The 100 Greatest Guitar Solos of All Time

The giant ringing chords, platonically perfect snare drum sound, and throat-bleeding vocals of “You Shook Me All Night Long” set a daunting standard, but Angus Young manages to somehow take a perfect song even higher with a taut, lascivious, no-note-wasted solo. With its shuddering vibrato, major-minor contrasts, and steady build, it’s a quick, little Ph.D.-level school on the art of rock lead playing, all from a guy in schoolboy shorts. It’s impossible to imagine a change to even a single bend or flourish. Young’s “solos always had a purpose,” Joe Perry once said. “Instead of using all the traditional tricks, he found a way to get inside those licks and be inventive.” —Brian Hiatt

Onstage, Buddy Guy was the first Stratocaster wild man, lacing his manic fretwork with distortion and feedback while Eisenhower was still in the White House. But in the studio, his label, Chess Records, relegated him to session work, urging him to turn down his amp while he was backing Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, trying to smooth out his sound to the point of suggesting a new name: Buddy King. But in the series of increasingly untamed solos on “Stone Crazy,” cut in late 1961, Guy’s actual sound came to life on tape, even if the full seven-minute version was shelved for nearly a decade. “Stone Crazy” was Hendrix before Hendrix, and it gave Eric Clapton an entire lexicon of licks to skim for Cream. “Somebody come get me,” Guy mutters before one manic flurry of licks — but try as they might, no one ever managed to catch up with him. —B.H.

Sure, enigmatic Geese frontman Cameron Winter gets most of the attention, but the band’s elliptical art-rock epiphanies wouldn’t hit nearly as hard without Emily Green’s guitar playing, especially on “Getting Killed.” The first half of the song is a salvo on all fronts, with each band member attacking their instrument, and then abruptly pivots to a lush and layered solo from Green. Her playing is lithe and spry like Tom Verlaine of Television, but also woozy like mid-career Radiohead, and so well-crafted you can imagine her mapping out every note she plays before she picks a string. “Getting Killed” isn’t flashy or freewheeling, but that’s not the point. Green’s style captivates you with its minimalist flair. —Jaeden Pinder

Using a sophisticated chord sequence he concocted while in Metallica (see: “The Call of Ktulu”), Megadeth singer-guitarist Dave Mustaine laid the foundation for lead guitarist Marty Friedman’s acrobatic fretwork. Friedman had spent the better part of his 20s playing 1,000 notes per second with the shred-metal group Cacophony. But with Megadeth, he could finally consider the music. “[Producer Mike Clink] told me to look at the lyrics, which were about aliens, and try to reflect the subject matter as much as I could in my playing,” Friedman once said. “I’d never cared about lyrics before, so it was a revelation to suddenly have to think hard about making my solos sound like they came from Mars.” Playing jazzy, Middle Eastern-influenced scales with slippery flourishes in between the notes and Mustaine’s own rapid-fire leads, he elevated what would’ve been another thrash goof into high art. —Kory Grow

When the first single arrived from the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 1999 album, Californication, fans weren’t sure what to expect. It had been a long four years since their last album, 1995’s One Hot Minute, a psych-funk stomper that failed to continue the momentum of 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik. A big reason for that was the absence of guitarist John Frusciante, who had been replaced by Jane’s Addiction’s Dave Navarro. But now Frusciante was back, and all doubts were laid to rest on “Scar Tissue,” a blissfully beautiful welcome-home party that’s still the most mellow these guys have ever sounded. Using a slide on a 1960s custom Fender Telecaster, Frusciante lays down a solo that melts each note so that it flows like one long, groovy river. It was the start of a whole new era for the band. —Angie Martoccio

You can essentially chart the history of the electric guitar as Before Les Paul and After Les Paul. The musician had been messing around with customizing his own electric six-string for years when he finally developed what would become his signature solid-body guitar — and nowhere is Paul’s influence on how that instrument could be played better heard than on this cover of the Morgan Lewis and Nancy Hamilton standard. The song had been part of the repertoire of Paul’s trio in the 1940s, but when he and his wife, Mary Ford, cut their Western-swing version of the track in their home studio in Queens, he sped up the tempo and seriously ramped up the solo. Everything chugs along nicely as Paul picks out what sounds like a Django Reinhardt line until right before the song’s minute mark — and then our man simply lets loose. The violent strums and sustained notes seem to echo decades into the future. —David Fear

Billy Corgan drew directly from the classic rock that shaped him — Iron Maiden’s harmonized dual-lead runs, Pink Floyd’s atmospheric slow-burn climaxes, Jimmy Page’s intricately-layered soundscapes — and supersized his ambitions via lavish production and a total absence of modesty. Yet the comparatively restrained solo on “Mayonaise,” tucked between the face-melting freakouts of “Geek U.S.A.” and “Silverfuck” on Smashing Pumpkins’ 1993 masterpiece, Siamese Dream, hits the hardest because of its vulnerability. Corgan does nothing by accident, so it likely took careful construction to make something that sounds like it’s falling apart. From the trembling sustained note that feeds back erratically to the aching bends on the verge of cracking, Corgan sets a template for the grand, distorted, beautifully wounded sound of nascent Nineties alt-rock. —Jason Roth

The Commodores’ Seventies classic “Easy” might sound silky smooth, but its snapping, melodic guitar solo illuminates the tensions in its lyrics. The man who made it happen is Thomas McClary, who wrote or co-wrote many of the group’s hits and played a huge role in shaping their unique mix of soul, funk, country, and gospel. “When you have lyrics in a song that say, ‘Why in the world would anybody put chains on me? I’ve paid my dues to make it,’ you have to match the intensity of those lyrics,” McClary said of “Easy” in a 2017 interview. “A lot of ballads, the song would just end, but we wanted the guitar solo to take it to another level of intensity.” —Maura Johnston

With his band Pavement, Stephen Malkmus was the flippant Nineties indie jester, with a bratty love for art-damaged punk feedback. But the Northern California boy soon revealed himself as the shaggiest of shredders. He explores his gorgeously lyrical solos all over indie-rock classics like Pavement’s Brighten the Corners (“Fin”), Silver Jews’ American Water (“Night Society”), or his solo records with the Jicks, like Pig Lib and Real Emotional Trash. The recent Pavement reunion tours were so jammed-out, he introduced the band as “Phishport Convention.” But he’s never reached higher than “Share the Red,” from 2011’s Mirror Traffic, two decades into his career. It’s a wistful ballad of feeling lost in adulthood (“Forty with a kid/Living on the grid”), but Malkmus lets his guitar tell most of the story, with elegiac hippie ripples full of mellow Seventies soft-rock gold-soundz. It’s the most beautifully unguarded and soulful playing of his life — so far. —Rob Sheffield  

While this deeply horny cut from Aerosmith’s 1975 landmark, Toys in the Attic, is best known for its funk-tinged central riff, guitarist Joe Perry’s showy solos give Steven Tyler’s flirtations a playful edge. After Tyler’s first plea to “just give me a kiss,” Perry offers a taste of his virtuosity with a squealing solo that, according to Guitar World, he overdubbed using a double-cutaway Gibson Les Paul Junior with a single P-90 pickup; after the second go-round he played a late-Fifties model Stratocaster that he also used on his final showcase, a lengthy solo that veers back and forth between longing squeals and fast-fingered blues jamming. —M.J.

In late 1965, Michael Bloomfield stayed up all night on acid listening to Indian sitar music. He emerged with “East-West,” the 13-minute psychedelic jam that blew minds in the summer of 1966, mixing up modal jazz, raga drones, and Chicago blues into a new breed of screaming rock monster. He was already a top guitarist — that’s him all over Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. But “East-West” is his timeless visionary trip — “a different kind of blues,” Carlos Santana called it. The Butterfield Blues Band would improvise on it for a half-hour or more live. “Pre-‘East-West,’ I was listening to a lot of Coltrane, a lot of Ravi Shankar, and guys that played modal music,” Bloomfield said. But for bands like the Grateful Dead, Santana, and Quicksilver Messenger Service, it was a door into the future. “We were all just awestruck,” the Dead’s Bob Weir recalled. “Within about six months everybody copped all his licks.” —R.S.

Scottish bard Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” is one of the most iconic moments in soft-rock history, a Number Two hit in 1978 that continues to occupy a preeminent place in today’s yacht-rock canon. For its guitar solo, session vet High Burns was saddled with the tough job of coming up with something that might match the grandeur of Raphael Ravenscroft’s towering sax solo, and he nailed it with a soaring, crystalline performance that perfectly echoes the mood of the sax. Burns has enjoyed a huge career as a studio great, including work with Paul McCartney and George Michael, who he backed on “Careless Whisper.” —J.D.

Like many of the best early Genesis songs, the prog-rock epic “Firth of Fifth” was largely written by keyboardist Tony Banks. And he originally planned on wrapping up the nearly 10-minute epic with a keyboard solo. “But then I started playing it on electric guitar,” guitarist Steve Hackett told Rolling Stone in 2019. “It happened to work particularly well with the pedal I had and the fuzzbox I had back in the day … it was a particularly good melody played on guitar. Played on piano, it sounds like a French Impressionistic thing. But when played on guitar, it’s got something Egyptian or Middle Eastern. Once I started playing it on guitar, Tony was like, ‘Oh, let’s do it as a band. Let’s do it with big keyboards.’” It was a fortuitous decision that gave Hackett a signature solo he continues to play at theaters all across the globe to adoring fans. —Andy Greene

Kelly Johnson played guitar in the all-female band Girlschool, part of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal that also produced Iron Maiden and Motörhead, who Girlschool teamed up with in 1981 for the Valentine’s Day Massacre EP. “Kelly Johnson, on a good day, is as good as Jeff Beck in his rock & roll days,” said Motörhead’s Lemmy. Johnson was as good as any other Eighties shredder at mixing punk aggression, blues-rock grind, and metal flash on songs like “Yeah Right, “Hit and Run,” and, especially, “C’mon Let’s Go,” the opening track on the band’s great album Hit and Run. On “C’mon Let’s Go,” she gets in and out quick, packing scads of weapons-grade shredding into compact package. —J.D.

Beyond the tragic circumstances of his 2004 death, Dimebag Darrell’s true legacy lies in his unique ability to combine flash and feel — where dazzling technique meets raw emotion — without sacrificing power on either side. At a time when hair metal and hyper-speed thrash ruled the land, his playing on 1990’s “Cemetery Gates” helped to define an emerging “groove metal” scene that was less frenetic, more inward-looking, and viewed guitars as potential storytelling tools rather than just blunt weapons. In the soaring solo, Darrell sonically helps to tell the song’s story of grief and loss in three distinct acts. First, a melancholic passage of vocal-like bends that counter Phil Anselmo’s guttural growls. Then, a furious, tension-building climb of breakneck runs and harmonic squeals. And finally, a cathartic, high-register release that wrings every ounce of drama from the moment. —J.R.

A standout track on the aptly named album Continuum, Mayer’s maturing sound was informed by his own guitar hero, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and by touring and recording with the blues-based John Mayer Trio. “Gravity,” which the voluble Mayer has described as “the most important song I’ve ever written … [with] the fewest words,” and its deceptively straightforward solo, is a study in negative space, gently swooping and surging, with moments of silence baked in like glimmers of sun through the trees on a late summer evening. Some players rely on loud amps or effects to get the tone across, but it’s all about the fingers here (a skill Mayer would hone further during his decade-long run in Dead & Company, where he was tasked with the solo work). There’s no bluster or bravado to offset the stillness of “Gravity” in its recorded version. A live take released in 2008 (paired with Otis Redding’s “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember”) bends even more at nearly 10 glorious minutes.–Shirley Halperin

When Mike McCready first met up with Mother Love Bone’s Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament — before Eddie Vedder entered the picture — they played him a rough track titled “Dollar Short.” “I remember hearing it, thinking, ‘OK, this is cool. What can I do with this,’” McCready recalled in 2024. “The pattern led me to playing the Ace Frehley ‘She’ solo, which I later found out was the Robby Krieger ‘Five to One’ solo.’” The influence of Frehley and Krieger is clear on the solo he eventually composed, but he turned it into something distinctly his own. And once Vedder put hit lyrics on top of it and called the song “Alive,” Pearl Jam were born. —A.G.

Adrian Belew’s otherworldly guitar playing made him a highly sought-after musician in the Seventies and Eighties, including gigs with King Crimson, Frank Zappa, and David Bowie. He was especially interested in creating sounds that didn’t seem like they were coming from a guitar at all, and he really outdid himself on Talking Heads’ 1980 masterpiece, Remain in Light, especially its opener, “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On).” Against a dense, frenetically funky track, he used an arsenal of gear to create elliptical blips that sounded like a dial-up modem gone nuts or an interplanetary distress signal. “I recorded a guitar solo and then ran it through an expensive piece of studio gear called a Lexicon Prime Time,” he revealed years later, “which allowed me to alter the [bandwidth] of the sound while capturing quick little loops I could fool with.” —J.D.

“I took up music,” Richard Thompson once told Rolling Stone, “so I wouldn’t have to talk to people.” He’s always reigned as the guitar hero of British folk rock, ever since his Sixties band Fairport Convention, with morbid classics like “Sloth” and “Meet on the Ledge.” For him, folk music was the dark stuff. “There’s more murder in it, more death, more of the supernatural, and more industrial grit.” But this live version of “The Calvary Cross” is his peak, a 13-minute Stratocaster seance full of late-night Celtic dread. It’s from his Oxford Polytechnic show on Nov. 27, 1975 — one of the great evenings in six-string history. (Don’t get us started about “Night Comes In” from the same gig — both are on the essential Guitar, Vocal.) His shivery tremolo solo is haunted by accordion, wife Linda Thompson’s harmonies, and an ancient sense of doom, casting a unique spell. —R.S.

For many listeners, North Carolina singer-songwriter MJ Lenderman’s sad-guy musings have practically made him the poet laureate of 2020s indie rock. As a guitarist, he’s a brilliant inheritor of aching-noise greats like Neil Young and J Mascis.  On “Knockin’,” he weaves together scenes of twentysomething ennui and delivers a knockout punch with a guitar part that distills heartbreak and loneliness in sonic form. When Lenderman launches into his solo, he stretches it out like taffy, making each note feel as enveloping as the embrace his character pines for throughout the track. —J.P.

When Steve Vai released Passion and Warfare in 1990, he had played with Frank Zappa, filled the unimaginably large shoes of Eddie Van Halen in David Lee Roth’s post-Van Halen group, faced off with Ralph Macchio in the hit 1986 film Crossroads, and recorded and toured with mega-platinum hard-rock veterans Whitesnake. Given Vai’s high profile, it’s not surprising that Passion and Warfare, albeit largely instrumental, entered the albums chart in the Top 20. The epic “For the Love of God” vividly illustrates that Vai wasn’t just at the height of his visibility, he was also at the apex of his creative powers. The six-minute track sees him exploring the song’s languid theme at length before falling into a fever dream where bizarre whammy-bar warbles punctuate angular phrases, flurries of tremolo-picked notes peel from the speakers, and descending legato runs eventually return Vai (and the listener) to waking reality. —Tom Beaujour

A couple of years before Steve Howe joined Yes, he was in the struggling British rock band Bodast. The group is little more than a footnote today, but its song “Nether Street” — written entirely by Howe — provided the framework for the third section of “Starship Trooper” on 1971’s The Yes Album. Once Howe was working alongside true visionaries like bassist Chris Squire, drummer Bill Bruford, and singer John Anderson, his guitar solo at the end took off like a starship entering the cosmos. It was prog-rock fans’ first glimpse at Howe’s genius. All these years later, Howe is the only classic-era member of Yes still in the band. Nearly every show ends with “Starship Trooper,” and the solo never fails to bring the entire crowd to their feet. It’s prog-rock at its most majestic. —A.G.

The double-bass-drum-powered riffs and breakneck tempos of Judas Priest’s 1990 album, Painkiller, proved the veteran metal band was still a force to be reckoned with. Hungry to establish their relevance in a world dominated by a new generation of young-gun shredders, guitarists Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing clearly logged serious time in the woodshed before laying down the solos for Painkiller’s unrelenting title track. Tipton takes the tune’s main (and most frequently dissected) solo, bursting off the starting blocks with a flurry of sweeping notes before throttling his whammy bar, nailing a sequence of hammer-on arpeggios and speed-picking his way to the finish line. Downing, whose style is more aggressive than technical, closes the song with a blues-based burst of notes that incorporates dive bombs and squealing pick harmonics to devastating effect. —T.B.

“My music is different from any blues player you hear,” Albert King declared late in his career. “I guess it’s because I’m wrong-handed.” The blues pioneer was a massive man with giant hands, a leftie playing his right-handed Flying V upside down, never using a pick. He grew up on a Mississippi Delta plantation with no electricity, teaching himself to play on a cigar box — “I rehearsed to myself seven years before I played with anybody” — yet became one of the most influential blues legends. As Gregg Allman said, “I don’t know a guitar player alive who didn’t cut their teeth on Albert.” The Stax hit “Crosscut Saw” showcases the Velvet Bulldozer’s string-bending power, cut in Memphis with Booker T. and the MG’s. “This gives me goosebumps,” Rush’s Alex Lifeson told Rolling Stone of this solo. “It’s all feel. His vibrato. The way he plays the notes. How he chokes them out.” —R.S.

With “The Middle,” Jimmy Eat World delivered an emo anthem with rock & roll flash. On the song’s solo, Jim Adkins dances across the frets of his signature Fender Telecaster, adding a twangy edge that could be heard as a nod to the Arizona band’s Southwestern roots. Adkins credits Guided by Voices guitarist Doug Gillard and the “hammer-on, pull-off elements” he brought to the indie-rock heroes’ 1997 tune  “I Am a Tree” as the inspiration for the solo’s distinct jangle. “For some reason, I thought of that,” he told Entertainment Weekly back in 2021. In the same interview, Adkins revealed that the song almost didn’t have a solo: “I don’t think there was a guitar solo on the original demo … The solo wasn’t final until we got into the studio.” —Maya Georgi

“The odds of me winging a solo that’s gonna be better than one I sat and worked really hard on,” Elliot Easton once told Guitar Player, “are very slim.” That philosophy produced one of the most hummable guitar solos ever recorded, composed like a pop song in its own right and refined through a year of club gigs. By the time the Cars hit AIR Studios in London with producer Roy Thomas Baker, every note was locked, with Easton steering through the chord changes, jazz-style, instead of spamming through pentatonic licks. Baker double-tracked it at slightly different tape speeds, giving it a shimmer everyone still mistakes for a chorus pedal. Ric Ocasek never wanted Easton to be marketed as a guitar hero, but the kids who still try to learn this solo note for note knows that he deserved to be. —B.H.

Sleater-Kinney have always kept finding ways to shake up rock cliches. They started as a scrappy bash-it-out punk trio, raging in the Olympia, Washington, riot grrrl scene, but evolved into a fearsome rock & roll machine on albums like Dig Me Out. Carrie Brownstein revels in her guitar-hero moves, priding herself on being one of the few players who can pull off a Pete Townshend-style windmill. Yet she, Corin Tucker, and Janet Weiss really took it to extremes with the stretched-out live jam that finally made it to The Woods as the 11-minute blowout “Let’s Call It Love.” She shreds with no mercy on her Gibson SG. “It’s a demon guitar,” she told Marc Maron on WTF. “I like a guitar that has a little bit of growliness to it — one that feels like the harder you play, it will react to that.” —R.S.