Yngwie Malmsteen
Sweden, 1978–now
Swedish guitarist (b. 1963) who put baroque violin writing on an electric guitar and made a genre of it. Rising Force (1984) runs harmonic minor arpeggios and diminished sequences at a speed nobody had attempted, and every shred player since works in the vocabulary he assembled.
MusicRoots documents 7 artists who influenced Yngwie Malmsteen and 0 artists Yngwie Malmsteen influenced in turn. Every connection cites a published source.
Who influenced Yngwie Malmsteen?
- Jimi Hendrix — The starting gun. Malmsteen was seven, watching a television report of Hendrix's death that showed him burning his guitar, and picked the instrument up that day.
- Ritchie Blackmore — One of only two guitarists Malmsteen credits, and the route by which he found the rest: Blackmore's minor scales over blues riffs are what pointed him at classical music in the first place.
- Niccolo Paganini — The blueprint, taken at ten — not only the writing but the showman's image around it. Malmsteen's own summary is that he threw guitar technique out and applied violin technique instead.
- Johann Sebastian Bach — Named first in Malmsteen's own list of where the classical side comes from.
- Antonio Vivaldi — The other baroque source Malmsteen names, and the one closest to what his arpeggio sequences actually do.
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky — Named in the same breath as Bach and Vivaldi when Malmsteen lists where the classical side comes from.
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — One of the composers Malmsteen's sister put in front of him as a boy, and one he still names.