A proposition

[lincsyokel2]

The guitar work on 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond Part VI - VIII' is the finest piece of Progressive Rock guitar played by any human on this planet in the last 10,000 years.

Discuss.

[lincsyokel2]

[Lottiman]

Dave Gilmour Genius Superb  ;D

[Unwashed]

Shine On You Crazy Diamond, prog rock?  Hardly.  It's derivative blues, there's no harmonic or thematic progression.  Even the idea of isolating the prog-rock guitar for special praise is self-contradictory as prog is much more about the ensemble.

I'd start with Steve Howe as the definitive prog-rock guitarist, but even then it's difficult to isolate a particular track that epitomises his art - say Yours is no Disgrace, but it's just an example.

And it would only be right to mention Robert Fripp too, but if I picked my favourite King Crimson track, Indoor Games,  his guitar, though defining and essential, is hardly ostentatious.

Same with just about any prog act I can think of (Genesis, Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull, ect) - there are guitars there, but it's just not easy to define prog in terms of its lead guitar - that's a defining characteristic of rock and blues, not prog.

[Bugloss2009]

there are those people who would say that a sentence with the words Progressive Rock in it would be greatly improved if the words "finest piece of......" were replaced with "biggest load of.....". I am not one of those people.

then there are people who would say that the most Mandrax befuddled guitar noodlings of Syd Barrett are more interesting than anything produced by La Gilmour.....

[lincsyokel2]

Shine On You Crazy Diamond, prog rock?  Hardly.  It's derivative blues, there's no harmonic or thematic progression.  Even the idea of isolating the prog-rock guitar for special praise is self-contradictory as prog is much more about the ensemble.

I'd start with Steve Howe as the definitive prog-rock guitarist, but even then it's difficult to isolate a particular track that epitomises his art - say Yours is no Disgrace, but it's just an example.

And it would only be right to mention Robert Fripp too, but if I picked my favourite King Crimson track, Indoor Games,  his guitar, though defining and essential, is hardly ostentatious.

Same with just about any prog act I can think of (Genesis, Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull, ect) - there are guitars there, but it's just not easy to define prog in terms of its lead guitar - that's a defining characteristic of rock and blues, not prog.

According to good ole Wikipedia

Progressive rock (also referred to as prog rock or prog) is a subgenre of rock music[1] that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of a "mostly British attempt to elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility."[2] John Covach, in Contemporary Music Review, says that many thought it would not just "succeed the pop of the 1960s as much as take its rightful place beside the modern classical music of Stravinsky and Bartók."[3] Progressive rock bands pushed "rock's technical and compositional boundaries" by going beyond the standard rock or popular verse-chorus-based song structures. The Oxford Companion to Music states that progressive rock bands "...explored extended musical structures which involved intricate instrumental patterns and textures and often esoteric subject matter."[4] Additionally, the arrangements often incorporated elements drawn from classical, jazz, and later world music. Instrumentals were common, while songs with lyrics were sometimes conceptual, abstract, or based in fantasy

which I agree with. Pink Floyd isnt by any measure blues, since it fails to adhere any of the principles of blues - its not 12 bar, and it doesnt use chord patterns such as root third fifth root. So Blues it aint. But it does fit the description of Prog Rock as above.

Unless you have a different defintion?