Kris Norris is the lead guitarist for the band Metalcore band Darkest Hour. I really love his style, it’s so melodic metal. I realize that he is not an unbelievable guitarist by any means, but I think he is equally good at composition as he is at actually playing. I’m not really going to say much more, I’ll just let the videos speak for themselves. These are both from a dvd released by Norris himself. This first video shows how to play the solo from the song Tranquil.
Guitar Player magazine readers have recently named Peppino D’Agostino the best acoustic guitar player in the magazine’s annual poll.
So, it looks like this guy is not so “never heard of”. But I have never heard of him, so thats why he is here.
I think he needs to cinch up that guitar a little higher. He still has a little bit of movement left!
D’Agostino was born and raised in Italy. He picked up the guitar after seeing his cousin perform at church in Torino. He is self taught and cites musicians like Paco de Lucia and Carlos Santana as influences.
Although Chuck Schuldiner is known by many, I really think he is one of the most underrated guitarists of the past 50 years. He is considered by many to the founding father of death metal. Chuck was the founding member of the band Death. In fact, the bad was more or less just a front for Chuck’s musical efforts.
There are several reasons why I love Chuck’s style. First off, he was very good at utilizing alternate timings in a song. You don’t have to listen very closely to hear the timing change at several different points in the above video and it really works.
Just watching Schuldiner’s fingers move is amazing. His style of playing was very strange. He brought his fingers so high off of the fingerboard when shredding, yet his playing is so fluid.
Sadly, Chuck passed away of a brain tumor in 2001 after struggling through treatment for two years. Initially there were reports that he was on his way to recover after surgery, but later it was discovered that the initial diagnosis was incorrect. There was a relapse and when Chuck needed immediate treatment he was denied due to lack of funds. Many artists in the industry held events to raise money for Chuck, but he continued to grow weaker and died of pneumonia on December 13th.
I have had several people ask me “Have you heard Don Ross??” after learning that I love to play guitar. Well aside from others asking me that question, no, I had never heard of him. I finally decided to check him out, and I wish I had earlier. Don Ross is a Canadian guitar player from Montreal. He started to teach himself guitar at 8 years old and at 26 began to seriously pursue a career in music. He has over 10 albums to his name and has won the U.S. National Fingerstyle Guitar Championship twice.
His musical style can not be classified very easily. It is an instrumental kind of new age fingerstyle acoustic rock. He goes from very relaxing tunes to very up-beat technical songs. Here is one of my favorites from the videos available on YouTube.
If you do a quick search though you can find many more. Three songs I have listened to now and I can already see that he is going to become one of my new favorite acoustic artists.
Biréli Lagrène is an amazing Jazz guitarist. He sort of plays his own breed of gypsy jazz and I like it. You hear me talking on here from time to time about “acoustic shredding”. Well this guy can do it… but jazzified.
First emerging as a 13-year-old guitar prodigy in the 80s, Lagrène was often compared to guitarist Django Reinhardt. At that time the boy had been playing for 9 years already. That’s right… started when he was 4. After a few albums Biréli tried to shake the Reinhardt parallels by changing his style to more of a rock-fusion sound. His current music is more jazz oriented, but still has that strong Reinhardt influence.
If you liked the above video, check out Biréli Lagrène’s official website.
