How To Be A Guitar Shredder

It's about time we dive into guitar shredding.  Whether or not you are a fan of guitarists that run through as many notes as possible in every solo, you have to appreciate the dexterity and precision of the skill.  When Van Halen introduced us to this whole new level of showmanship on guitar, I was in awe.  So let's take a deeper look into guitar shredding and see just how they do it.  There will be exercises to build hand strength and dexterity, problems many guitar shredders face that you can avoid, industry speed secrets from the pros, practice methods to increase your speed, and even a feature about some of the best guitar shredder albums in history.   Join me as we cut open the world of guitar shredding and take a look inside.

Rock guitar shredder

One of the primary goals of many guitarists is playing faster.  It's important to realize that playing faster should be coupled with playing accurately.  Nobody likes a fast, but sloppy, guitar player.  There are certain tips that every guitarist should know if they are trying to increase their speed.  Find a few of them here at http://www.guitarnoise.com/blog/speed-secrets-part-1/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GuitarNoiseBlog+%28Guitar+Noise+Blog%29.

For some styles of music, like metal, bebop, and bluegrass, fast guitar runs are an essential element of the genre. And no matter what style you play, a well placed display of speed can often be impressive. As a result, lots of guitarists put speed development on the practice agenda.

In this brief series, I’m going to reveal some of the ways you can make your playing speed faster – in fact, most guitarists will be able to play MUCH faster in a relatively short period of time.

In my teaching, I’ve noticed three barriers to developing speed: excess motion, excess tension, and a lack of coordination between the hands. Excluding virtuosi, we all suffer from one or more of these barriers. We’ll deal with them one at a time.

Excess motion is moving your fingers (or your pick, which I’ll get to in a moment) farther than you have to in executing a series of notes. Distance equals time: the more you lift your fingers, the harder you’ll have to work to achieve the same speed. If you lift your fingers one inch off the strings, your fingers must move EIGHT TIMES faster than a guitarist who only lifts an eighth of an inch!

You’ve probably heard the maxim ‘you learn to play fast by playing slow’. What this really means is rarely explained: playing slowly allows you to focus on your technique. Repeating a technical drill over and over at a very slow speed lets you build a habit, and once you have a habit ingrained, it becomes second nature – it’s what you’ll naturally do every time you play.

As you work through scales and other exercises you’ll find or develop on your own, start by slowing down… WAY down. 30-50% of your top speed is probably about right. Watch your fretting hand, and focus on keeping your fingers as close to the strings as possible. Don’t be impatient; it’s going to take a lot of slow practice sessions to make it habitual, so in the beginning I’d do only slow practice for a week or three before ramping up the tempo.

The picking hand needs the same attention, but in addition there’s a gear factor: the pick you choose. When I started working on developing my speed, I made the same mistake I’ve seen other guitarists make over and over – I switched to a thin pick, thinking it would move more easily through the strings.

As I got faster, I realized the problem with this thinking: thin picks are very flexible. As they pass through the string, they bend… and the point of the pick has to snap back into place before you can pick the next note. You’ll actually reach higher speeds with a stiff pick.

Since heavy picks are harder to force through the string, you’ll probably have to make an adjustment or two in how your pick hits the strings. The more pick you’re using (i.e., the farther your pick extends through the plane of the strings as you play), the more resistance there’s going to be. Devote some of your practice time to focusing on your picking hand, and trying to minimize the amount of pick you use – an eighth of an inch, or even less, is enough to get the string to sound.

Another adjustment you can make is to ‘cock’ your grip – instead of holding the pick parallel to the string, strike at an angle… the edge of the pick should be the surface hitting the string. This lets the rounded point glide across the string, instead of having to forcing the face of the pick through it.

To get the correct grip for this, start by holding the pick flat against a string. Without changing the placement of your hand, tip the point of your thumb either up or down; that will rotate the pick slightly, and you’ll be presenting the edge of the pick to the string. I cock my thumb down, but I know a few guitarists who are more comfortable cocking it up, bending the thumb joint slightly backward. Either way will result in less resistance than striking the string ‘flat’ with the pick.

Shredding guitar solo

Those were some great tips to start working on your playing speed.  The author refers to a part two of the lesson that focuses on an interesting practice method for building speed.  Find it here at http://www.guitarnoise.com/blog/speed-secrets-part-2/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed     utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GuitarNoiseBlog+%28Guitar+Noise+Blog%29.

Now that we’ve covered the basic mechanics of distance, and how to practice slowly, we’ll move on to eliminating tension. Many guitarists ‘choke up’ their muscles when they need to play a fast run, and the resulting tension creates fatigue. You might be able to squeeze out a quick burst this way, but you won’t be able to sustain it.

One of the keys to staying relaxed when you’re playing fast is using the correct muscles to drive the pick. Picking strings can be done with three different sets of muscles: the fingers, the wrist, or the forearm.

Picking with the fingers alone involves holding the hand stationary, and moving the pick up and down using only the motion of the thumb going down, and the index finger going up. The muscles used to create this picking motion are largely those in the hand and fingers. This approach is most useful for slow, quiet passages, or for very short runs – I’ll use this technique for things like a quick subdivision, where I’m playing 3-5 notes in the space of a half of a beat.

Picking from the wrist keeps the arm stationary, but moves the hand up and down over the strings. When you pick from the wrist, you’re using the larger muscles of the forearm instead of those of the hand and fingers – and bigger muscles don’t get tired as quickly. Wrist picking probably accounts for 85% or more of the picking I do, and it’s probably where you’ll spend most of your time practicing.

Picking from the forearm transfers the workload even farther up, and uses mostly the bicep and triceps muscles to drive the pick. This is done by ‘locking’ the wrist, and making the motion from the elbow. Since these are the largest muscles you can use in picking, they can handle the most sustained effort. This approach is best for tremolo picking, and it’s also useful for sweep picking.

To practice the various techniques and make them habit, it’s best to isolate the picking hand at first. That means you’ll practice while repeating a single note (which can even be an open string if you’d like). This is where you’ll eventually discover your ultimate top speed, as you’ll never be able to pick a complicated run any faster than you’ll be able to move the pick back and forth across a single string.

After you’ve decided what muscles you’ll use for the exercise, concentrate on staying loose. If you find you’re becoming tense, slow down! A useful exercise for developing your speed by staying loose is one I borrowed from the ‘fartlek’ (speed play) training that runners do: you’ll start picking slowly, build up the speed, back off a bit, and repeat. A typical drill for this sort of practice might look like this:

• 50% speed for 10 seconds
• 75% speed for 5 seconds
• 90% speed for 5 seconds
• 75% speed for 10 seconds
• 90% speed for 10 seconds
• 100% speed for 5 seconds
• 75% speed for 5 seconds
• 50% speed for 10 seconds

Notice that the drill takes just one minute. After that, shake out your picking arm, relax for a minute or so, and then repeat it. As with slow practice, you want to be focused on your goal: changing speed without increasing the tension in your muscles.

You’ll also want to devote some practice sessions to eliminating tension in your fretting hand. Many players tend to increase the force of their fingers when they increase the speed, and this creates tension that ultimately limits your top speed. Playing fast requires a light touch; your fingers need to dance across the fretboard, not stomp on the strings.

Fartlek type drills can be useful for this; just concentrate on using as light a touch as possible without sacrificing your tone – it’s probably a lot less pressure than you think.

Live Rock show

Practice techniques like those above will build your speed and accuracy on the guitar.  But how about specific scale exercises to build your speed.  Take a look at the article here for a strong speed exercise at http://www.guitarworld.com/guitar-101-how-play-fast-part-1.

One needn’t be a technical virtuoso to play fast…just resourceful, pragmatic and willing to shamelessly exploit any "trick" in order to achieve the desired effect. The key is to find the easiest way to get the sound you want, and this entails experimenting with different fingering patterns and techniques. Technical problems should be approached creatively; play smarter, not harder! With this mind-set, and the benefit of a little direction and a reasonably consistent practice schedule (20-40 minutes daily), you’ll be able to develop an arsenal of flashy "speed licks" that you can execute with minimal warm-up…even on a bad day.

The intent of this lesson is to show beginner and intermediate guitarists several ways of creating a "wall-of-notes" effect without having to devote precious songwriting time to practicing three-octave scales and arpeggios with a metronome. In most lead-playing situations, it’s really a rhythmic effect you’re after, and this can usually be achieved by repeating short patterns.

The easiest way to play fast is on one string. The following licks (FIGURES 1-5) are played on the 1st string and should give you some cool ideas to experiment with. Practice each lick slowly at first and try to keep your hands as relaxed as possible while gradually increasing speed. Once you’ve memorized the licks, try adapting the same patterns to each of the other five strings and inventing your own single-string speed licks using the same techniques.

FIGURE 1 uses tremolo picking to create a riveting rhythmic effect. Each note is picked four times using strict alternate picking (down, up, down, up). Edward Van Halen employed this technique very effectively during his classic solo guitar extravaganza "Eruption." FIGURE 2 uses an open-string pedal tone and fast alternate picking to create a suspenseful, classical-sounding lick similar to one heard near the end of Ritchie Blackmore’s solo in Deep Purple’s "Highway Star." FIGURE 3 is a suspenseful-sounding "chromatic nightmare" lick that also employs alternate picking. This lick sounds faster than the previous two because you’re not repeating any notes consecutively. For a more legato sound, pick the first 16th note of each beat and pull-off the remaining three notes with your left hand, as indicated by the broken slurs.

FIGURE 4 uses hammer-ons, pull-offs and an open-string pedal tone to create a hypnotic, droning sound. As you practice this figure, concentrate on executing clean hammer-ons and pull-offs. To keep the idle strings from inadvertently ringing, mute them with your right hand.

FIGURE 5 illustrates how two-hand tapping can be used to play fluid arpeggio licks on one string and create a wall of notes. When tapping and pulling-off, be sure to pull the string slightly sideways (away from the other five strings). This plucking motion is essential in order to keep the string vibrating and to maintain an even volume level.

FIGURE 6 is a delirious-sounding whole-tone tapping lick that crawls up the fretboard using taps and double hammer-ons. Once you have these two licks under your fingers, check out FIGURE 7, a classical-sounding, single-string tapping extravaganza in the style of Nuno Bettencourt.

Guitar solo

There is advice out there from guitarists who have struggled with learning to play fast and we should all take advantage of it.  These mistakes are pretty common so take a look to make sure you follow their advice when learning to play faster.  Check it out at http://www.learn2playguitarfast.com/troubleshooting-speed-problems/.

Is there a riff/solo you can’t play? This happens quite a lot when you hear a new cool song and you tend to blame your cheap guitar or something and throw it away and look at signature models for the whole week and decide you can’t play worth crap.

This guide will help you speed up and play that thing faster than the original.

So lets troubleshoot.

Note: This lesson does not include any tablature of any sort and is just to refine your technique of playing songs. Sometimes, you do the correct thing in practices but not in playing songs.

This lesson is divided into two parts :

I – FOR THE LEFT HAND (when your left hand lets you down)
II – FOR THE RIGHT HAND (when your picking hand lets you down)

Problem 1: Using all fingers

There can’t be a single hero to fight villains for the whole world. Yeah, using all fingers is very important. You might be able to go faster with just three fingers at once, but in the longer run, practicing with all your fingers is very important. There are a lot of chromatic exercises which can help you. You just know where you can use the other finger.

Problem 2: Distance of fingers from the frets

The biggest and most common problem I get to see with guitarists is that they raise their fingers too high from the fretboard when they just used that finger to play a note. Keep all your fingers very close to the fretboard, just enough to get them inaction when required and not to close to mess up or mute the string. This is very important. This is the main problem when you can’t play a riff or lick. So go check yourself.

Also, check the action of your guitar.

Problem 3: Barring a fret in a solo

Yea, this is a bad thing to do. Give your fingers as much freedom they can get. For those of you who don’t get what this means, Barring a fret means sticking your index finger all the way up to two or three strings when playing a solo. This happens a lot while playing the basic pentatonic when the index finger doesn’t have to change positions. Don’t bar the fret and try again. Maybe you can do it this time. Do some stretches and you can hopefully conquer this problem

*Note : Sometimes you have to bar you finger when tapping on multiple strings together.

Exercises:

Stretch your fingers, use all the above methods and keep on practicing the same thing. Boring but gives great results.

If nothing else works, use the good old slow-it-down method. Use all the techniques given above while playing slow and increase your speed by practice.

Problem 1: Picking style

I know this old crap but if you can’t play a thing just use economical picking. No harm is done. Sometimes even alternative can’t even do it. Some songs do use a specific picking pattern but to most listeners, there is no difference. If you don’t know what alternative or economical picking is, it is explained in one good lesson I read. Go check it out.

Problem 2: Right hand movement

OK, when you strum quick patterns which require great right hand stamina, make sure that you are moving just your wrist, not you whole goddamn arm. YEAH, seriously, just move your wrist. Most of these riffs are palm-muted so go rotate your wrist.

Exercises:

Use a metronome and stop at specific beats. If you are playing 32nd or 16th notes at a great speed, its is important that you know when to stop or fret.

Just start a metronome, play sixteenth notes for half a bar then start playing again after a quarter beat.

Thats all, if you don’t find this lesson helpful at all, maybe you are picking a song too fast for you. It is very important that you proceed in a orderly fashion picking easy songs first. You can’t play Malmsteem at your first go, its true, they don’t call them GUITAR GURUS for no reason.

Guitar shredding

Now let's hear from a pro from the world of Rock.  This should offer a fresh perspective on those of you hoping to play faster and build a career in the music industry.  Check it out at http://www.guitarworld.com/zakk-wylde-guitar-boot-camp.

In this classic Guitar World Berzerker Boot Camp lesson from 2004, Zakk tells the story behind his drive and rise to success, and demonstrates the exercises that help him remain one of the hardest-rocking guitarists of all time.

1) GIVE IT ALL YOU'VE GOT

When I was a kid, I lived for football,” Zakk says. “I was a linebacker, and I loved contact — I loved taking people out. I was so into it that at one point I wanted to go to Penn State because all the great linebackers usually come out of there. 

“When I was around 11, I went to a football camp and I met the legendary [ex–Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker] Jack Lambert, who was a huge influence on me when I played ball. I idolized him. In fact, I still do because he’s the real deal; he’s totally devoid of bullshit. I remember him telling us something that remains with me to this day: ‘Anybody can play football, but if you don’t have passion for what you’re doing, then get the hell out of here and go home, because I don’t want you on my team.’ 

“That’s the bottom line right there — you don’t go out there to get your brains bashed in with the intent of ending the season with a seven-and-nine record. Fuck that! You go out there with the intention of winning the Super Bowl or you shouldn’t fuckin’ bother. I have the same mentality with guitar: you either strive for greatness or you go home, ’cause you’ve gotta give all or nothing. 

“I wanna be the very best at what I do, because I love it much. Because of that I’ll try my damnedest to live up to the likes of Randy Rhoads, Eddie Van Halen, Frank Marino, John McLaughlin — all the great guitar players I look up to.” 

So what caused Zakk to shift his focus from football to rock guitar? 

“I was a huge Black Sabbath and Ozzy fan, and I loved the stuff Tony Iommi and Randy Rhoads were doing on guitar so I decided to start playing. I took lessons from a guy named Leroy Wright. I was, like, 15 at the time, and he was 25, and when I saw him playing it blew me away. When you hear somebody play, it’s exciting, but when I actually saw him play, I thought it was the coolest thing on the planet. I was so intrigued by the whole thing that I just went, ‘That’s what I want to do with my life!’ And to this day I’ve still got the same hard-on. All I’ve got to do is listen to great players and I go, ‘Man, I can get better.’ You can never get tired of that." 

2) BE DISCIPLINED 

“You gotta have discipline, man,” says Zakk. “The reason I love people like Jack Lambert and [six-time Mr. Olympian] Dorian Yates to death is the discipline it took for them to get where they got. Same for John McLaughlin and Yngwie Malmsteen. I mean, those guys just keep getting better, and regardless of what you think of their music, you’ve gotta give them props for that. If you want to be as good as they are, you need to be disciplined about practicing. For example, every morning I grab a guitar, sit down and get to work. There are days when I don’t have as much time as I’d like, but there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t pick up a guitar and practice. 

“One thing I like to do is start off with chromatic exercises, picking each note and using alternate picking,” says Zakk as he cranks out FIGURES 1 and 2 at a breakneck pace. “And, if I want a real good workout, I’ll start both these at the first fret and take them all the way up the neck and then back down again,” he says while playing FIGURE 3, a longer version of the pattern shown in FIGURE 1, to illustrate his point.

“Then I usually run through some pentatonic [five-note] and diatonic [seven-note] scale shit all over the neck. I think it’s important that you get to know the five pentatonic scale patterns [FIGURE 4] and the seven diatonic scale patterns [FIGURE 5] back to front and inside out, so that you can rip through them fast and with total confidence. Together, they form the basic framework you need to be able to slam out killer leads.

“Sometimes, instead of just running up and down the scale shapes, I’ll come up with fingering patterns that make these scales sound more musical and less like finger exercises,” Zakk says, playing FIGURE 6 and FIGURE 7 to illustrate. “There are lots of patterns and combinations of patterns you can come up with.”

In addition to practicing scales and modes, Zakk works religiously on technique he’s referred to in his popular monthly Brewtality column as “connecting the dots.” It requires that you become familiar with these patterns and how to link them together, so that you can move seamlessly up and down the neck as well as across it. “Doing this is important because it opens up the whole fretboard,” says Zakk, playing FIGURES 8–10 to prove his point. FIGURE 10 is an A minor pentatonic monster run that climbs the neck on the high E and B strings, then goes across it at the 17th fret before climbing back down on the low E and A strings.

“I find it’s very beneficial to play these kinds of finger exercises along to the radio or your favorite records,” says Zakk. “Doing that makes them sound more interesting and, more important, helps teach you how to apply these kinds of runs in real songs.”

3) GO SLOW N’ EASY

“As I’ve been told by all my mentors, do it slow and then work on it until you can play it faster. [Seattle Mariners third baseman] Scott Spiezio, a Black Label brother who’s won a World Series ring and is one of the best baseball players out there, is one of the people who told me this. When Scott was a kid, his dad, who was also a major leaguer, said, ‘Son, if you can’t hit a ball off a hitting-tee there’s no way you’re gonna hit a ball that’s pitched to you.” So to this very day, when Scott’s warming up, he still hits a ball off a tee, in order to totally focus on what he’s got to do. The same principle applies to guitar playing—you’ve got to be able to do it slow before you can do it fast. A lot of the time I practice slow so I can zone in on the little nuances and work out the mechanics of playing something right.”

4) CLOCK IT

“Want a killer practice tip? Get a metronome,” says Zakk. “I still practice with one, and I always bring it with me on the road. In addition to helping you with your timing, a metronome lets you see how you’re progressing when you’re learning difficult shit. You start out with the metronome running slow, but as you get better, you can increase its speed. Doing that helps you keep track of how you’re progressing.”

5) PLAY IT AGAIN

“I don’t care who you are, the bottom line is this: if you want to play something bad enough and you practice it enough, you’ll eventually get it. It’s a matter of repetition. You gotta start off slow, and then just do it over and over and over. There are no short cuts, either; you just have to practice your ass off and play through things a million times. That’s how I do it. For example, I’ll take a run like this [FIGURE 11] and then practice it for days and days until I can play it fast. There’s no slacking off, either—use it or lose it, bro.”

6) PRACTICE AT EVERY CHANCE 

“When I first started playing, I’d practice every chance I could. I’d get home from school at about 2:30 in the afternoon and practice until dinner time. Then I’d stop, grab something to eat and go back up to my room and jam until about 11 o’clock or midnight. There was a period when I was putting in something like nine or 10 hours a day! Nowadays, I can’t always do that because I’ve got shit to do, whether it’s doing press, picking up the kids, cleaning up Rottweiler crap, getting yelled at by the wife or whatever. So I try to take advantage of whatever free time I have and cram in as much practicing as I can. I mean, even if you only get in half an hour, that still means you’re going to be half an hour better when you’re done.” 

7) USE IT OR LOSE IT 

“It’s great finding weird, exotic scales that are challenging to play, and it’s cool to learn them. But if you’re going to sit down and practice something over and over, it makes sense to practice something that you might actually incorporate into your playing, instead of some insane shit you’ll never use. [Martial arts actor] Bruce Lee once said, ‘If it’s not useable, then don’t bother with it.’ It’s kinda like having junk pile up in your house—if you’re not wearing those clothes anymore, then give ’em the hell away! I’d much rather put time into something like this [plays FIGURE 12] rather than some scale I’ll never use.”

8) MAKE IT MUSICAL 

“When I first started playing, a lot of my shit sounded like I was just running scales at a million miles an hour—because that’s exactly what I was doing! Then Dave DiPietro from [Eighties metal band] T.T. Quick, one of the greatest players I know, taught me about the blues. Dave was like the big brother I never had, and he taught me a lot. I can still remember him saying, “Zakk, slow down for a second and check this out.” 

He’d play something like this [plays FIGURE 13], a real simple blues lick that sounded like music, not like a scale. That got me into incorporating slurs [hammer-ons, pull-offs and slides], bends and passing tones into my playing.” Compare FIGURES 14 and 15 to see what Zakk means; FIGURE 14 sounds like a scale, while FIGURE 15 doesn’t. And, as Zakk notes, “all you’ve done is change two notes.”

“One of my biggest guitar influences is [Mahogany Rush guitarist] Frank Marino. Most of the stuff Frank does is based on the pentatonic box patterns [FIGURE 4], but he uses passing tones all the time. A passing tone is a note that would sound wrong if you stopped on it but sounds killer if you just touch on it on your way to another note.” Zakk then demonstrates how the five moveable pentatonic box patterns can be packed with chromatic passing tones (FIGURE 16) and offers the B minor pentatonic-based lick depicted in FIGURE 17 as an example of how to use them. “Check out this E minor lick, too [plays FIGURE 18]. It’s chromatic as all hell, but it sounds slamming because you don’t stop on any of the passing tones.”

9) FOLLOW GREATNESS 

“When I started playing, I was inspired to practice 24/7 by hearing guys like Al Di Meola, Eddie Van Halen, Randy Rhoads, Gary Moore, Yngwie Malmsteen, John McLaughlin, Steve Morse, Dave DiPietro, Michael Schenker, Tony Iommi and Frank Marino. Hearing those guys still has that effect on me. You’ll never know everything, so listen to greatness and get inspired. 

Sit down and copy some of your favorite players’ shit; I still do that all the time. Also, check out country pickers like Albert Lee. His Advanced Country Guitar video is phenomenal, and I’d recommend that video to any rock player that’s stuck in a rut. It’s what got me into chicken pickin’.” This is a lead-playing technique in which you pick the strings with your bare fingers as well as with your pick. Says Zakk, “One of the cool things about this technique is that it makes string-skipping licks like this [plays FIGURE 19] easy to play. It can also help you haul ass on something like this [plays FIGURE 20].”

10) PLAY EFFICIENTLY

As regular Brewtality readers are aware, Zakk is a staunch advocate of alternate (down-up) picking, but only if it makes sense. The final two examples from our guest teacher, FIGURES 21 and 22, are in E minor and show how he employs economy picking, a technique in which a player uses consecutive downstrokes (or upstrokes) wherever and whenever it allows the least amount of physical movement. “Everything I do is geared for efficiency. If it doesn’t make sense to do it, then I’m not going to bother.” The picking strokes indicated above both figures tell the tale.

11) BE TRUE TO YOUR MUSIC 

“There are some people that only want to be famous,” says Zakk. “And then you’ve got the real musicians who love playing music. The ones who love their art will always last, while the pop stars that only care about being famous or getting a piece of ass will always fall by the wayside. For me, it’s not about fame or money. I do what I do because I love making music—period. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to land the Ozzy gig, I wouldn’t be working a regular job; I’d be teaching guitar lessons and playing five nights a week in a cover band or something. If you commit yourself to music, it ain’t a hobby. When music chooses you, you do it."

I would like to close with a feature that Guitar World did on the best guitar shredding albums.  I had a great time looking through these remembering some of the originators of guitar shredding.  Enjoy them at http://www.guitarworld.com/30-greatest-shred-albums-all-time.

To some people, shred guitar is about one thing, and one thing only: the need for speed. The yearn to burn. The desire for fire.

Just the word itself can conjure glorious images of long-haired, pointy-guitar-wielding metalmen, fingers scaling fretboards with dazzling dexterity and furious speed, melody and musicality by damned. And indeed, during the shred zeitgeist of the 1980s, it seemed as if guitarists built up bpms the way Russia and the U.S. stockpiled nukes.

But in fact shred was around well before the Eighties, and it has continued to thrive in the decades since. Because shred guitar is about more than just velocity, or how many notes you can squeeze into a bar of music. And it doesn't necessarily require the use of distortion, electricity or, is some cases, even a pick.

In the following gallery, we present 30 great players from the Golden Era, the Old-School Era and the Modern Era of shred, along with the album and song that best exemplifies their shredding skills.

You might notice these albums are not ranked ... yet! Click here to take our poll and cast your vote for the greatest shred album of all time.

As these entries attest, shred is about pushing boundaries, exploring the great guitar unknown and, basically, doing really cool stuff that's never been done before. Of course, a bit of sheer, unadulterated fret-burning speed doesn't hurt either.

This post is just a sample of guitar shredding.  Shredding has become an attraction all its own in a variety of music styles.  Use this as the first stepping stone in your journey to guitar shred and speed maniac. 

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Have fun and stay tuned!

Mike