We’re guitarists, so we know how we are. We have elevated praising and blasting other guitar players to an Olympic-level sport. So the staff thought it would be fun to step out of the way for a 50th Anniversary issue feature lauding supreme guitarists between 1967-2017, and let you pick the honorees. Now you have no one to blame but yourselves for any omissions, controversies, or blasphemies. Hahaha.
Seriously, though, we felt it would be appropriate and immensely interesting to turn the selections over to you, as the readers have supported this magazine and all of the musicians it has written about in its pages for 50 years. You have been an essential part of GP’s longevity and success. We appreciate that fact more than you could ever know, and we trust your collective wisdom.
To collect your votes for this feature, we posted a “redacted” image of the October 2017 cover with all of the images blanked out on Facebook on July 14, and we asked that you name your most influential/inspirational guitarists. Getting to the list you see here required a bit of editing, of course, as there were thousands of names put up for consideration.
We determined that if a player was mentioned just once or twice, that wouldn’t be enough to get his or her name on the magazine’s list. Every player we left behind was an excellent guitarist, but we had to produce a manageable list—rather than a free-for-all of every player who ever touched an instrument—and we also wanted to see which guitarists a democratic, “majority rules” process would reveal. All of the players presented here were chosen multiple times by different readers.
We also asked readers to choose players who had kicked off their commercial careers during the magazine’s