I was quite amused to see that someone on the 3rd page of this thred with a name like randomly selected letters (no offence meant) from a scrabble bag picked scored his favourite guitar shredders on their abillities to sweep, tap, their feel, use of whammy bar etc. I guess technique is practially the only objective ways to compare players but it does seem a bit screwy to me, surely there's more to playing than speed?

Personally my favourites are:

1) Alex Lifeson, check out Xanadu and La Villa Strangiato from Exit STage Left by Rush (1981) , not only can he play horrifyingly fast but his solos are exquisitely melodic and beautiful. It's worth putting up with Geddy Lees dreadfully high voice to hear that.

2) Joe Satriani. This guy is one staggering technician and I think that every guitar player should hear The forgotten (from Flying in a blue dream) which is heart wrenchingly passionate as well. I can't help feel that he's losing something in his composition these days though but then he's had such an incredible output of jaw dropping music.

3) Dave Gilmour. Division bell has some of the most beautiful soulful guitar play i've ever heard on it.

But in terms of technique I shall name 3 fairly obscure players who haven't been mentioned yet:

1) Stanley Jordan;. Note-wise it's like listening to a fine jazz pianist, several parts played with staggering independence on one instrument with a mixture of fingerstyle and tapping. He can shred but I actually think this polyphonic stuff he plays is probably much harder than the 20note/sec stuff played by Becker, Malmsteem and vai. Without wishing to seem arrogant I think I'm much closer to being able to copy those guys than Jordan who is utterly terrifying to behold.

2) Rusty Cooley. I don't much like his music but this guy is probably the fastest shredder I have ever heard, it's very Becker-like. He brought out a tutorial called "shred guitar manifesto" which has some clips of him playing. Very scary.

3) Allan holdsworth. A very clever jazz guitarist. I often feel that I ought to like this guys music more but it's so off the wall and irregular in timiming and key that it doesn't hold together in a way that I can understand or at least appreciate. This guy is the king of legato, he can play more with his left than most top players can with both hands and has a distinctive sound that I've never heard convincingly duplicated.