The 1972 song Slash called the greatest guitar sound ever: “Best of all time”
Slash has always been one to look for the riffs before anything else on any record.
Everyone has tried their hand at doing their own rendition of ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’, but even outside of Guns N’ Roses, Slash has tried his best to keep things interesting and make sure that his voice on the instrument shines through every single time. Because, as far as he was concerned, the most important thing that a rock star could do was leave a sonic footprint that no one else could have made.
Even if you don’t know a thing about Guns N’ Roses or even heard of Velvet Revolver, it’s easy to pick out just about anything that Slash ever played. His playing was a lot more fluid than anyone else out at the time, and even for a post-Van Halen world, his vibrato and sustain on guitar were what made people fall in love with everything he did. But the secret behind his licks was a lot more rudimentary than most people realise.
He wasn’t looking to make one of the most unique guitar tones in the world because some of the best ones had already been covered. He had found the comfortable middle ground between all of his influences, whether that be Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page or Joe Walsh, and he was only the next in a long line of guitarists taking that extra step forward. But every now and again, there are certain musicians who are doing things that no one else would have ever dreamed of with their instrument.
Every generation has those musicians that come out of nowhere, and while Van Halen was the big eye-opener years before Guns N’ Roses came out, everyone from Tom Morello to Jack White had found their voice using the guitar in a different way. They weren’t afraid to make their music sound mean, but Slash could hear every single emotion in the way that Jeff Beck played his guitar.
Beck was already one of the biggest names in the guitar community for what he did with a six-string in his hand. He wanted to create musical colours that no one else had ever seen before, and Slash was absolutely knocked out when he heard the original version of what Beck was doing on ‘Superstition.’
The song is one of the best tunes that Stevie Wonder ever wrote, but the way that Beck plays guitars was everything that Slash was after in his early days, saying, “The sound this group gets out of the wah wah bar and the distortion pedal, it’s a little bit funky, but it still rocks real fuckin’ hard. One of the best rock guitar sounds of all time.” This probably explains why they needed the biggest names in music to help match it when Wonder did his version.
Michael Sembello was already one of the finest guitarists that the scene ever had, and while he had a completely different vocabulary than Beck, he did his own thing with it. Wonder didn’t need to have a song that was the same as his friend’s version, so the most that he could hope for was to capture a vibe that was similar to the way that Beck weaved his melodies together when the song came up.
And while Slash abides by the same principles when he’s playing many of his solos, a lot of what Beck does isn’t so easy to master, even if you’ve been practising in your room for decades at a time. There are certain things that he does that can’t be taught, and even the greatest guitarists of all time have to admit defeat when stumbling across some of his greatest licks in the past.
