Over the past decade or so, we’ve seen the emergence of quite a distinctive approach to the electric guitar. Although not gone, the idea of the ‘rhythm’ side and the ‘lead’ side as distinctly separate entities, has become somewhat blurred.
These days, certainly with some styles or genres, it’s equally rhythm and lead, chord and melody, pick and fingers, combining elements of funk, jazz and fusion, and borrowing vocabulary from piano and horn parts. This style is often labelled ‘neo-soul’ or ‘neo-soul fusion’, a nod to the similar genre-spanning developments in soul and R&B in the 2000s.
