30 albums every Guitarist should Own

Lost classics and masterpiece recordings that will make you a better player

Last month in the Guitarist office a conversation started about the underrated guitar albums that inspired us to play better. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that getting better at playing guitar is solely a matter of learning new licks or boning up on theory. What gets forgotten is that we also have to educate the ear – and occasionally reconnect with the passion for beautiful playing, which is the reason we fell in love with the instrument in the first place. With that in mind, we decided to put together an eclectic playlist of guitar recordings, each of which is a masterpiece in its own way, which will hopefully strike fresh sparks in your musical imagination.

Disclaimer

You’ll notice, in perusing our list of 30 masterpiece albums, that some very famous names are missing. Confession time – it’s entirely intentional. Clapton’s playing on the Beano album or Gilmour’s on Comfortably Numb or Hendrix’s genius on Electric Ladyland have been covered in the pages of this magazine many times before. So, with apologies to those ackowledged Guitar Gods, and others we haven’t mentioned, we’re going to take it as read that most of us already reap the benefits of being familiar with those masterworks.

Instead, think of this list as staff favourites that have been selected to inspire new directions in your playing by being eclectic, sometimes unexpected, provocative, but always top-drawer quality. We don’t claim these are the only albums to fit that A-grade billing – but we do promise our picks will satisfy and open up your guitar vocabulary.

We’d love it if, having soaked up our magnum opus of classics, you also sent in your own ‘masterpiece’ playlists to us, to broaden what started as an office debate into a worldwide mixtape of inspiring guitar music. And, if even a fraction of the dazzling licks contained here makes it into your own playing, well, that’s job done. As someone once said, great guitarists have great record collections...