10 Perfect Rock Albums For Guitar Players

A lot of the greatest guitar players in the world can win you over just through pure technique. Even though someone like Steve Vai might not have a singer on every single one of his tracks, it doesn't really matter when the riffs hold up this well whenever he plays them. There comes a point where even technique gets stale though, and Tom Morello sounds like he's trying to deconstruct the meaning of guitar on Rage Against the Machine's debut.

While you can tell that Tom can play more than his fair share of lead lines, the real wow factor behind this record is just how many weird sounds he can squeeze out of his guitar. Although some of them were created using effects like a digital whammy pedal on the song Killing In the Name, songs like Know Your Enemy and Bullet in the Head were giving us sounds that none of us had heard before, like short blasts of noise or messing around with the toggle switch to make the guitar sound like it was short circuiting in rhythm with the song.

Since Rage was always indebted to the world of hip hop, Tom assumed both the role of the guitarist and the DJ and brought them under one roof for every single one of these tracks. You can normally spot influences from a mile away, but Tom may be one of the only guitar players who hasn't played a single unoriginal lick in his life.