10 Best Guitarists You've Never Heard Of

3. Tosin Abasi (Animals As Leaders)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt-RoSzsEKA Jazz and metal aren't usually the best of bed-fellows, especially for guitarists. Jazz guitarists tend to be purists who let the notes do the talking and focus on smooth, warm clean tones. Metal guitarists are usually the polar opposite, colouring their tones with distortion and effects in the hope of achieving that brutal nirvana that only metal can provide. Tosin Abasi is a strange beast in that respect. He is a self-trained guitarist who has honed his talents over the years by playing with many technical metal bands, but it's with Animals As Leaders that Abasi is taking the world by storm. His style takes influences from primarily the jazz world and supplants them onto a metal soundscape. His signature sound is one that is highly musical, yet insanely brutal. AAL's debut album is one of the heaviest albums released by an instrumental act, ever. Wave Of Babies in particular is crushingly heavy and painfully dissonant, yet somehow it manages not to be too difficult to listen to. However, Abasi himself has admitted that the heaviness wasn't sustainable and on further releases the extreme tonality has been turned down, as has the solo shredding. Tosin Abasi is one of the most interesting and unique guitarists in the world and deserves to be recognised as a player with a different way of thinking about his compositions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihqT1aA4Q88