“My guitar is not a thing,” Joan Jett once said. “It is an extension of myself. It is who I am.” The guitar is the most universal instrument, the most primal, and the most expressive. Anybody can pick up a little guitar in no time at all, but you can spend a lifetime exploring its possibilities. That’s why thinking about what makes a great guitarist is so much fun.
Rolling Stone published its original list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists in 2011. It was compiled by a panel of musicians, mostly older classic rockers. Our new expanded list was made by the editors and writers of Rolling Stone. This one goes to 250. Barbed Wire
Guitar players are often as iconic as the lead singers for the bands they play in. But mythic guitar gods like Jimmy Page, Brian May, and Eddie Van Halen are only one part of the story. We wanted to show the scope of the guitar’s evolution. The earliest entrant on the list (folk music icon Elizabeth Cotten) was born in 1893, the youngest (indie-rock prodigy Lindsey Jordan) was born in 1999. The list has rock, jazz, reggae, country, folk, blues, punk, metal, disco, funk, bossa nova, bachata, Congolese rumba, flamenco, and much more. There are peerless virtuosos like Pat Metheny, Yvette Young, and Steve Vai, as well as primitivists like Johnny Ramone and Poison Ivy of the Cramps. There are huge stars like Prince, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young, and behind-the-scenes masters like Memphis soul great Teenie Hodges and smooth-rock assassin Larry Carlton.
Many great guitarists realized their genius as part of a duo, so Kim and Kelley Deal of the Breeders, Adrian Smith and Dave Murray of Iron Maiden, and other symbiotic pairs share an entry. Our only instrumental criteria is that you had to be a six-string player. (All you Balalaika shredders out there, keep at it; maybe next time.)
In making the list, we tended to value heaviness over tastiness, feel over polish, invention over refinement, risk-takers and originators more than technicians. We also tended to give an edge to artists who channeled whatever gifts god gave them into great songs and game-changing albums, not just impressive playing.
As modern blues visionary Gary Clark Jr. put it, “I don’t know if I want to get too far off the path — I don’t want to get lost in the forest — but I like to wander out a bit and adventure.”
The Police were a new kind of power trio, and Andy Summers was the main reason. Quickly moving away from punk, he recast jazz chords and reggae rhythms as headlong rock & roll. Summers played as sparely as possible, constructing clipped twitches or dubby washes of sound, leaving ample room for Sting and Stewart Copeland. “His tone and style were just absolutely perfect — he left space around everything,” Rush’s Alex Lifeson said. “And he can handle anything from beautiful acoustic playing to jazz to hybrid kinds of stuff.” —D.W.
Key Tracks: “Message in a Bottle,” “Every Breath You Take”
Since starting out in the garage-roots band Alabama Shakes, Brittany Howard’s guitar playing has always been an earthy, fluid, admirably ad-hoc complement to her powerhouse vocals and soulful songwriting. She’s has an elastic sense of rhythm (check out the way her tough, jagged lines bounce off Shakes lead guitarist Heath Fogg on their 2015 song “Don’t Wanna Fight”). Howard took on straight-ahead rock & roll with her side band Thunderbitch, and her 2019 solo album, Jaime, was a stellar showcase for her open-ended musicianship, from the funky James Brown-indebted hopscotching she did on “History Repeats” to the molten fuzz she slathered on “Presence.” —J.D.
Key Tracks: “History Repeats,” “Presence”
Schooled in flamenco and jazz, Robby Krieger pushed beyond rock at a time when most players were still bound to the blues. In the Doors, he had the improvisatory flair to follow Jim Morrison’s wildest journeys, wrote some of their biggest hits (“Light My Fire”), and picked up the slack in their keyboard-drums-guitar lineup. “Not having a bass player … made me play more bass notes to fill out the bottom,” he said. “Not having a rhythm player also made me play differently, to fill out the sound. I always felt like three players simultaneously.” —A.L.
Key Tracks: “Riders on the Storm,” “Roadhouse Blues”
When the B-52s played live, Ricky Wilson often seemed to exist happily in the background amidst the manic exuberance of lead singer Fred Schneider and the beehive hair and campy dance moves of Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson. But his mix of downhome chicken scratch, angular post-punk, rockabilly, and surf rock on classics like “52 Girls,” “Strobe Light,” and “Private Idaho” made him one of the most inventive players of the New Wave era. Wilson often used only four or five strings on his blue Mosrite guitar and odd tunings to get a strange, spartan sound. “I just tune the strings till I hear something I like,” he once said. With his death in 1985, the indie-rock scene lost an unassuming radical. —J.D.
Key Tracks: “52 Girls,” “Mesopotamia”
Paul Simon, the great wordsmith, speaks as vividly through his guitar as his lyrics. Weaned on early doo-wop and rock & roll, Simon got caught up in the folk revival during the mid-Sixties, traveling to England to study the acoustic mastery of Bert Jansch. He has continued absorbing new influences, as on “Dazzling Blue,” off his most recent album, So Beautiful or So What: “All that folk fingerpicking is what I did with Simon and Garfunkel, but [here] it’s on top of this rhythm with Indian musicians playing in 12/8.” In his 80s, he’s still as nimble as ever, as he demonstrated on his 2023 album Seven Psalms.–W.H.
Key Tracks: “Dazzling Blue,” “Kathy’s Song”
Leslie West (real name: Leslie Weinstein) first made his mark in mid-Sixties garage rock, with the Vagrants’ meaty cover of Otis Redding‘s “Respect.” By 1969, West was the heavy vengeance in the Cream-like quartet Mountain. On songs like the 1970 hit “Mississippi Queen,” West played roughened blues lines with deceiving facility and an R&B flair, through a black forest of stressed-amp distortion. “The riffs were incredible,” says Dave Davies. “He could play flashy, intricate phrases. But he wasn’t a look-at-me guy. He played with feel.” —D.F.
Key Tracks: “Mississippi Queen,” “Nantucket Sleighride (To Owen Coffin)”
Now that pop stars Rosalía and the Weeknd have dipped into its mystique for a global hit, it’s hard to believe that bachata was once little known outside its native Dominican Republic. And the man who gave la música del amargue its sonic identity — those pungent, spiraling guitar lines that flutter and accentuate the bitterness of love lost — is Edilio Paredes. A self-taught prodigy, he played a key role in engineering the transition from bolero campesino to the contemporary bachata that finally won its rightful place as a transcendent Afro-Caribbean genre in the Nineties. Paredes’ discography as a prolific session man from the ‘60s to the ‘80s speaks for itself — but el maestro was also vindicated through his appearance on the exquisite 2011 album The Bachata Legends. —E.L.
Key Tracks: “No Me Olvides,” “Bendita Nena”
The National are a one-of-a-kind rock story, starring a virtuosic twin-guitar duo who happen to be twin brothers. Bryce Dessner has collaborated with legends like Steve Reich, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Jonny Greenwood, and Kronos Quartet. Aaron Dessner is Taylor Swift’s guitar wingman on Folklore and Evermore, adding Jerry Garcia-like twang to “Cowboy Like Me”; he really cuts loose on “August” in The Long Pond Studio Sessions. The Dessner brothers can mesh for electric angst (“Terrible Love”) or intimate folk beauty (“I Need My Girl”). They also masterminded the ace 2016 Grateful Dead tribute Day of the Dead, jamming with Bob Weir on “I Know You Rider.” —R.S.
Key Tracks: “Mr. November,” “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness”
Gen Z guitar hero Lindsey Jordan took lessons from fellow 250 Greatest Guitarists list-member Mary Timony, the extraordinarily inventive guitarist in Helium and Wild Flag. When Jordan made her debut as Snail Mail at 18 years old with 2018’s Lush, she seemed to have arrived having fully internalized the entire indie-rock canon. She’s a casual virtuoso and a serious shredder, shifting from strummy tension-builds to glorious, combustible solos, from coolly coiled Liz Phair low-fi to Sonic Youth sprawl. “I like to play really balls out,” she told Rolling Stone in 2018. “That’s what it means to be onstage with integrity.” —J.D.
11-4 Staright Cut Wire Key Tracks: “Heat Wave,” “Pristine”