Buckethead is an amazing guitarist with work dating all the way back to the 1990s. My exposure to Buckethead started sometime around the mid-2000s when Guitar Hero II was popular. Jordan was the big difficult song in that game and everyone was talking about it being the song that, if you could beat, you knew your shit with Guitar Hero. Slowly but surely I was exposed to more Buckethead through friends and my own searches on him. Notably in the late 2000s me and a friend went through his entire (at the time) discography, listening to each song of each album that we could find to get a full picture of what Buckethead could do and what he was. These albums included standout efforts from him such as Electric Tears, Captain Eo’s Voyage, Colma, Crime Slunk Scene, Monsters and Robots, Inbred Mountain, and Albino Slug (Forgotten Trail anyone???). Very quickly I learned of Buckethead’s world-class skill concerning his songwriting abilities, technical abilities, and quality PLUS quantity approach to music creation. I found it quite jaw-dropping that he had albums capturing not only awesome and empowering rock, but also extremely spooky music, mixed with a blend of downright weird and experimental. It’s hard to say now with all of his Pike releases, but for a long time my favorite album from him was crime slunk scene. The absolutely perfect guitar solos as well as the catchy and soulful rhythmic lines abound in Soothsayer. The album as a whole underscores Bucketheads ability to blend advanced technical proficiency with beautiful and melodic phrasing. Of course, Nottingham Lace was a huge track that showed this as well. Another notable part of Buckethead’s work is that you’ll have “diamond in the rough” tracks that are hidden in his stranger albums. Some albums are laced with experimental and skronky riffs to, if only for a single song, give way to a beautiful and soulful ballad. The pikes are full of songs like this that stand in sharp contrast to the dissonant tracks replete on some albums. Beak to Scoop comes to mind here, even though it’s not actually a ballad. No doubt it’s for this reason that he eventually released an album full of beautiful songs called A Real Diamond in the Rough. Recently, I found some Buckethead’s pikes to be the perfect companion when doing activities such as biking, longboarding, or walking through the woods. It is yet another element that speaks to Buckethead’s professionalism in terms of him being able to deliver music. Not just can you rock out and bang your head to his stuff, but also take a nice peaceful ride through a beautiful area with it on as well. I’ve mentioned before one of Bucketheads most impressive features is his ability to deliver top quality music at top levels of quantity. The amount of music that he releases is absolutely insane, and through my journey playing guitar, recording music, and composing music, I look forward to seeking how Buckethead puts out top-notch content at such a high rate. And I’ll certainly be making videos about the process as I discover more pieces of how he does it.
