While it’s impossible to substitute for a top notch musical spirit, there are times where technology can serve as a soulmate. Such is the case with British guitar maestro Allan Holdsworth. He developed an electronics-driven sound that incorporated long-sustain / constant volume lines and a fat tone that was equal parts distorted guitar, violin and '80s synth pad. To top it off, his improvisational lines contained turns and leaps that forged a new vocabulary for guitarists. His performance at the Deutsche Jazz Festival in Frankfurt, 1986, capture Holdsworth at the cutting edge. He starts out on a Stratocaster copy plus heavy doses of digital delay, compression, pitch shifters and distortion. The instrumentalist then switches to the SynthAxe Guitar Synthesizer, a whole new invention that uses triggers under the frets and a separate set of short strings to track the guitarist’s playing and map it to synth modules (search YouTube for “Allan Holdsworth plays SynthAxe" ). Sadly, the “bionic guitarist” passed away in 2017.

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