What is the greatest rock guitar ever?

Brian May's Red Special!

 

The Les Paul Custom, hands down. It takes strength just to wield it. Heavy mutha.

 

The Strat is winning? What a joke! Such a wimpy sounding guitar! (Except for Hendrix).

Obviously the winner should be Les Paul.

 

I agree 100%, although I might even go with an ES. In any event, give me the guitar that can play the solos on Sympathy for the Devil, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, and Dazed and Confused and hold down the Pete Townshend parts for The Who live (allllllmost as well as an SG!) any day.

 

The Parsons/White B bender

 

You called??? Oh, and by the way, I'm a '49 FrankenStrat

 

I'm interested that the order of the top guitars listed above exactly matches the order of popularity in the poll.

 

I voted for the Gibson Les Paul.

 

The Strat in Jimi's hands.

 

You can get an SG with a tremolo.


I've heard so much of that clean rock-candy sweet Strat sound that I've gotten to appreciate a guitar that sounds chunkier. And the SG seems to articulate a little better than the Les Paul. The LP is superior to the SG for slide, though.

 

I've always liked the versatility of Steve Morse's sound on the Dixie Dregs records and his early solo stuff, it's a Telecaster ....... kind of.




What was the first thing you did to it?

"The first thing was to put the Strat neck on the Tele body. I was surprised that it worked. I played some gigs with it, but I wasn't totally happy. Next, I stripped the black paint off the body. I used paint stripper and got it down to the natural wood. I put some varnish and shellac on it that I got from a hardware store. Then I started on the pickups. I clipped out the capacitor, which helped a lot - it allowed me to bring both pickups together with the three-way switch and get some high end. Still, I wasn't getting the humbucking sound you need for rock 'n' roll, so I bought one of the very first Fender humbucking pickups that was available. I figured it would be pretty good because I liked their lead pickups.

After you put the humbucker in the bridge, what was next?

"I put the lipstick pickup in next to the 335, which was kind of inconclusive. It's a thin-sounding pickup, and it didn't have a lot of harmonics. But when I put it next to the humbucker, it gave me something good that I liked. After that, I got an on/off switch from an electrical supply store and put that in a spot where I deemed it should go. I needed that to work all the combinations on the pickups. "I still needed something else. At this point, DiMarzio was in business. I met Larry and Steve Blucher, and I told them that the Fender humbucker was good but it kept feeding back. They made me a pickup, which was close. We exchanged ideas, went through a few prototypes, until we wound up with what would become the Steve Morse pickup. That now went into the bridge position.

"I tried replacing the 335 pickup for a time. Somebody gave me a hexaphonic pickup, which I tried in the neck position, but I didn't like it, so I went back to the 335. Before this, however, I decided that I needed to carve another hole in the guitar because, you know, why not? [laughs] "A friend of mine made a pickguard for me when I had the hex pickup in it, so we put that on the guitar. It's bigger than a normal Tele pickguard. Then I decided that a Strat pickup worked next to the 335, but I had a big gap where the hex pickup used to be, so we had to put this block in there to fill up the space.

"I needed a way to control the Strat pickup, so I put another switch, and right between the volume and tone I put a miniature three-way in. We're getting close to being finished with it now." "Putting the humbucker in the bridge position took some major surgery, and I realized that I needed a new bridge, so I got a Tune-O-Matic bridge and put that in. It worked OK, but the only problem was I was getting strings scraping on the Tune-O-Matic, so I had to find some new way to attach the strings. In a pawnshop, I got a trapeze 12-string tailpiece. I put that in and it worked the problem out."

What's the story with the wire attached to the tailpiece?

"Whenever I touched the strings, I noticed that I would get some unwanted noise and hum, so I put a grounding wife on the tailpiece and ran it underneath the pickguard to the metal plate that holds the volume, tone and switch."

Any changes to the neck, or were you happy with that?

"I was pretty happy with it, but I did put jumbo frets in it. It wasn't a mod, but as a way to keep the high E from popping out when I hit it too hard, I routed the E string through the string tree where the B string went. The tuners stayed the same - they were OK."

You still have a pick tucked underneath the tailpiece. Any significance to it?

"That was one of probably two or three picks that I owned. These nylon Dunlop picks were hard to find. I played with the rounded edge, on the side, and they wore away very slowly. The reason I used the edge, especially with downstrokes, was that I could get some unusual sounds - it would kind of scrape the strings. It would pull a little bit, like a hint of sandpaper. "I was funny about picks back then: I never changed them and I never gave them away. I had one spare pick and that was on the guitar."

 

Does Jeff Beck sound wimpy to you?

I voted for the Les Paul by the way.

 

I anticipated that somewhat when I made the list. Regardless of my personal feelings objectively I’ve always thought the top 3 would be Strat,LP, Tele.

 

I am a little surprised the Jag and Explorer haven’t gotten a single vote. Especially the Jag. Where’s the Nirvana fans?

 

Hehe. I thought so. You influenced the result

 

You prejudice the polling by the very order the guitars are listed . . .

 

one of them had to be first. I voted Les Paul, but I kinda knew the Strat was going to win. It may be the greatest certainly you can make the case for that. It’s crazy but I’ve never owned one.

We still have 9 days left on the poll. We’ll have to see how it comes out.

 

It's 3:00 in the morning. You haven't talked to anyone in months. The neighbors call you "The Ventriloquist."

They hear strange sounds coming from your window, like the singing of a very human wooden doll.

It is you and your guitar. You are locked away from the world around you. There are strange charts on your wall, unlikely chord families, tricks and tips, a grimoire of guitar secrets.

And which guitar do you reach for? Which one is your life and your wife and the thing that offers eternal consolation in a dark and desolate world.

It is a beaten up, old sunburst Strat, passed over by many, precious to you.

 

Gibson Flying V. Unlike most of the other models the V is pretty much exclusively a rock music guitar (yes, Albert King counts). It's got humbuckers for proper rock tone. And, I mean, just look at it! None more rock 'n' roll.

 

It depends on what period. In Procol Harum, he was a Gibson guy, Les Pauls & SG.
Once he went solo, he did a 180 and switched to a Strat.

 

DFAB842
The Adrian Belew Signature Maxx Fly

 

I, personally have always liked different guitars for different songs. It's a feel and tone thing. I personally found different guitars always brought out different characteristics in my playing and writing.
So I don't really find there to be a best rock guitar.
The main brand that i always found consistent and reliable was Ibanez. Having said that I had a Telecaster that I loved and a Gretsch Chet Atkins that I loved and there was a beautiful Seagull 12 string acoustic that I loved also.

 

I always liked how if you followed a band closely (like Rush) you knew what song they were likely going to play based on the guitar being brought out on stage.

 

I'm a traditionalist when it comes to guitars so I'm not taking mods into account here.

That said... the Telecaster. You can do anything with one.

 

Easy
STRAT
For sure