The Best Guitar Solo of All Time, According to 250 Guitarists (Ranked)

We asked one of the most loaded questions in guitar to our community last week:

What’s the best guitar solo of all time?

250+ of you weighed in, and I knew what I was getting myself into. This is the kind of question that ends friendships.

But data is the data, and a pattern showed up once we started counting the responses. Some answers were obvious, a couple were surprising, and a few of you went WAY off the reservation.

Here’s the top 10 ranked by vote count:

#10: “Beat It” – Eddie Van Halen

Pop song, metal god, and 30 seconds of fire. You know the story; you probably watched it on TV.

Eddie did the solo as a favor to Quincy Jones and didn’t take credit on the record. He was supposedly in and out of the studio in under an hour.

The reason this solo still holds up 40 years later was the phrasing. Eddie didn’t try to fit Van Halen into a Michael Jackson song. He wrote a solo that serves the track. That’s the move most guitarists miss when they try to be the star of someone else’s song.

#9: “Still Got the Blues” – Gary Moore

Gary Moore should be in this Top 10 about six times over.

“The Loner,” “Parisienne Walkways,” “The Messiah Will Come Again,” and a dozen others all got votes. But “Still Got the Blues” was the one that showed up the most.

If you want a masterclass in vibrato, this is it. Gary’s left hand is doing things on those bends that most players spend their whole lives trying to copy.

You can sit there with the tab and play every right note in the right order and it’ll still sound like a polite imitation. The man had one of the most expressive voices on the instrument period.

Anything Gary Moore is in the conversation.

#8: “Free Bird” – Allen Collins and Gary Rossington

It’s a cliché at this point. Doesn’t matter. The solo earned every bit of it.

Skynyrd was doing something with dual-guitar harmonies in the early 70s that almost nobody was doing as well, and Allen Collins took the lead on most of the outro. It builds and builds and never lets up. Five solid minutes of escalation.

And while people make fun of it, the solo is genuinely well-constructed. There’s architecture to it.

Most extended jams fall apart structurally somewhere around minute three, but this one doesn’t. It’s a model for how to build a solo that goes the distance without losing the audience.

Try learning the whole outro sometime and you’ll have a new respect for it.

#7: “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” – Prince (live at George Harrison’s Hall of Fame induction)

Technically the song belongs to George, he studio solo belongs to Clapton, and both are incredible.

But almost every vote for this song was about Prince’s 2004 ceremony with Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne and Steve Winwood.

Prince was standing off to the side for almost the entire song doing basically nothing.

Then the last two minutes come and we all know what happens.

If you haven’t watched it, stop reading this and watch it above.

Prince does things in that solo that don’t make sense for someone who isn’t known primarily as a lead guitarist. The bends, face-melting runs, and the way he tosses the guitar in the air at the end and someone catches it offstage.

The whole thing is one of the most badass moments in the history of live music.

People talk about Prince mostly as a writer and a frontman. He was also one of the greatest guitarists of his generation.

#6: “Stairway to Heaven” – Jimmy Page

Page got mentioned all over this poll with “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” “Dazed and Confused” (live versions), “No Quarter,” and “Whole Lotta Love.” The man wrote a whole catalog of legendary solos.

But Stairway is THE one.

Page constructed Stairway to mirror the arc of the entire song. It starts controlled and patient. Then it gets restless. Then it absolutely loses its mind in the back half.

Writing a solo with that kind of dramatic structure takes serious compositional thinking. Most guitarists just shred the most exciting thing they can play and call it a day. Page treated the solo like a movement in a piece of music, and you can FEEL the difference.

The intro is banned at Guitar Center for a reason.

#5: “Mr. Crowley” – Randy Rhoads

Randy fans came out swinging in this poll, as they always do.

“Mr. Crowley” got the most votes, but “Crazy Train” was right there with it. The thing Randy brought to metal in 1980 was classical training, and you can hear it everywhere in his playing with diminished runs, neoclassical phrasing, and harmonic minor for days.

What’s wild about “Mr. Crowley” is that the solo sounds composed, not improvised. Every note has a purpose. There’s no filler, no “let me just shred for 16 bars while I figure out where I’m going next.” Randy knew exactly where he was going from beat one.

He was 25 when he died. The shred guys who came after him built whole careers on what Randy figured out in those few years. Imagine what 30 more years would have looked like.

#4: “25 or 6 to 4” – Terry Kath

This is the one I love seeing on the list.

If you mention Chicago to most people, they think pop ballads and horns. They don’t think about Terry Kath, which is a crime, because Terry might have been the most underrated guitarist of his entire era.

Hendrix reportedly said Kath was the best guitarist in the universe. Whether or not he said that exact line, plenty of people who heard Terry play in the late 60s came away with the same impression.

The “25 or 6 to 4” solo is the perfect Terry Kath introduction. It’s aggressive, melodic, dripping with attitude, and totally unconcerned with showing you how fast he can play.

He’s playing FOR the song, not over it.

If you’ve never gone down a Terry Kath rabbit hole, do it this week. You’ll thank me.

#3: “Eruption” – Eddie Van Halen

Eddie shows up twice in the top 10, and “Eruption” is the one that guitarists say changed the whole game.

It’s one minute and 42 seconds, no vocals. It’s just Eddie tapping, sweeping, doing dive bombs, and pulling off harmonic squeals that nobody had really heard before, at least not put together like that.

Here’s how big of a deal “Eruption” was.. every rock guitarist who picked up the instrument in the 1980s was either trying to copy Eddie or actively trying NOT to copy Eddie. There was no neutral position. He moved the goalposts on what a rock guitar could even do.

The funny thing is, “Eruption” is technically just a warm-up. Eddie was messing around before a take and Ted Templeman said “put that on the record.” That’s how the world’s most influential guitar solo got captured.

Sometimes the throwaway take is the masterpiece.

#2: “Hotel California” – Joe Walsh & Don Felder

This one almost won.

Walsh and Felder built a dual-guitar outro that’s the gold standard for how two players can trade phrases without stepping on each other.

Listen to the way they hand off the lead lines. Listen to the harmonized parts where they’re moving in thirds and sixths with surgical precision. Listen to the bends, especially the slower, expressive ones in Felder’s first pass.

Every choice is the right choice. There is not a single wasted note in that whole outro.

Most guitarists I know have at some point tried to play the whole thing top to bottom. It’s harder than it sounds, because the precision required to nail the harmonies is no joke. But it’s worth the work.

There might not be a better extended solo to study if you want to understand how to build something that stays interesting from start to finish.

#1: “Comfortably Numb” – David Gilmour

You knew it was coming.

Almost 1 in 5 guitarists in our poll named “Comfortably Numb” as the best guitar solo of all time. It was the runaway winner by a huge margin.

The second solo. The one at the end. That’s the one.

This solo isn’t technically difficult. There’s no shredding, no tapping, no anything that an intermediate player couldn’t physically play. The notes themselves are simple. You could write the whole thing out on a single page.

What makes it great is the FEEL.

Every single bend has to be exactly right, every vibrato has to breathe, and every sustained note has to sit perfectly in the pocket. Gilmour is doing things with his hands that don’t show up in the tab. The space between the notes is doing as much work as the notes themselves, maybe more.

I’ve watched a lot of players take a run at “Comfortably Numb” over the years. Most of them play every right note in the right order and it still sounds wrong. That’s because what Gilmour does on that solo is closer to singing than playing.

If you only ever learn one solo in your life, learn this one. It’ll teach you more about playing with feel than any 50 shred lessons combined.

Honorable Mentions

A bunch of great picks didn’t crack the Top 10 but absolutely earned a mention:

“Cliffs of Dover” – Eric Johnson (the tone alone is worth a study session)
“Sultans of Swing” – Mark Knopfler (clean, fingerpicked, totally untouchable phrasing)
“For the Love of God” – Steve Vai (one of the most expressive solos ever tracked)
“Tightrope” – SRV (Stevie’s tone is its own instrument)
“Floods” – Dimebag Darrell (RIP Dime, that solo is church)
“Cemetery Gates” – Pantera (Dime again, because it’s Dime)
“Tornado of Souls” – Marty Friedman (the cleanest melodic shred line ever written)
“Reeling in the Years” – Elliott Randall (Jimmy Page reportedly called it his favorite solo, and Eddie Van Halen reportedly called it the best solo that wasn’t his)
“Bohemian Rhapsody” – Brian May (short, but good)
“Machine Gun” – Hendrix (Fillmore East, New Year’s Eve 1969, one of the most emotional pieces of music ever recorded)
“Hot Wired” – Brent Mason (the country pickers showed up too, and they were not playing around)
“I’m Going Home” – Alvin Lee (Ten Years After at Woodstock, pure joy)

What We Took Away From This Poll

Three things stood out to us after going through all 250 responses:

Feel beats flash, almost every time.

Look at the top of this list. Comfortably Numb, Hotel California, Stairway, Mr. Crowley, 25 or 6 to 4.

Almost every solo at the top is about phrasing, dynamics, and emotional delivery. The shred guys made the list, but they didn’t run it. Make of that what you want.

The classics are the classics for a reason.

Comfortably Numb came out in 1979, Hotel California in 1976, Stairway in 1971.. Half the top 10 is older than most of the guys playing today. Those songs survived for a reason, and players can hear that across generations.

Guitarists love guitarists.

What came through loudest in this whole poll was the love. The Randy Rhoads defenders, the Gary Moore people, Dime fans.. Every one of you cares deeply about this instrument and the people who pushed it forward.