The guitarist may employ any of several methods for sounding the guitar, including finger picking, depending on the type of strings used, and including strumming with the fingers, or a guitar pick made of bone, horn, plastic, metal, felt, leather, or paper, and melodic flatpicking and finger-picking. The guitarist may also employ various methods for selecting notes and chords, including fingering, thumbing, the barre, and 'bottleneck' or steel-guitar slides, usually made of glass or metal. These left- and right-hand techniques may be intermixed in performance.
Several magazines and websites have compiled what they intend as lists of the greatest guitarists—for example The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time by Rolling Stonemagazine, or 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time by Guitar World magazine. ;Rolling Stone:In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine published a list called The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. This list included 100 guitarists whom the magazine editor David Fricke considered the best, with a brief introduction for each of them. The first in this list is the American guitarist Jimi Hendrix introduced by Pete Townshend, guitarist for The Who, who was, in his turn, ranked at #10 in the list. ;Guitar World: Guitar World, a monthly music magazine devoted to the guitar, also published their list of 100 greatest guitarists in the book Guitar World Presents the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time from the Pages of Guitar World Magazine. Different from the Rolling Stone list, which listed guitarists in descending order, Guitar World divided guitarists by music genre—such as "Lords of Hard Rock" for hard rock artists or "Jazzmen" for jazz players. Despite the appearance in other magazines like Billboard, this publication by Guitar World was criticized for including no female musicians within its selection. However, Guitar World recently published a list of "Eight Amazing Female Acoustic Players," including Kaki King, Muriel Anderson and Sharon Isbin. ;TIME and others: Following the death of Les Paul, TIMEwebsite presented their list of 10 greatest artists in electric guitar. As in Rolling Stone magazine's list, Jimi Hendrix was chosen as the greatest guitarist followed by Slash from Guns 'N' Roses, B.B. King, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton. Gigwise.com, an online music magazine, also ranks Jimi Hendrix as the greatest guitarist ever, followed by Jimmy Page, B.B. King, Keith Richards and Kirk Hammett.
Other genres
The classical guitar is strung with gut or nylon stringson top and wound basses for the lower strings. It was often ornately decorated with mother of pearl. Many early classical guitarists played with their finger tips only but later guitarists play with a combination of finger nail and flesh to project a clear sound and allowing for many different changes in sound quality. This guitar tradition dates back at least to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when a four course instrument was popular among aristocrats. In the early nineteenth century there the guitar enjoyed a surge of popularity when composer/performers such as Fernando Sor, Napoléon Coste, Mauro Guiliani, and many others published thousands of pieces for the concert hall and home gatherings. The classical guitar enjoyed another period of popularity in the twentieth century when recordings amplified the relatively quiet instrument. There are many classical guitarists listed as notable in their respective epochs. One of the most renowned Flamenco guitarists in recent decades was Paco de Lucía. Flamenco music is a popular traditional music associated with the Andalucia region of southern Spain. It is characterized by intricate syncopated rhythms intimately informed by a gypsy dance style. Flamenco guitarists also often accompany flamenco singers performing "cante jondo". Paco de Lucía was also one of the first flamenco guitarists to have successfully crossed over into other genres of music such as classical and jazz. Richard Chapman and Eric Clapton, authors of Guitar: Music, History, Players, describe de Lucía as a "titanic figure in the world of flamenco guitar", and Dennis Koster, author of Guitar Atlas, Flamenco, has referred to de Lucía as "one of history's greatest guitarists.".
