What Do the Greatest Guitar Solos Have in Common? An Analysis of 25 Iconic Solos

Take two solos that could almost be arguments about what a guitar solo is supposed to be.

Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption” erupts exactly as advertised: fast legato, harmonics, whammy-bar manipulation and the two-hand tapping passage that helped rewrite the vocabulary of rock guitar. B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone” works from almost the opposite premise. King stretches a small collection of notes with bends and vibrato until individual pitches behave less like frets on a guitar and more like syllables in a voice. Both performances routinely appear in discussions of great guitar playing. Musically, they hardly resemble one another.

So what, if anything, do the greatest guitar solos have in common?

To find out, I assembled 25 celebrated recordings spanning rock and roll, blues, classic rock, progressive rock, hard rock and metal, then compared six things that can at least in principle be measured: note density, musical space, repetition, pitch and register, expressive techniques, and structure.

There is an important catch. This is not a laboratory sample of guitar solos, and I did not invent notes-per-second figures by eyeballing YouTube waveforms. These are already-famous performances selected partly because published polls, critics and guitarists have canonized them. The Total Guitar/Guitar World reader poll alone ranges from the nine-bar “Bohemian Rhapsody” solo to the 143-bar “Free Bird” marathon. Rolling Stone’s 2026 list likewise explicitly embraces everything from brief melodic statements to enormous improvisations.

That variety turns out to be the point.

Speed is a color, not a prerequisite

If speed made a solo great, this investigation would be easy. Sort the solos by notes per second and stop writing.

The evidence refuses to cooperate.

Yes, fast playing is structurally important in several selections. Ritchie Blackmore’s “Highway Star” contains a documented 20-bar passage built around relentless alternate picking. Randy Rhoads closes “Crazy Train” with fast-picked F-sharp-minor pentatonic material followed by a rapid Aeolian legato run. Kirk Hammett’s “Fade to Black” outro includes two-string arpeggios notated as 16th notes at 142 BPM. Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption” develops from legato blues-derived material into its famous tapping finale.

But “Fade to Black” also exposes how misleading a single “NPS” number can be. Sixteenth notes at 142 BPM imply 142 × 4 ÷ 60, or 9.47 note onsets per second for that particular passage. That is legitimately calculable from the published transcription description. It tells us nothing, however, about Hammett’s average density across the whole solo, nor does it make meaningful comparisons possible with a sustained bend from Gary Moore or Steve Hackett.

At the other end of the spectrum, Guitar World describes Prince’s “Purple Rain” outro as explicitly “not busy,” built around hooks and generous space. Steve Hackett characterized “Firth of Fifth” as slow, elegiac “adagio rock guitar,” centering part of its sound on a sustained high F-sharp. Brian May’s nine-bar “Bohemian Rhapsody” solo contains quick figures, but they arrive as short expressive bursts rather than continuous shredding.

These are not lesser solos for lacking continuous velocity. In the 2016 Classic Rock poll, “Stairway to Heaven,” “Comfortably Numb,” “Hotel California,” “Free Bird,” “All Along the Watchtower” and “Eruption” all made the top six despite representing radically different relationships with density and speed.

The safer conclusion is that speed functions like dynamics or distortion: useful when the music needs it, irrelevant as a universal threshold for greatness.

Speed Without a Scoreboard: A local passage in “Fade to Black” can be calculated at 9.47 note onsets per second. The other solos are not ranked because comparable speed measurements are unavailable.

Space is not the same thing as silence

Guitar discussion often praises players who “leave space,” but that phrase hides several different musical events.

A guitarist can stop producing a lead-guitar sound altogether. That is a rest. A guitarist can attack one note and allow it to decay for two seconds. That is sustain, not silence. And a player can fill a long note with vibrato, feedback, a bend or a volume swell without adding a single new note onset.

That distinction matters enormously here.

“Purple Rain” is the clearest sourced example. Prince repeatedly leaves gaps between lead lines and privileges large melodic hooks over streams of licks. “Firth of Fifth” uses slow melodies and sustained feedback. Jeff Beck’s “Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers” builds drama through attack strength, volume control, bends and huge dynamic changes rather than simply packing more notes into every second.

This helps explain why note density alone is such a crude proxy for intensity. A bent note held at the edge of pitch can feel more unstable than eight neatly fretted notes. Research on guitar tablature formalizes part of the reason: bends let a player move continuously through pitch rather than remain confined to the instrument’s discrete frets. A 2023 ISMIR study analyzing 932 lead-guitar tablatures treats bends as a distinct, context-dependent expressive event alongside slides and other guitar gestures.

The broader science of musical emotion points in the same direction. In controlled experiments, mode, tempo, register, dynamics, articulation and timbre all contributed to listeners’ judgments of emotional character; no single speed-like variable accounted for expression by itself.

So when a Gilmour or a King appears to “do more with fewer notes,” the useful lesson is not fewer notes for their own sake. It is that duration, pitch movement, attack, vibrato and tone can keep one note musically active long after the pick has left the string.

Space Is Not Silence: One sustained, bending note is not the same as one moment of silence, even though both can reduce measured note-onset density.

Great solos repeat themselves more than guitarists sometimes admit

Originality is prized in improvisation, so repetition can sound like a failure of imagination. Yet several of these solos are memorable partly because they refuse to abandon their best ideas.

Mark Knopfler’s rapid “Sultans of Swing” outro is built substantially from recurring four-note arpeggio patterns. Prince repeatedly circles a small intervallic motif in “Purple Rain.” Steve Vai begins “For the Love of God” with a motif that is progressively rephrased as the performance intensifies. Even “Eruption,” remembered as a cascade of invention, spends its opening sections developing thematic material before reaching the famous tapping patterns.

Jimmy Page’s “Stairway to Heaven” makes the strategy unusually clear. Its solo establishes opening phrases, raises the energy with a rapid repeated lick, moves into question-and-answer gestures, then finally releases the built-up tension in a last burst and bend. It behaves less like an encyclopedia of guitar licks than, as Guitar World describes it, a miniature song inside the song.

But the richest example is David Gilmour’s second solo in “Comfortably Numb.” Published analysis identifies a Hendrix-influenced idea around 4:57 and 5:12; double stops enter at approximately 5:15; the earlier lick returns in more elaborate form at 5:27; by 5:35 the double-stop idea has become a motif. Only after establishing that vocabulary does Gilmour jump an octave for the climax. His five or six recorded takes were compiled into a final performance whose apparent spontaneity is supported by deliberate repetition and development.

That mechanism—idea, recognition, variation, return—may be one of the strongest common threads in the sample.

A music-theory analysis of a different Pink Floyd work, “Dogs,” reaches a related conclusion on a larger scale: Gilad Cohen shows how a comparatively small amount of material can maintain momentum through repetition, variation, tension and strategically placed guitar solos. The important point is not that repetition automatically produces greatness. It is that repetition gives development something to act upon.

Motif → Variation → Climax: The “Comfortably Numb” outro reintroduces familiar phrases before expanding into a higher register.

Do great solos climb toward the heavens? Sometimes

There is a familiar rock-solo narrative: start low, accelerate, climb the neck, hit the screaming high note, audience explodes.

Several selections really do follow versions of it.

Slash’s “Sweet Child O’ Mine” solo changes character halfway through: the first portion is comparatively laid-back and modal; the later passage shifts roughly an octave higher into more aggressive blues vocabulary, stronger bends and more pronounced vibrato. “Comfortably Numb” likewise reserves an octave jump for its climax. Dimebag Darrell’s “Floods” ultimately reaches an ascending unison-bend climax. Randy Rhoads ends “Crazy Train” with a large bend at the 19th fret after a rapid run.

But the pattern is not a rule.

Duane Allman’s slide outro on “Layla” spends much of its time already above the 20th fret and even ventures beyond the physical fretboard into pitches corresponding to theoretical higher fret positions. In other words, it does not need a simple low-to-high trajectory because it begins in an unusually elevated register.

Beck offers a different counterexample. “Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers” reaches a major intensity peak around the three-minute point, sustains it, then gradually comes back down. Its drama is an arc, not a staircase.

This distinction is useful: climax and highest pitch are not synonyms. Register can help create climax, but so can density, loudness, distortion, harmonic tension, rhythmic compression or the return of a familiar motif. Music-cognition research similarly finds register to be one among several perceptually important expressive cues rather than a master variable.

Higher Does Not Automatically Mean Bigger: A solo can peak through register, density, dynamics or thematic return—not merely by reaching its highest pitch.

Technique matters most when it changes the phrase

Across the 25 recordings, bends are probably the most conspicuous shared expressive device—but not because every guitarist bends the same way.

B.B. King can construct whole phrases through controlled bending and vibrato in “The Thrill Is Gone.” Jeff Beck combines bends with radical dynamic control. Slash widens bends and intensifies vibrato as “Sweet Child O’ Mine” moves into its aggressive second section. Mike McCready’s “Alive” deploys vibrato, whammy-bar bends and wah. Duane Allman makes the slide itself the pitch-controlling mechanism in “Layla.” Eddie Van Halen expands the palette further with legato, harmonics, whammy manipulation and tapping.

Jimi Hendrix is especially difficult to reduce to a “lead technique” because “All Along the Watchtower” deliberately blurs lead and rhythm: its central solo moves through octaves, minor-pentatonic language, rhythmic chordal gestures and muted-string scratching. That rhythm/lead fluidity is also a defining feature identified in Enter the Jam’s Hendrix profile.

The commonality, then, is not a particular technique. It is continuous control of notes after they begin. Many of these players do not treat pitch as fixed after the fret is chosen. They bend it, shake it, slide into it, swell it, sustain it, harmonize it or alter its timbre.

The Expressive Toolkit: Marks indicate techniques documented in the sources consulted. An unmarked cell does not mean a technique is absent from the recording.

Length may be the least useful rule of all

Brian May needed nine bars for the “Bohemian Rhapsody” solo. Allen Collins needed 143 for “Free Bird.” Both sit near the top of one of the largest modern reader polls.

Nine Bars to 143: The size of an iconic solo varies widely. Bar counts and approximate durations are shown separately because they are different units.

The longer examples survive by dividing time into perceivable stages. “Hotel California” spends 24 bars trading Felder and Walsh phrases before resolving into its harmonized arpeggio sequence. “Firth of Fifth,” which Hackett estimated at roughly three to three-and-a-half minutes, sustains a long arc through tone, feedback and melody. “For the Love of God” continually intensifies its original motif through slides, bends, tapping, legato and whammy-bar techniques.

The short solos solve the opposite problem. May’s nine bars have virtually no room for digression. Their job is to connect dramatic sections of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and almost every gesture contributes to that transition.

So the length question resolves into a structural one: does the listener have a reason to hear the next phrase?

That may be the closest this study comes to a general anatomy of a great guitar solo.

Not speed. Not maximum register. Not the number of techniques. Not even economy, because “Free Bird” exists.

Instead, the strongest recurring principle is controlled contrast inside a coherent identity. A motif returns, but changes. Density rises after space. A register shift arrives after the ear has learned the lower material. A bend delays resolution. A tone change marks a new act. A technical burst feels exciting because everything before it has established what “normal” sounds like.

For guitarists, that leads to a more useful practice question than How many notes can I fit here?

Ask instead: What has the listener learned—and what can I change next?

The greatest solos in this sample do not reveal a formula. They reveal something better: a collection of different ways to make the next note matter.