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(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)<\/p>\n
Thu 1 January 2026 18:30, UK <\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to imagine any piece of rock and roll guitar history that Brian May<\/a> hasn\u2019t been able to master. <\/p>\n Throughout Queen\u2019s career, they made it a habit of trying on any style that suited the song they were making, and whether that was stadium rock, operatic tunes, or even the occasional rockabilly, May usually found the perfect guitar solo to accompany anything that came out of Freddie Mercury\u2019s mouth. But in the age of the guitar virtuosos, May realised that some of the finest guitar players of all time played the kind of tunes that he could have never imagined.<\/p>\n If you listen closely to every Queen record, though, a lot of what May was playing served the song perfectly. Every single time he turned up the gain for a solo, he seemed to be approaching it from a vocalist\u2019s point of view. It\u2019s easy to sing nearly everything that he came up with, but that didn\u2019t mean he couldn\u2019t fly off the handle. This was the same guy who jammed with Eddie Van Halen and held his own, so he wasn\u2019t afraid to break out the real chops.<\/p>\n And when looking at his personal guitar heroes, May had a lot of geniuses to learn. Whether it as shouting the praises of someone like Rory Gallagher or looking on in amazement at Jimi Hendrix, every single musician in his record collection taught him a different lesson on how a guitar can fit within a rock and roll context, but that didn\u2019t matter when the scene became inundated with guitar geniuses.<\/p>\n By the time Queen were making records like The Works, there was practically a war going on between guitar virtuosos over who could play the fastest and make something no one had heard before. Yngwie Malmsteen had gone the classical route, Joe Satriani sounded like he was making alien noises come out of his guitar, and Steve Vai<\/a> managed to blend rock and roll taste with Frank Zappa levels of weirdness, but no scene squandered their guitarists more than hair-metal.<\/p>\n It\u2019s one thing to be able to play fast, but since half of the bands coming out of the Sunset Strip couldn\u2019t write a song to save their lives, it was easy to forget what a lot of those guitarists had to offer outside of a few decent solos. But right when the genre was fading, Extreme came out with Nuno Bettencourt creating some of the most intricate fretwork that anyone had seen since the days of Van Halen. <\/p>\n