Title says it all.
Are metal guitarist greatly under appreciated for their talents? How do they compare with a well seasoned classical guitarist? (Like say Pat Metheny?)
Pat Metheny is a jazz guitarist, not a classical guitarist.
Pat Metheny is a jazz guitarist. (ETA: ninja’d by Crotalus!)
Our boy **Yngwie Malmsteen **has played classical music with symphony backing. He is generally regarded well for his technique…but that is about it.
“Under appreciated” - hmm. Metal guitarists are appreciated in metal circles. Classical guitarists are appreciated within classical music circles. I am sure they overlap in places, and, say, a metal guy will take classical lessons to learn some technique, but they really are different beasts.
**Rodrigo y Gabriela **got big after they shifted from electric metal to nylon-string classically-inspired arrangements…
Dang it! I knew Pat Metheny was a Jazz guitarist! :smack: I don’t know what the heck I was thinking.
As a guitarist who plays rock and folk styles and not classical, metal or jazz, I would rate the degree of difficulty of the physical skills required to play the three styles from hardest to easiest as classical > jazz > metal. Overall, including the mental component, jazz is probably the hardest to do well. IMO, of course.
That sounds about right to me (I played classical as a teenager). Jazz players might not be the most apparently impressive technically (although some are absolute monsters) but it’s the stuff they’re inventing as they go that really blows me away.
Even speaking as an electric guitar player who plays mostly rock, and other styles rooted in rock, top classical players blow away metal players.
Even Yngwie, who’s credited with bringing “neo-classical” rock guitar to the fore in the 80s, has a pretty limited vocabulary when compared to a top-notch classical guitarist. Yngwie is great at playing lightning fast single-note runs and arpeggios that sound like Bach, Vivaldi, or Paganini, on the electric guitar. I’ve never heard anything from him that leads me to believe he could play complicated counterpoint, fingerstyle, on a nylon-stringed acoustic guitar, the way a great classical guitarist can.
One type of metal guitar player that’s come along in the last few years, and really blown me away with dexterity and inventiveness, is the “djent” player. Bands such as Animals As Leaders and Periphery are laying down weird atonal shred over crazy polyrhythms. And at its best, it’s still catchy. Of these dudes, the king is probably Tosin Abasi of Animals As Leaders. Here’s a fair sample: Animals As Leaders, “CAFO.”
To expand a little on my thinking, all guitar playing involves coordination between the left and right hands. The complexity of that coordination is way higher for classical guitar that for the other two styles. On the mental side, classical players are usually playing from charts, reading what they are playing. Jazz players are thinking through the expected harmonies coming from their accompanists, reacting to the unexpected harmonies from their accompanists, and inventing something to play on the fly.
That’s how it looks from down here at my skill level, anyway. 
I never gave Slash any credit for musicianship until I heard him do a Blues set. Maybe it’s just the music and not the talent.
And rock guitarists are looking at the bass player’s hands for the root note, then wailing away heedlessly in one of two possible scales (major or minor pentatonic), based on that note. And making cool faces and hoping for the best.
I speak from experience. 
That sounds about right to me, too.
OneCentStamp - what is “djent”? ETA: I know Animals as Leaders a small bit, but hadn’t heard that term.
What’s your opinion of John Petrucci, of Dream Theater fame ? I’m no guitarist myself, just a headbanging (former :() kid, but that band always impressed me by the complexity of their songs and the way they switch to-and-fro between weird rythms & time signatures seemingly on the fly. They’re actually a little *too *noodly for my simplistic tastes :o.
Luca Turilli (formerly of Rhapsody, or now with his own take on Rhapsody… it’s complicated :)) is another guy who pops into my head when I’m told that metalheads only know power chords. Wiki says of him :
I have no idea what any of this means, BTW. But it sure sounds impressive !
I’m no big fan of Dream Theater in general - they just aren’t my cup of tea, stylewise - but Petrucci is stupendously talented. Not only is he ultra-fast and technical, he’s versatile and a good composer. I would much rather pay to see a Petrucci seminar than a DT concert.
The hirajoshi scale is one used in traditional Japanese music, and it’s the one that sounds most immediately “Japanese” to most Western ears. In addition to Turilli, Marty Friedman (ex-Megadeth guitarist, famous Japanophile) uses it as well to create “exotic” sounds.
The pentatonic scale, while it’s at the root of American blues (and therefore rock), is also the scale used in what we think of as “Chinese-sounding” music. That stereotypical Chinese melody from old cartoons? Pure pentatonic.
Well, what I had to say was pretty much covered, other than as a general rule: If you’re wondering which guitarist has picked the tougher row to hoe and one is a finger picker – it’s probably the finger picker.
*I’m totally not sure if classical circles call it that.
Djent. I still can’t believe that stupid word is gaining traction as a separate style of metal.
Metal is broken into so many ridiculous sub-genres that are more pretentious sounding than any in other main genre out there. In fact, I feel like I remember exactly when this really started. It was when Pantera classified themselves as “Power Groove” back in the Cowboys from Hell time frame. After that every metal band/fan with a slightly different sound felt the need to come up with some new style because there is “just NOTHING out there that sounds like us”!
Kobal2 - that stuff just means he can shred. No clue if it is musical and sounds good!
To be clear, players like Petrucci, Steve Vai, Paul Gilbert, Guthrie Govan (look him up on youtube and prepare to be blown away) are amazing players. Bottom line is that playing an overdriven electric solidbody (and effects, amp, etc.) and using a bunch of single-line superfast techniques is a different form of difficult vs. playing a nylon-stringed classical acoustic where you have multiple lines going, a counterpoint bass line, etc.
Someone like Tommy Emmanuel kinda does both - plays super-complex fingerstyle, hybrid picking and flatpicking. He doesn’t shred in a metal-ish way but is pretty much up there in terms of technique…
It doesn’t make sense to compare the best.
The best at anything are the best, and only a few folks can reach that level. Now, if we assume more aspiring guitarists try to be metal greats than classical greats, it might just be that the greatest metal greats are actually more talented than the greatest classical greats. (OK, I’m at least 50% kidding there, because the folks choosing the greats are way more critical for classical than for metal. But I’m not totally kidding.)
So let’s try another approach. How hard is it to be half-decent?
I play a variety of guitar styles, and I find classical a lot easier than metal. Metal requires a lot more sensitivity and dexterity than a lot of people realize. When you crank up that much gain and distortion, any slop quickly turns into pure noise. Classical is far more forgiving. Minor mistakes in articulation are clear to an expert, but the girl next door won’t hear them. But she will hear the gawdawful screeching howling noisy crap that happens when you use poor articulation with a cranked up guitar amp.
Of course, if she’s a garage punk fan, she’ll like that crap.
Seriously, it’s hard to answer the question in an objective way. Both require technique that takes many hours of serious practice to develop.
For jazz, in addition to having hands, you have to have a brain. While I don’t underrate the skill and nuance and talent required to perform a set piece, it takes a whole nuther type of skill to improvise creatively. Metal (along with rock and blues) falls between classical and jazz on this scale. It requires improvisation, but on a much simpler stage.
Yeah. This is like asking “What’s harder? Football or Hockey?” Both require stellar athletes who can take a hit but that’s about as far as you can compare them.
Yes. Metal guys seem to lack subtlety, the classical guys seem to lack…for lack of a better word…uumph.
It seems like any classical guitarist would have some experience playing rock, pop and maybe some metal. They were once teenagers wanting to impress chicks. Unless he lived in a cave or monastery. 
They just choose to perform classical professionally.
How many metal guys ever pick up a classical guitar?
I’ve always assumed a classical guy could switch to metal (with a few months of training). I’m not sure if the reverse is true. It would make a fantastic reality show watching them try.