Originally Posted by: dakine80If it weren't for him we'd still be mimicing a violinists appraoch to vibrato? I almost laughed when I read that. I think MOST of us discovered vibrato for ourselves by accident, the BB King way, as you claim. He's not the first of anything;certainly not "perpendicular" vibrato.[/quote]
1. We've all grown up since B.B.'s time; I and most people I know figured out how to play "Enter Sandman" by accident, yet before Metallica released it, who latched onto that riff?

2. "Tapping" existed well before Eddie Van Halen. However, he popularized it and therefore he was the impetus for 99.999% of the implementation of that technique to come since that time.



[QUOTE=dakine80]And blues "as we know it today" wouldn't exist if it weren't for him?
That's ridiculous.

Tell that to Buddy Guy, Eric Clapton, SRV, Jimmy Vaughan, Robert Cray and any number of other contemporary Blues (and, honestly, a lot of Rock and Jazz guitarists I've run into) who have cited B.B. as a key influence on them.

When Jimmy Vaughan says that "we're all trying to sound like [B.B. King]" and the entire cast of the SRV tribute agrees with him, then I think that should tell you something.


When you think about it, compared to contemporary Hard Rock and Metal bands, Black Sabbath is relatively unremarkable; and yet without them, none of it would exist in its present form.

You have to remember: you're listening to B.B. King's music with 50+ years of following music history being thrown at you at the same time and so for you or I or almost anyone else on this site, it's a lot of hard work to put his music into the context of what music was before he came along and what it became because of it.