We’ve had a great time running this the first of a series of polls we are planning around guitars and guitarists and we’ve also learnt a lot on the way about the power of social media and the online guitar community with much of the voting traffic coming from posts on Facebook and fan forums.

The poll is really the end result of several ongoing debates (sometimes heated) amongst us here at dbTwang and friends. We decided to have the poll to put this ongoing debate out there for the world to have it’s say. We drew up a shortlist and then took suggestions from our members, readers of this blog and the online guitar world at large, so there were some unexpected inclusions and omissions from the shortlist and surprises in the votes we received but then that’s the nature of anything that is community led.

In truth musical expression is territorial rather than hierarchical, in that guitarists stake out their own style and voice and it either connects or doesn’t. So you could argue that making the debate a horserace is a little disingenuous. The point of the poll and particularly forcing ourselves to choose just three is to make us really consider what it is that connects for us and which of these great guitarists (and they are all great within their own territories) have lengthened the vanishing point of possibilities for the guitar either through innovative technique or sound and within that subjective context voting in a poll is not totally dissimilar to purchasing a download and having it logged in a Billboard chart.

So, Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado we are happy to announce that the great Brian Setzer is the peoples favorite.

Brian Setzer - The Peoples Favorite

Picture: Wikipedia

The Final Results

Top 20 from our shortlist of 97 Guitarists

1st: Brian Setzer – 351 votes

2nd: Joe Bonamassa – 208

3rd: Eric Clapton – 176

4th: Tommy Emanuel – 129

5th:   Jeff Beck – 131

6th: Jimmy Page – 119

7th: Eddie Van Halen – 87

8th: BB King – 78

9th: John Mayer – 74

10th: Steve Vai – 73

11th: Dave Gilmour – 72

12th:  Joe Satriani – 67

13th: Carlos Santana – 66

14th: Matthew Bellamy – 56

15th: Angus Young – 53

16th: Lindsey Buckingham – 52

17th: Chuck Berry – 48

18th: Steve Howe – 44

19th: Slash – 39

20th: Gary Moore – 38

Watch this space for our next poll, The People’s Favorite Heavy Metal Guitarists, we’ll be taking suggestions for the poll shortlist very soon.

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Fintan

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Guitarists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.