10 Greatest Rock Bands With Two Guitar Players

The music world has always been familiar with the phrase less is more. Even though there are bands that love to play a million notes per second, there’s no shame in hanging back with a great song and just doing what the track calls for. As far as the six string goes in rock and roll, you can never have too much now can you?

As much as one guitar player would have been fine, each of these bands kicked things up a notch by having two guitar players in their ranks, making for a wall of sound whenever you heard them play. There’s a lot more that goes into having two guitarists than just more noise onstage though. When you have two brilliant musicians working off each other, there are a lot more opportunities to toy with your sound, whether that means playing in harmony with each other or trading off during solos to give a new sound to the song halfway through.

Beyond just your average rock and roll setup though, each of these guitarists know how to play off each other perfectly, knowing just when to bring the best out of each other while never grandstanding that often. Having one guitarist might be all you really need, but each of these guys have made their living as partners in crime.

When it comes to the best punk music ever made, you never really had to be the most technical player in the world to get by. If you had just a handful of guitar lessons and knew what a power chord was, you could probably get away with playing the Ramones' entire discography in just a few days. Regardless of how easy they were though, it was all about the power behind the song, and Mick Jones and Joe Strummer may as well have been the punk rock version of Lennon and McCartney.

When the Clash were first getting started, Joe was really the driver of the group, penning songs like White Riot and Complete Control about the injustices that both artists and punks have to deal with and how things needed to change. It took Mick to turn them into something a lot more radio friendly though, taking the hooks and cramming them into songs like Remote Control and even shifting the focus to something that a man on the street could understand, like the Rolling Stones style sound of Lost in the Supermarket.

Throughout their career, you can also see them learning from one another as well, like Joe getting into pop material on Rock the Casbah and Mick Jones getting more and more into the avant garde style of writing, which he would incorporate later into Big Audio Dynamite. The entire aesthetic of punk may have been about changing the corrupt parts of the world, but listening to the Clash was the first time when the revolution actually looked like it was succeeding.