10 Best Grunge Guitar Solos

There's a common misconception that there were no guitar solos in the entirety of the grunge music. I mean, since the era of the supershredders like Eddie Van Halen had fallen by the wayside when Seattle started its reign, there really wasn't a need for the over indulgent guitar playing any more, right? Though the guitar was more about serving the song, that didn't mean that the freakout solos necessarily went anywhere.

Across the alternative rock spectrum, plenty of guitar players threw that their hat into the ring of the all time greats and put together some of the greatest musical fragments of the modern age. On the other hand, these guitar solos played a bit of a different role than what you would normally expect from your average rock song. While there was still plenty of fast runs to be accounted for, most of these songs catered to how much emotion you put into the solo, whether it be through pure noise or the actual note choices you made.

Even though these didn't reinvent the wheel, they have still gone down as some of the greatest little pieces of music to come from the turn of the decade. Pack up all your scale books...it's time that things got a little more dirty underneath the fretboard.

R.E.M. always seemed to be the one band right on the fringes of the grunge movement. While they were making some of the best alternative rock around long before any of the Seattle genre came to fruition, they settled gracefully into superstardom once everything went nuclear. Though they switched things up on albums like Automatic for the People and Monster, The One I Love showed they at least had a clue as to what the whole Seattle scene was about.

Set in a lowdown minor key, this is the same kind of midtempo emotional powerhouse that would become the bread and butter for artists like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Even with Michael Stipe's unmistakable voice echoing through the fray, the real musical hit comes from Peter Buck's guitar break. In what can only be described as an anti solo, Buck uses his Rickenbacker to make a chiming sound reminiscent of acts like the Byrds while also paying tribute to fellow alternative act the Smiths.

Despite not doing anything too flashy per se, this is the kind of solo that informed the next generation going forward, as Buck adds just the right sonic texture needed to send the song over the top. However, this was just the tip of the iceberg for new and exciting performances later down the line.