Stevie Ray Vaughan – Texas Flood Audio Cassette

There is no real blues without torture. And what Stevie Ray Vaughan went through in order to produce his stunning range of guitar sounds and expressions was a severe punishment in itself.

To optimise the tone, he would use incredibly heavy and thick strings, which were actually painful to play in a blues style – sometimes slicing into the tips of his fingers as he pushed them into wide bends. The pain was clearly visible on his face, and the guitar fingerboard literally convulsed with the power of his vibrato. This was a man for whom no agony was too great in the name of musical expression.

Yngwie Malmsteen – Eclipse Audio Cassette (1990)

The impact of Swedish prodigy Yngwie Malmsteen on the guitar scene in the 1980s was almost inescapable. He was most often documented as a classically-influenced rock/metal guitarist, and there was nothing inaccurate about that. But there was a lot more to Malmsteen’s ‘product’ than taking Paganini violin lines and fusing them with existing hard rock techniques on a guitar.

Joe Satriani – Surfing With The Alien (1987)

Joe Satriani’s Surfing With The Alien was an instrumental rock guitar album showing off some truly stunning fretboard pyrotechnics. I was just starting to pursue the electric guitar at a more advanced level when this album was released, and after seeing the unmitigated praise it was getting in the guitar magazines, I bought it.