1.9 1983: The Arrival of the Godfather of Shred

Yngwie Malmsteen – to this day a name that player brings equally adulation and derision to guitarists. The Swedish Neo Classical pioneer first came to attention via Mike Varney’s Spotlight Column in US guitar magazine – and at that point very much the guitarists bible – Guitar Player. Spotlight was a column that Shrapnel Records supremo Varney wrote that featured up and coming players from all over the world: players such as Marty Friedman, Jason Becker, Paul Gilbert, Richie Kotzen Vinnie Moore, Tony Macalpine – even steel Panthers Satchel (under his real name of Russ Parish) were all ‘discovered’ here. Malmsteen – and his tapes displayed his playing from when still in his mid-teens – exhibited the picking prowess of DiMeola with an overtly classical approach that harnessed the music of classical composers Bach and Paganini as much as it did the rock stylistic traits that had gone before. Malmsteen took what Blackmore and Uli Jon Roth introduced a decade earlier, and ran with it developing a far more extreme style. Technically his main innovations include the wide spread adoption of sweep picking and arpeggios, as well as the extended scalar runs and classically derived pedal point licks that would provide the mainstay of the vocabularies of almost all the shred based players who followed. Tonally – and from a phrasing perspective – Malmsteen also exhibits a vibrato and bending ability that his shred descendants have never bettered. Despite a catalogue of music that has never achieved the heights of his 1983-1988 golden years Malmsteen’s influence cannot be ignored. Those of you not up to speed on Yngwie check out these tracks: ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’, ‘Kree Nakoorie’ and ‘Jet To Jet’ from Alcatrazz’s first album ‘No Parole From Rock’n’Roll’ as well as ‘Black Star’, ‘Far Beyond The Sun’, ‘Icarus Dream Suite’, ‘I Am A Viking’, ‘I’ll See The Light Tonight’, ‘Overture 1383’, ‘Trilogy Suite’ from his first solo albums. These tracks showcase simply otherworldly guitar playing that opened the floodgates and unleashed the Golden Age of Shred’…