I hate sounding like a rock cliche, Terje Rypdal's work has helped me out a bit. He's an inconsistent but occassionally utterly superb rock guitarist who plays with jazzy and or orchestral strings backing.

He plays lots of volume swells and reverb, often with harmonics or bends on his strat and has quite a trebly tone and uses a linear vibrato and his whammy. He's from Norway and aptly enough his playing often has a very remote, lonely and glacially tragic air to it.
Sometimes he uses a pedal that produces really dissonant overtones, truly horrible but kind of cool in small doses.
He mixes the ugly and the beautiful to great effect and is a competant shredder on the rare ocassions when he truly lets rip.

Try getting your hands on "If mountains could sing". I think it's worth it for the first track alone but there are 4 or 5 excellent tracks in all.
Movement four of QED is a must hear, the album sucks but for that one movement which is probably the most terrifyingly desolate and beautiful thing I've ever heard, too amazing for words.