5 Solo Guitar Records
that Will Change the
Way You Play
Solo guitar instrumental music is a tough,
thankless gig. The audiences are small, the
paychecks are smaller, and the stage is a
cold, lonely space with nary a comrade in
sight and no one to cover your ass when
you hit a clam. In short, it’s one of the
scariest realms of the live music world, one
that only attracts the most self-assured and
single-minded visionaries, musicians born
alone into this world possessed of a set of
solid brass balls and something important
to say.
Perhaps as some sort of byproduct
of the music’s lonesome, fearless,
and individualistic prerequisites, solo
guitar performers tend to be a highly
experimental bunch as well. Freed from
any responsibility to a backing band or any
other sort of human accompanists, these
guitarists often give themselves carte
blanche to push their abilities and their
instruments in any direction they see fit.
The end result is guitar like you have never
heard it before.
It’s for this reason that, when I’m feeling
especially burned out and boxed in by the
usual blues licks and barre chords routine,
desperate for some sort of inspiration to
remind me why the guitar is the greatest,
most versatile and formidable instrument
as yet created by humankind, I inevitably
turn to solo guitar music to stoke my
inner mounting flame. What follows
is a short list of my favorite albums of
unaccompanied guitar music (or at least
mostly unaccompanied, as some of these
records feature rare, sparse moments of
additional instrumentation). It covers a
variety of genres, moods, and decades, and
should have a brain-melting moment or two
for anyone that approaches it with an open
mind and an appetite for fresh sounds.
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