10. Polyphia – Playing God (2022)
Of late, few names have impressed the guitar community as much as Polyphia duo Tim Henson and Scott LePage, and Playing God is one of their most daring innovations, as they ditched their usual Ibanez AZ electric guitars for a new nylon string signature guitar – the TOD10N electro-acoustic.
The opening solo uses ideas from the E harmonic minor and diminished scales, all linked together by many a passing tone in order to emphasise the track’s jazzy, Al Di Meola-esque feel.
For the closing leads, Henson and LePage run through some octave-based lines that, thanks to a healthy dose of delay, almost feel like wide-interval synthesizer arpeggios. Henson noted how it forced him to brush up on every technique from hybrid and selective picking to hammer-ons. It’s not for the faint-hearted.
9. The White Stripes – Ball And Biscuit (2003)
Jack White’s genius is almost underwhelming when you analyse it: a Whammy pedal, a Big Muff, and the minor pentatonic scale. But to break it down to those components gives no sense of what a revelation he was to hear.
There’s a definite nod to Hendrix at the start – that opening lick is essentially Voodoo Child up an octave – but his startling timing and unexpected octave leaps quickly leave the realm of the familiar. From 2:03-2:05 he makes his guitar sound like it’s been recorded backwards, and his trademark stuttering picking tells us we’re not in the Mississippi Delta anymore.
Then he jerks the Whammy pedal back to normal pitch, creating a divebomb just as surprising as when Hendrix first performed them. If it didn’t end with a classic turnaround, we’d probably forget entirely that we were hearing 12-bar blues.
8. Muse – Reapers (2021)
You could make a top 20 list just of Matt Bellamy’s 21st century solos, but Reapers boasts an intro that outdoes most guitar solos for drama, sounding like a dystopian Hot For Teacher. After the first chorus, Matt introduces Eddie to Tom Morello, developing the intro lick with Whammy-pedal octave shifts.
With a less inventive guitarist, you’d wonder if anything was left for the main solo; with Bellamy, you just hold your breath. He enters with a Kaoss Pad divebomb and dissonant Whammy pedal lines, and builds into the mother of all pickslides, enhanced with stereo panning.
From there he dives into Whammy-powered trills straight from the Morello playbook, following that with a sequence of angular licks that show Jack White isn’t the only one who can make blues sound quirky. He transposes a three-note repeating lick into unexpected places, creating melodic hooks out of thin air.
7. Alter Bridge – Blackbird (2007)
The greatest tag-team solo since the glory days of Thin Lizzy saw Myles Kennedy and Mark Tremonti trading blows over a brooding groove in 6/8. Kennedy’s Diezel Herbert tone contrasts with Tremonti’s spitting Dual Rectifier, so there’s no doubt who’s playing what. Kennedy takes first blood with a uni-vibe-drenched melody.
With plenty of time to stretch out, Myles holds his opening notes for up to two bars each, luxuriating in the sustain from his PRS singlecut. On his second time round the chord progression, he builds a melody based on the underlying guitar part, including some colourful outside notes. He ends his solo rising to some screaming bends, ready for Tremonti’s takeover.
Mark’s opening punch sees the entire band rise dynamically. While he might have been tempted to go full shred, he wisely holds back with long, singing vibrato. There’s a brief but gnarly legato run at 5:29, with Mark’s signature Morley wah pedal adding drama.
6. Joe Bonamassa – Sloe Gin (2007)
If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about the art of long-form soloing, the last three minutes of this title track from Bonamassa’s sixth album is as informative as it gets. Sloe Gin was written in the ’70s by producer Bob Ezrin and composer Michael Kamen (both of whom worked with Pink Floyd), and it was Bonamassa’s producer Kevin Shirley who suggested covering it.
This would quickly become one of Joe’s signature anthems and ultimately his most performed live track, partly thanks to its elongated solo section which provided the perfect bedrock for the guitarist to tell a story through the Les Paul in his hands.
Back in 2011, Joe told Total Guitar that he used an Iced Tea Sunburst ’59 reissue Les Paul for the recordings, through “my Two-Rock Custom Signature Reverb, the Marshall Silver Jubilee and a small pedalboard with a DD-3 delay, a wah and maybe a TC chorus box”.
5. Mdou Moctar — Afrique Victime (2021)
Although blues evolved in 19th-century America, its roots are in Africa. Enslaved people brought their musical traditions with them when they were transported to America. Musical traditions from across the continent combined and evolved into the blues.
Afrique Victime sees the next stage of that evolution, as Niger’s Mdou Moctar combines electric blues tones and phrasing with the rhythms and harmony of Tuareg berber music. The resulting ‘desert blues’ is psychedelic and mesmerising. The propulsive rhythms underneath clearly inspire Moctar’s freewheeling improvisation.
4. Jeff Beck – Hammerhead (2010)
From the latter part of Beck’s trailblazing career, Hammerhead
features one his greatest riffs and some of his most spectacular lead playing. The inspiration for the song came from Beck’s frequent collaborator and keyboardist Jan Hammer, most notably his theme tune for hit television show Miami Vice.
And after some scratchy Hendrix-inspired wah work, its main theme in D Mixolydian soon erupts with Beck sticking with minimalistic ideas during the verses using notes from the minor pentatonic and Dorian scales. The second verses brings with it added tension thanks to the major 7th played, belonging to the harmonic minor scale found in the same position.
3. Guthrie Govan – Waves (2006)
Before his debut album, Erotic Cakes, Govan was a guitar-playing Rory Bremner, capable of flawlessly impersonating any guitarist you could mention. It was a joy to discover he was also capable of sounding like no one else. On Waves, Guthrie delivers a turn of shred that justifies his other reputation as probably the most technically-complete electric guitarist on the planet.
For Waves, Guthrie was trying to make a fretted guitar sound fretless, hence the huge number of slides. The incredibly smooth neck pickup tone almost recalls a monophonic synth, but it’s remarkable how relatively little gain he uses.
2. Eric Gales ft. Joe Bonamassa – I Want My Crown (2021)
What happens when two of the greatest blues players on earth go head-to-head? A pentatonic explosion is the only correct answer. The fireworks heard on the lead single from Gales’ Crown album, produced by Josh Smith and Joe Bonamassa himself, made it Total Guitar’s solo of the year in 2021. And in the time that’s passed since then, our affections – and that of the wide blues community – have only grown warmer for this powerful conversation in Ab minor between two highly gifted virtuoso players.
It starts very simply, with Bonamassa kicking things off with a minor 7th to root bend which naturally flows into some 1st-position pentatonics, but then he dazzles with a chromatic bebop line that snakes around higher up the neck. Gales then roars in with his Cry Baby shaping some jaw-dropping runs that splice Mixolydian ideas with some more Eastern-sounding flavours from the Phrygian Dominant mode.
1. Extreme – Rise (2023)
So we arrive here at the number one spot in our list – and for our money, this really is where it’s at right now! Nuno Bettencourt’s solo on Extreme’s comeback single Rise is a technical tour de force, 55 seconds of sublime shredding that have taken the guitar world by storm, and, let’s be honest, caused a fair few jaws to drop in sheer excitement.
As Nuno tells Total Guitar: “When Rise came out, we thought, ‘OK, decent song, decent guitar solo’, but the reaction that it got was something else. When Rick Beato posted his video breaking down the solo, and he’s saying that Steve Lukather’s calling, and his brother is calling and Phil X is calling saying, ‘Have you heard the Nuno solo?’, it was really surreal for me.
“It’s that scenario that you fantasise about as a kid. He’s saying things like, ‘Other than Eddie, he’s the guy!’ You’re like, ‘OK, hold on a second!’ I had people I admire texting me, like Phil Collen from Def Leppard, Brian May reaching out and talking about it. You have to take a step back and go ‘What’s actually happening here?’”
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