Happy Birthday GLENN TIPTON (video)

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Glenn Raymond Tipton (born 25 October 1947) is an English Grammy Award-winning guitar player and songwriter. Often noted for his complex playing style and classically influenced solos, he is best known as one of the lead guitarists for heavy metal band Judas Priest.

Tipton was born on 25 October 1947, in Blackheath, Staffordshire, to Olive and Doug Tipton. He attended Olive Hill Primary School when he was about five years old. His brother, Gary, was a guitar player for a local band called the Atlantics. Early on, Tipton was taught to play the piano by his mother.

Tipton learned to play guitar at age 19 with his first guitar being a Hofner acoustic guitar. He would then play on a Rickenbacker until he was able to afford a Fender Stratocaster. This guitar would become his main live guitar until it was stolen at a show. Tipton soon bought a black Stratocaster and, later, a Gibson SG afterwards with money he received to replace his old guitar. Both of these guitars can be seen when Judas Priest played on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1975.

Tipton is known for his complex, classically influenced solos, and he has a unique guitar-playing technique. Many of his solos are very difficult to transcribe, and his playing is notable for his double lead guitar trades with fellow Judas Priest guitarist K.K. Downing. Tipton's solos have maintained a consistent style for most of his career, but he has continuously incorporated new techniques into his playing over the years as he has developed as a guitarist. The usual arrangement on Judas Priest songs feature riffs and leads by both Tipton and Downing. Starting with Judas Priest's fourth album, Stained Class, Tipton began to dominate the band's songwriting, especially on the more commercial tracks which almost exclusively featured his guitar leads. Following the release of their sixth album, British Steel, most songs in the live set lists were Tipton's. On the whole, his solos feature in almost 60% of Judas Priest's total catalog.

In contrast to Downing, Tipton's solos tend to feature a more melodic, legato blues rock sound, making use of harmonic minor scales, Aeolian mode, pentatonic scales, and techniques such as sweep-picking arpeggios, legato picking, tremolo/alternate picking, hammer-ons, and pull-offs; moreover, the solos often showcase both accuracy and aggression. However, like Downing, his playing sometimes emphasizes speed rather than precision, and Tipton has been known to occasionally use pinch harmonics and dive bombs in his solos (for example, on Invader). Tipton also has a trademark 2-strings bend/whammy dive scream for ending the solo, as evident in solos like All Guns Blazing, Heavy Metal, Demonizer, Bullet Train, and Ram It Down. In 1978, Tipton began to incorporate tapping into his playing, which Downing promptly did as well. In the mid-1980s, both guitarists started to use the complex technique of sweep-picking, which can be notably heard on the title track of their 1990 album Painkiller. Both have continuously used these techniques ever since.

In 1997, Tipton released his solo album, Baptizm of Fire, featuring a host of well-known musicians including Billy Sheehan, Cozy Powell and Don Airey, among others where he showed his technical guitar playing abilities.

source: wikipedia

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