meet up with your own personal John Belushi.

Despite the diversity of George Harrison's many pursuits during his 58 years on earth — racing, gardening, Indian religion and culture, film making and anything remotely associated with ukeleles, Mel Brooks or Monty Python — he'll go down in history as one fourth of the Beatles.

[[ Poll: What Was George Harrison's Coolest Beatles-Era Guitar? ]]

But, notwithstanding his contributions to the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed act in the history of popular music, Harrison had a successful solo career that proved he was more than just a silent partner to John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

The guitarist released 10 studio albums between 1970 and 2002, an experimental electronic album, a soundtrack album and two live albums (including The Concert for Bangladesh), plus some non-album singles, including the sadly overlooked "Cheer Down" (1989).

Today, on the 71st anniversary of his birth, we're ranking his 10 serious studio albums. This list doesn't include his two "while the Beatles were still together" albums, 1968's Wonderwall Music and 1969's Electronic Sound. (Although, even if we were to include them, they'd wind up as No. 12 — Electronic Sound— and 11 — Wonderwall Music— anyway. So there!)

Below, you'll find a quick "Happy Birthday" video that's now playing over at GeorgeHarrison.com. Below that, check out the photo gallery to see how we've ranked his 10 albums.

Damian Fanelli is the online managing editor at Guitar World. Follow him on Twittah.