Ritchie Blackmore joins previous award winners including Honeyboy Edwards, Jeff Beck, Bonnie Raitt, Liona Boyd, Jose Feliciano and B.B. King. Recipients are recognized for a lifetime of contributing to the legacy of the guitar and having a singular historical importance to the development and historical appreciation of the instrument.
Said Blackmore, "I'm rather thrown by the magnitude of this honorable award. I am grateful to accept this award and this recognition."
Blackmore's guitar playing has inspired countless numbers of musicians to follow in his wake, and very few guitarists can match his lifetime of achievements. His influence is pervasive amongst players in a wide variety of genres, from blues-rock and heavy metal on to neoclassical and pop rock. It is conceivable that every electric guitarist on the planet has learned how to play the riff Blackmore came up with for "Smoke On The Water".
Ritchie Blackmore: "I'm More Comfortable on Acoustic GuitarWhen I first started playing this type of music [with Blackmore's Night back in 1997], it took me a long time to get used to it because of the way it's played.
"The right hand is fingerstyle guitar most of the time; and if I'm playing rock, I play with a plectrum, so that right there is a big difference - whether you're picking the notes or playing fingerstyle.
"I had... not problems, but it was strange for me to play with an acoustic guitar in the beginning. But I've become used to that now so after 20 years I'm almost more comfortable with the acoustic guitar than I am with the electric.
"The electric is all about the sound and loudness and sustained notes, bending notes. And of course with the acoustic, you can't really do that. If you bend the notes on the acoustic guitar, it will go out of tune.
"So I play more runs, single-string kind of stuff, it is quite a drastic difference. For instance, I've just come off tour doing the rock stuff [with revamped Rainbow] a month ago and that went great, it was good to have a blast and play loud.
"But of course when I'm playing acoustic music, I have to have longer nails. So within that month, I had to grow my nails very quickly to play a fingerstyle guitar. I also aplied acrylics to my fingernails so that they are actually longer and stronger. So there's little things like that that are very different, and if I'm playing mandolas and hurdy-gurdys, that's a whole another world."
