100 Guitarists, 464 Days: No One Agrees on What Makes a Good Guitarist

100 guitarists who play very well: no one agrees

Who decides what it means to play guitar well? A list of 100 names — from Jimi Hendrix to Paco de Lucía, B.B. King to Tosin Abasi — sparked a discussion of 148 responses and 464 days, ending in something more interesting than a ranking: whether a list can replace the ear. The starting point was a classification by style — classic rock and blues, hard rock and shred, jazz and fusion, flamenco and fingerstyle, modern and alternative — with 20 names per block. The result was not a consensus, but an uncomfortable realization: each generation has its own pantheon, and none match.

From the list to the reckoning: the missing weigh more than those present

The initial responses did not discuss the included names. They discussed the missing ones. Django Reinhardt was the first major absentee cited, trinc by Jeff Beck — with the argument that he did not just play, but also sang — and Shawn Lane, who appeared as the name any serious list should include. Kenny Burrell entered via elegance: "you cannot play finer." And Robert Cray remained a veiled threat of complaint if he did not appear.

The pattern is revealing. A list of 100 names automatically generates a parallel list of absences, and that parallel list says more about its author than the original. The list's author accepted this with sportsmanship: he admitted not knowing "ALL" the discography and confessed he had started counting "from a certain point." His honesty did not save him from the backlash.

Flamenco enters through the back door and stays

The most interesting breakthrough came from flamenco. An Andalusian participant recounted that when deciding to play guitar, he had to choose a school: the technicians — Paco, Manolo Sanlúcar, Cepeda — or the anarcho-ists — Diego del Gastor, Sabicas, Manitas —. He could not enter either. He chose the school of La Pantoja, "that old lady changed my life," and thanks to her "null sense of embarrassment," he lost his shyness and became a guitarist. The anecdote, between joke and confession, summarizes the Spanish relationship with the instrument better than any treatise.

From there, a deep technical debate peine: is classical guitar or flamenco more difficult? One position holds that the complexity of classical comes from playing pieces not adapted to the instrument, with extreme demands on the left hand. The counterargument responds that any piece by Paco de Lucía has comparable difficulty, and that what is truly difficult is the right hand. The duende, that unmeasurable word, remained the factor no sheet music captures.

Holdsworth, Rosenwinkel, and the problem of infinite lists

The central part of the conversation drifted toward jazz fusion and technical metal. Allan Holdsworth acted as the pivot: from him, lists of influenced players were built — Brett Garsed, Alex Machacek, Wayne Krantz, Tim Miller, Scott McGill — who in turn generated lists of those influenced by those influenced. The mechanism is known: each name opens a branch, each branch demands a new list, and the conversation becomes an infinite genealogical tree where no one discusses who plays well, but who knows more people who play well.

Kurt Rosenwinkel had his own trilogy of waves, with names like Jesse Lewis, Nir Felder, or Peter Bernstein. The implicit question — is this erudition or posturing? — hung over the entire segment. One participant settled it with irony: "When you know his discography inside out, call me ignorant or whatever you like." Another replied with a sentence summarizing the subtext: "I'm not going to review 9 pages, but I'm sure someone in this wise forum has mentioned Shawn Lane."

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Guthrie Govan, Corey Feldman, and the limit of the joke

Toward the end, the conversation broke in two opposite directions. The first was doubt about Guthrie Govan: "either he is a niche seeker of clinics or I would say the guy Guti Govan is not very prolific." The second was the intrusion of Corey Feldman as "the best of all," with his "incredible (but misunderstood) guitar solos." The joke worked because it pointed to something real: when a list includes Buckethead and Tosin Abasi, the criterion has become so elastic that any name fits.

The question left unanswered is the initial one. There is no consensus on what playing well means, no agreement on who is missing, and no way to close a list of 100 names without someone claiming the 101st. The only clear thing is that 464 days later, the discussion remains open. And that Django is still missing.