Famous for: Being a true rock icon in
the way Sting, Bono, Cher, and Madonna are icons.
Slash is one of the charmed few who's celebrity
status is so accepted and secure that having a
last name is unnecessary. The name Slash instantly
conjures up his image of top hats, cowboy boots,
and leather chaps. His silhouette is more
recognizable than his face — which always
seemed to be obscured by his long hair. In addition
to the image, he's penned some of the most successful
riffs and memorable solos in rock history. He's
famous for the session work he's done. Never mind
that Slash can really play — his name
alone brings instant cache and "rock cred"
to any recording he guests on. No one is calling
Zakk Wylde for these sessions. They're not calling
Van Halen. And they're not even calling Jeff Beck
as much as they used to. They call Slash. From
a guitar perspective, Slash is also the last true
Guitar God. The last major influence
on a generation of young players who still cared
about playing lead guitar. Slash is also famous
for re popularizing Les Pauls during the age of
superstrats and Floyd Roses.
Infamous for: Ditching the Saul Hudson moniker, and
using a verb for a name. Having more hair in his
face than a sheepdog. Slash created an image morphed
from equal parts Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, and
Joe Perry. And like his idols, Slash also consumed
insane levels of drug and drink while partying
in the requisite rock star manner. At least Slash
hired a bodyguard to make sure he got home in
one piece.
Influences
Obvious: The most obvious influences are
Jimmy Page and Joe Perry. Slash can be thought
of as the last link in the chain of stylistic
evolution — if you can call it evolution —
from Page, to Perry, to Slash, in the same way
that Malmsteen is the stylistic evolution of Hendrix,
Blackmore and Uli Roth. In Slash, you can also
hear Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards,
and most of the Stones guitarists. There's also
some Brian May.
Not-so-obvious: Michael
Schenker, Cheap Trick, Ted Nugent, Wes Montgomery,
Nile Rodgers, Django Reinhardt, Johnny Thunders,
Steve Jones, Mick Ronson. Slash is a huge Alice Cooper fan.
Must be where he got his love of snakes.
Strengths
Attitude, image, and swagger. Slash realized
that you didn't need to be the most technically
proficient player to make your mark. He made Richards,
Page, and Perry his personal templates for his
image and guitar style. He used booze and heroin
to fuel the wasted bad-boy image. Slash is sex
personified, both as a sex symbol and in his guitar
style. Shirtless, Les Paul slung low, cigarette
hanging from his lip, sweaty curls obscuring his
face, Slash churned out dirty, sexy, raunchy,
rude, riffy rock. It was blatantly derivative
to anyone who had experienced 70s hard rock firsthand,
but it sure hit home on a younger audience that
was tiring of spandex, Aqua Net, and pretty boy
shredders. Guns N' Roses became the Rocks
-era Aerosmith of their generation.
Distinctiveness. Image aside, this is really
the key to Slash's popularity and success as a
guitarist. He doesn't bring anything particularly
new to the table as a guitarist, yet you can always
recognize Slash when you hear him. Like all great
guitarists, Slash has carved out a unique, instantly
recognizable style for himself. And he's done
it using rock's most fundamental building blocks.
There are silly Internet rumors going around suggesting
that he didn't actually play on this or that.
Anyone buying into that nonsense must not have
ears. Slash is one of the easiest players to identify
on any recording.
Versatility. Aside from his bands and projects,
Slash is the session player to the stars, similar
to the way Jeff Beck has been throughout his career.
You could argue that it's due to Slash's name cache. Clearly
that factors into things. But hire Slash, and you know
he'll deliver a wonderful rock guitar sound and
performance that's always recognizable. But we'd argue
that Slash also gets hired for his surprising versatility
in many genres. Slash has played on blues
albums, jazz albums, funk albums and punk albums.
He has lent his skills to artists as diverse as
Lenny Kravitz, Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Chic,
PFUNK, Fishbone, Bob Dylan, Alice Cooper, and
more.
If Slash weren't the bad ass, authentic rock stylist
he is, he wouldn't get these gigs. He'd just be
Dave Navarro — rock star for hire.
Weaknesses
Technique. Though he's cleaner and faster than
Page and Perry, Slash still comes from the sloppy
chops school of guitar. He admits this freely,
has called his picking technique his weakest point,
and has stated that if he didn't concentrate on
his right hand and really watch the angle, he
can lose it.
Songwriting. While he's a riff machine, Slash
is not a great songwriter. For example, the majority
of Appetite for Destruction was written
by Izzy Stradlin and Axl Rose. Slash's Snakepit
also proved the point, featuring great playing,
but largely unmemorable songs. His Velvet Revolver
partnership with Scott Weiland hasn't produced
anything particularly noteworthy either. As good
a player as Slash is, he can't carry a project
on his name alone. If he could, Snakepit would've
been multi platinum.
Originality. Here's the deal. Slash is
a good and distinctive player, but he isn't particularly
original. If you were a older guitarist and not
of the age that made Slash your first guitar hero,
you'd already heard Slash's schtick before.
Compared to Page and Perry, Slash can seem like
a copy of a copy — even though he plays their
style with a higher degree of technical proficiency.
Malmsteen took a similar approach by turbo-charging
Blackmore and Uli Roth, but he did so to a degree that
raised the technique bar for everyone. By contrast,
Slash really doesn't bring anything new to what his heroes started.
Tone
Everyone knows Slash is a Les Paul - Marshall
guy. In our opinion, he has one of the best Les
Paul tones in rock history. It's pretty darn
recognizable too. Nasty, unrefined, greasy
— it growls like a bitch. Appetite For Destruction
was so effective, in part, because those alley
cat songs were accompanied by some great alley
cat guitar sound. Slash's classic Guns N' Roses sound features far more distortion
and sustain than the Les Paul tones of Joe Perry
and Jimmy Page, but is rawer, thinner, and less processed than the Les Paul tones
of Zakk Wylde and John Sykes. You don't hear much of the string
or pick attack. It's very buzzy and almost ratty
sounding at times but somehow Slash seems to make
it work.
Whether by design or by accident, in Guns N' Roses, Slash
achieved a sound that was both distinctive and complementary to
Izzy's sound. When he started Snakepit, he went
for a much tighter, double-tracked Les Paul sound
that is far fatter and browner than his sound on Appetite
for Destruction.
With Velvet Revolver, Slash's lead tone changed
again. It's more nasal and trebly and definitely
shows off his Schenker influence. He also seems to be
borrowing a page from Dean Deleo, by using a very trebly guitar
sound to cut through the very thick de tuned rhythm
guitars.
To produce his tones, Slash uses Marshall Slash Signature Model half-stacks
exclusively. These amps are based on the Marshall Jubilee
Anniversary series, a high gain Marshall that most tone freaks despise.
His favorite guitar is still his handmade 59
yellow flame top non-Gibson replica Les Paul built
by Max Guitars in Los Angeles. This is the guitar
featured in the opening lick of Sweet Child
of Mine. As of 1994 Slash was reported to
own 81 guitars. Roughly half of them were Les
Pauls, and a large percentage of those are vintage
ones. For example, his axe lineup for Use Your
Illusion included a Tobacco 59 Les Paul (formerly
owned by Joe Perry), a 58 Les Paul Standard sunburst
with stock pickups, a 59 Flying V, a 59 Les Paul
with original pickups a 65 Strat, the Max Guitars
59 replica, and a 58 Explorer. His main guitar
for live work is an 87 Gibson Les Paul standard,
however he sometimes uses a B.C. Rich Mockingbird
on stage. Most of Slash's guitars are kept stock.
As with Marshall did with their Slash Amp, several
guitar companies produced Slash signature guitars
to cash in on the guitarist's popularity. The Gibson Custom shop
created Slash Model Les Paul Classic model with
an inlayed and painted Snakepit insignia. They listed for $8000.
75 were made between 1996 and 1998, and Slash owns two
of them. Epiphone produced a less expensive version of the guitar
featuring a snake logo sticker. Slash had to approve them,
and proclaimed the Epiphone Slash, "a good guitar." Slash's
other signature guitar is the Crossroads (6/12) Double Neck
manufactured by Guild.
Also of note, Slash is great at using the volume
knob and pickup selector in a very musical way.
He probably picked this up from Jeff Beck. Slash
is also famous for using feedback to increase
his sustain, much like Hendrix and Carlos Santana.
One of Slash's favorite settings for lead is the
neck pickup with tone control rolled back. This
setting produces what is known as woman tone,
and was made famous Eric Clapton with Cream. Slash
also likes to use feedback to sustain notes on
solos and intros.
The main effect Slash is really known for, is
the wah, which you can hear in the solo on Sweet
Child of Mine. Like Michael Schenker, Slash
sets the wah to various points to enhance different
frequencies of his tone. On occasion, Slash uses a talkbox.
Guitar Style
Slash is an anomaly in that he was a 70s stylist
who made his name in the 80s. In a time when music
was becoming utterly technique driven, he was
a throwback to a time when you had to actually
have attitude and sense of what the hell you were
playing. Yet growing up in the era of Van Halen,
he acquired some of the 80s idioms in his bag
of tricks. It doesn't affect his basic style,
but it gives him more options. That said, he doesn't
have the technique of a Warren DeMartini or a
Jake E. Lee, but he's got significantly more modern
chops than Page and Perry.
Guns N' Roses was sort of a combination of Aerosmith
and punk rock, a la Dead Boys, the New York Dolls,
or Sex Pistols. And as a rhythm player, Slash
brings punk and funk to the table. There is a
good amount of Johnny Thunders in his style, as
well as Joe Perry. You can hear Slash's punk influence
in his rhythm styles's sloppy choppiness, and
in his I don't give a fuck attitude. Slash's
funkier rhythm style probably came from Aerosmith
and Hendrix. It's evident in his rhythm work on
Lenny Kravitz's Always On The Run,
or Fishbone's Fix. Still, for the most
part, Slash relies primarily on power chord riffs
played on the lower strings, or arpeggiated figures.
As a soloist, Slash has recently tried to incorporate
his Michael Schenker influence into his lead style,
but he is really not a technique driven soloist.
He's much more of a feel player who emphasizes
tone, feel, and great attitude. Rather than running
scale patterns, he likes to play melodies, and
often links a series of melodic phrases together
to keep the listener enthralled. Slash plays for
the song, not to show off. He once said: "I don't
practice technique, but I play all the time, but
whatever I play has to be a song with a groove,
to which I can apply the right kind of riff or
solo. I'm kind of single-minded that way."
Slash relies on the Pentatonic scales for many of
his solos. As such, it would be very easy to write
him off as a one trick pony, but that's not the
whole story. Along with the pentatonic minor in blues
box positions, he also sometimes uses the Aeolian
and Dorian modes, the Mixolydian scale and pentatonic
major scale. Slash often plays pedal-steel bends
and uses the pentatonic major scale to create
leads that have a country sound. You can hear
this in Paradise City and Coma.
Look no further than Sweet Child Of Mine
to hear Slash's use of the Harmonic Minor scale.
Slash is a great playing great melodies over a
song's chord changes, especially during ballads.
If you think about it, a good portion of Guns
N' Roses' most successful tunes were ballads and
Slash's playing was a huge part of their success.
On Velvet Revolver's Contraband, Slash's playing is much different
than it was in Guns N' Roses. He's less
melodic, less bluesy, and more Metal. He plays
more runs based on diatonic scale shapes — apparently because
he'd been listening to a lot of UFO during the
making of the album. He also does more un-Slashlike
things like the cliche, 80s-style pinch harmonics, dive bombs,
and whammy abuse on the opening
cut Sucker Train Blues. This is the very stuff Slash stayed
away from and made fun of when he was in Guns N' Roses.
But when Contraband's big power ballad,
Fall To Pieces kicks in, there's the old Slash.
Playing melodies and hooks that
enhance the song, and a solo reminiscent of the
Sweet Child solo — played
over an identical ascending chord progression.
Of his picking style, Slash says: "I'm heavy handed in my
strumming, I hit the guitar really fucking hard."
It should come as no surprise to learn that Slash is not a
pure alternate picker. Like Angus Young, he mainly uses his left
hand for speed, often using pull-offs and hammer-ons
to sound notes. He does a good amount of right
hand muting on the bridge to make notes sound
more percussive in both his rhythm and lead playing.
A good example of this technique is the intro
to Welcome to the Jungle.
Vibrato:
Slash uses a wide, fast vibrato technique. Like
the rest of his guitar style, it's a little sloppy.
