Name: Is Jimi Hendrix the greatest guitar player of all time? | Rick Beato and Lex Fridman
Uploaded: 2026-03-08T21:34:51.000Z
Duration: 10 min 6 s
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You had, I think, an incredibly fun and diverse beginning to your music journey.

I heard somewhere that one of the things that made you fall in love with music was listening to guitar solos, some epic guitar solos.

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What's an early guitar solo that you remember you connected to spiritually, musically, where you're like, wow, there's magic in this.

Well, the first solo that I learned was hey Joe.

It was actually a good beginner song, you know, when I first started playing the guitar, because it has pretty simple chords, right?

And I learned the solo and I figured out this, like.

I didn't know that's what it was called, but learned this thing, and

it's like, whoa, he's just in this one shape here now.

If you could figure out the notes, you noticed that there was a little pattern to it.

And I showed my younger brother John, who started playing guitar right at the same time I did.

And I would play rhythm for him for five minutes while he would solo over hey Joe.

And then as soon as I'd start soloing, he'd throw the guitar down.

And so my mom eventually was like, what is going on here?

She's like, okay, I'll play rhythm for you.

And I was like, okay, it's like E, C, G, D, A.

And so my mom would literally play rhythm for 20 minutes while I'd play.

When I look back on it now, my mom's been gone for 10 years now.

When I look back on it, it's like, my God, my parents were so cool.

And Hendrix, in general, is kind of known for the rhythm not being simple rhythm, just the chords that you mentioned.

The rhythm side, he did all those really cool chord fragments, riffs and things like that.

I mean, many people put Hendrix as the greatest guitarist of all time.

If you somehow don't know who Rick Beato is, go on YouTube right now and watch your excellent interviews with musicians, watch your breakdown analysis of different songs, and

Watch your top 20 lists where you're very opinionated, sometimes very openly critical about certain kinds of song.

Opinions are fun, but they do change, Lex, from day to day.

when, anytime I do a list, if I do 20, I like to do 20, because that gives me some leeway to, to throw in.

I have to throw in something that is so weird that people, you know, something that a lot of people won't know just to have it on there.

So I can at least introduce a pretty, you know, I'll put somebody like a Alan Holdsworth, who's a famous fusion guitar player.

I'll throw in one of his solos or something.

Just some, some oddball solo in there, just so that people, as they're listening down the list, will get exposed to something they would not necessarily get exposed to.

Rick tried to tell me that Hendrix is not up there.

You know, you, you can say, well, there are people that inspire Jimi Hendrix.

Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt were the first two really big.

And Andre Segovia were three of the giants of the 20th century as far as guitar influences for most of the players that were to follow.

Django Reinhardt was, of course, a jazz guitarist and composer active mainly in France, and

is widely regarded as one of the greatest guitarists in jazz.

Well, there's a huge movement right now, gypsy jazz movement, as they call it, that is kind of built around this style of music that he played back in the early 20th century.

One of the things about Django is that he was in a fire and he had two of his third and fourth finger.

So his ring finger and pinky were essentially melted together.

He had no use of them, although he could use them while he was courting.

But a lot of these incredibly fast lines, he's just playing with two fingers, and it's amazing.

Him, Stefan Grappelli is a violinist that played with him a lot.

Everything he's doing there is improvised.

So bebop was the kind of Jazz that was also influential on you in your own life journey.

And it's this complicated, legendary kind of jazz that was very influential on the music that followed.

The big bands were happening in the, you know, from the 20s through the 40s, small people would go out and play in small groups that they would tour with.

And Charlie Parker, who's really kind of the.

One of the main figures of early bebop, really developed the language of it.

Usually the music that they're playing over are standard chord progressions that they would use as vehicles to improvise over.

And Charlie Parker created this language of improvisation that was far more sophisticated than the swing players of the big band era.

You know, think of people like Benny Goodman of that era.

They would have really fast tempo songs, angular lines, chromaticism, things like that.