Shredding (guitar playing technique)

Shred guitar or shredding is a virtuoso lead guitar solo playing style for the guitar, based on various complex playing techniques, particularly rapid passages and advanced performance effects. Music critics have stated that shred guitar is associated with "sweep-picked arpeggios, diminished and harmonic scales, finger-tapping and whammy-bar abuse", while others contend that it is a fairly subjective cultural term used by guitarists and enthusiasts of guitar music. It is commonly used with reference to heavy metal guitar playing, where it is associated with rapid tapping solos, fast scale and arpeggio runs and special effects such as whammy bar "dive bombs". Metal guitarists playing in a "shred" style use the electric guitar with a guitar amplifier and a range of electronic effects such as distortion, which create a more sustained guitar tone and facilitate guitar feedback effects.

The term is sometimes used with reference to virtuoso playing by instrumentalists other than guitarists, such as with bass virtuoso Billy Sheehan (who has toured with electric guitar shredder Steve Vai). The term "shred" is also used outside the metal idiom, particularly in bluegrass musicians and jazz-rock fusion electric guitarists.

Ritchie Blackmore, best known as the guitarist of Deep Purple and Rainbow was an early shredder. He founded Deep Purple in 1968 and combined elements of blues, jazz and classical into his high speed, virtuostic rock guitar playing. Songs like 'Highway Star' or 'Burn' from Deep Purple and 'Gates of Babylon' from Rainbow are great examples of early shred. Blackmore separated himself from the pack with his use of complex arpeggios and harmonic minor scales. His influence on Randy Rhoads and Yngwie Malmsteen was definitive for the evolution of the genre.

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