Jimi or Stevie

[Bornindamecca]

Re: Jimi or Stevie

. I'd rather listen to someone playing the same pentatonic blues phrases with some soul and great tone than someone like Petrucci blowing up 24 frets with the most technically-impressive runs I can think of. Just a taste thing I guess.

Good post overall, but this bit right here^^^^is not an accurate description of most of John's playing. It's a convenient description that doesn't fit the bill.

[savoie2006]

Re: Jimi or Stevie

They were two different styles kind of. Jimi did the blues too, not to the extent Stevie did, but he did have his share of blues arrangements. Heck, Stevie wasn't even just strictly blues himself. Anyways, both are in the top five guitarists of all time no matter what. Both are very enjoyable to listen to still, which is ALOT more than you will be able to say for most of the artists today 20+ years from now.

[MC Fatigue]

Re: Jimi or Stevie

Listen to "Little Wing" by both of them.

Aye SRV butchered it and should have been shot for his version of it.

However, he did an amazing Voodoo Chile:

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[Stumbleweed]

Re: Jimi or Stevie

Haha what? That's one of the best pieces of instrumental guitar work around. Did it need Hendrix's acid-induced lyrics to meet your standards? SRV absolutely ripped every cover song he ever did...

EDIT: I'm hugely surprised that the poll is 24-21 Hendrix right now... thought that he'd run away with it.

Good post overall, but this bit right here^^^^is not an accurate description of most of John's playing. It's a convenient description that doesn't fit the bill.

As far as that goes, I guess we just disagree on that. Shredding fast runs isn't all he does (like Yngwie or Tony MacAlpine), but the basis of his guitar playing is all technicality. Like I said, I enjoy Liquid Tension Experiment because it's instrumental (hatehatehate the Dream Theater singer), but even on LTE Petrucci is either a) crafting melodies with single note phrases that form the core of the songs, b) playing crunchy metal riffs on songs where said single-note phrases might be out of place, or c) soloing like a mofo, mostly filled with crazy runs, string bends, whammy dives, etc etc.

Tell me what is wrong about the above. I'm really curious to know what else you think Petrucci does that sets him apart from Satch, Vai and the rest -- the music is almost identical... guitar-based prog-rock just has that sound. I personally think that he's slightly technically better than both of them, and I appreciate the improvisation present in LTE especially. But there aren't huge differences between the three guys except that Vai is a little more metal/crazy, Satch is a little more traditional rock/bluesy, and Petrucci is more straight up prog rock. Educate me -- find me a YouTube video or something where he's doing something other than the 3 things I listed above.

You're obviously a bigger fan of his than I am, so hopefully you can show me some stuff I haven't seen before. I'm open-minded about him, I just haven't seen much of anything to put him outside of the guitar-prog-rock bubble that I placed him in in that earlier post. Asking any Petrucci fan about his playing will probably get you some response centered around his amazing technical skills, not his instrumental songwriting abilities or whatever... his fast playing and skill is his draw.

[Bornindamecca]

Re: Jimi or Stevie

I'm not going to fill this thread up with Dream Theater/Petrucci vids, but check PMs for links to playing that doesn't fit your description.

More so than anything, Petrucci has a lot of songs that are just riff based metal songs. Nothing more, nothing less. Not super technical metal riffs, or crunchy typical metal riffs, but all kinds of metal riffs. He's not in a hurry to cover the whole freatboard in every song and often uses speed as a quick texture while giving plenty of space to his other band members, which I don't see a lot from Vai and those other guys. With Vai and Satch, it feels like a guitar show, and with DT it feels like a band.

Forsaken is a great example. I don't see what's especially "proggy" about that song, or what's especially technical. There's a little solo at the end, like any metal-based song, but aside from that he just lays in the cut, and you'd never know that he's as skilled as he is just by listening to this song.

Open chord strumming in the vid I sent in PMs, which doesn't fit the description you put.

And what does "technically based" mean? Isn't all guitar playing just a various combination of chords and single note lines? Sure, some guys might arpeggiate those chords, but what fits into this description of "not technical" playing? SRV's pentatonic licks seem very technically based to me, and that's not a criticism. I like that stuff, but it still sounds like scale fragments to me.

I ask because sometimes I feel like people associate speed with technicality, and because they don't "feel" the story in something, it seems mechanical to them. In a case like Yngwie, I can understand because he has a very basic chord progression, and he's just arpeggiating it back and forth like a machine with extremely predictable peaks and valleys.

Outside of him, I don't know if I feel comfortable with that association, because a lot of tendencies are just the basic tenets of the genre. Like you said yourself with SRV, blues is an extremely trapping style in one sense. I've personally never been surprised by SRV for a single note. I can generally tell when he's going to bend, go on a run or pull back and ride a note. Just because he's really predictable doesn't mean I think he's mechanical. He just stays within a certain box, like most every musician.

[Stumbleweed]

Re: Jimi or Stevie

By "technically-based" I mean that the main merits of his music is that guitarists will go "wow, that's pretty incredible" -- that's what draws people to him as well as Vai/Satch, it's that they play the guitar better than the rest of us. Part of it is because there are no lyrics in most of their songs.. so the guitar automatically becomes the focus. Also, the vast majority of their fanbase are guitarists. That's less true of Dream Theater (their fans are Japanese guitarists hah), but that's just because they're an actual band as opposed to "John Petrucci w/ Studio Musicians".

With DT, Jordan Rudess (or whoever the keyboardist is now) will take turns soloing with him and stuff like that... he doesn't totally hog the show. If Satch and Vai were playing in something other than a solo act and had someone talented like that to trade solos with, they'd probably do the same. I don't think that's really a reflection of Petrucci as much as it's a reflection of his being in a band as opposed to a solo artist. Again, I fail to see much of a difference between him and Satch especially (I'll give you Vai, as the whole point of every one of his songs is him playing guitar) beyond that he is in an actual band with a singer and Satriani is not.

I'll look for the links. Maybe it's his tone... when he has that normal distortion on (like he does for most of LTE and Dream Theater), it makes all his solos sound the same to me... Eric Johnson has a great unique tone and it sets him apart from the others in my mind. I dunno, I guess I just prefer simple tone and melody to Petrucci's intricately-planned melodies and saturated tone... I can be impressed by and enjoy listening to an amazing classical pianist, but that doesn't mean that I want to listen to it all the time... I feel basically the same about Petrucci and the like.

EDIT: Ha, yeah.. let's not turn this into a separate guitarist argument. We can PM or whatever.

[ODogg]

Re: Jimi or Stevie

I'm surprised it's this close, I figured Hendrix would run away with it.

[MC Fatigue]

Re: Jimi or Stevie

I'm surprised it's this close, I figured Hendrix would run away with it.

I'd say that's a good thing that it's close; like I said earlier neither is better than the other. They're simply different. Each one should simply be appreciated for what they are without any of the "no - so and so is better..." stuff that goes on so much.