8 Female Guitarists to Jam to this Guitar Month
Photo Source: MTV
My first guitar was a sunset colored Fender Stratocaster. I screamed when I found it leaning against the foot of my bed frame on my 10th birthday. Call me dramatic, but it had been a long four years of styling the signature Avril Lavigne necktie and singing into a hairbrush. The guitar was a necessity.
Some “Stairway-to-Heaven”-type songs later, it hit me that everything I was learning was played by men. The whole reason I picked up this contraption that weighed as much as I did was to join a sea of lady rockers in taking over the world, but it turned out they could hardly take over Z100 radio.
More recently- 15 years and many callused fingers later- a study by USC’s Annenberg Institute found that even still, only 20.2% of the top songs from 2019-2020 were by women; 12.9% were female songwriters; and only 2% producers. Yet something struck a chord in the little girls who have recently picked up a six-string, and today we see women accounting for 50% of aspirational guitar players.
These eight famous female guitarists are turning up their amplifiers and encouraging girls to pick up a guitar. They’re changing the sound of music and the message it gives: Girls don’t just rock, they shred.
H.E.R.
H.E.R. is a musical inspiration in her lyrics, her style, and of course in the fact that we hardly ever see her without a guitar in her hands. H.E.R. began playing the blues when she was seven years old and never stopped.
H.E.R. became the first black woman to collaborate with Fender and have her own Stratocaster. “I want to inspire,” she said, “to pass the torch on to the next girls who want to kill it on the guitar.”
Arianna Powell
Arianna Powell is a guitarist who took every chance she could to play with any artist who would have her. This led her to make quite a name for herself, touring with Nick Jonas, Chris Brown, Drake Bell, The Black Eyed Peas, and more.
Many female singers own the stage with their voice and use a guitar to put them over the edge, but Powell is a proud guitarist who makes her presence known with the sting of a guitar lick.
Orianthi
Orianthi is the Australian-born, Los Angeles-based, super-guitarist we all had on our iPod in 2008. Her smash hit “According to You” sent her commercially flying, but even more impressively, she’s shared the stage with guitar gods like Carlos Santana, Michael Jackson, and Alice Cooper.
Orianthi studied classical guitar when she was nine and classical theory in college, but is now heavily associated with the electric guitar. “It’s how you pick up different personalities… it makes you play differently,” she said.
Lianna La Havas
Lianne La Havas shockingly didn’t pick up a guitar until she was 18. “I never had any role models that were female playing the guitar...so I used to think that guitar was just for boys,” La Havas told Guitar World. Thankfully, that idea didn’t stick.
“I became obsessed with discovering new styles that could use as many fingers as possible, and the richest chord possible, and then I just put that all together.” This alt/folk soul singer has since acquired a distinctive and full guitar sound that is completely her own.
Molly Miller
That’s Dr. Molly Miller, to you! She’s the chair of the Guitar Department at Los Angeles College of Music, she tours with Jason Mraz, and is the front woman of her own trio, Molly Miller Trio. So basically she’s a superhero.
“When I was 13 my guitar teacher showed me Purple Haze. I had no idea guitar was cool until that moment,” said Miller. “That was the beginning of a shift for me; guitar became a choice.”
Tori Kelly
At age 15 Tori Kelly taught herself how to play the guitar. At 16, she made it through to Hollywood on American Idol season 9. Tori Kelly is a special guitar player because America was able to watch her grow into her skills. This surely gives a confidence boost to any young girl deciding to pick up the guitar for the first time.
“Just me and my guitar is really how it started,” said Kelly.
Lari Basilio
“I reinvent myself with each song,” said Brazilian guitarist Lari Basilio.
Basilio fell in love with guitar when she was 8. She’s now 32, and has played alongside guitarists like Paul Gilbert, Andy Timmons, and Steve Vai. She has impressed a worldwide audience with her unmatched skills and creativity.
HAIM
Technically three ladies fall under this one- but all with the same last name. HAIM came up as a staple band in indie music but grew to become a mesmerizingly talented and standard-raising rock band. “It’s a tough business to be women in rock,” says eldest sister Este. Middle sister Danielle remembers “going to a guitar shop and the man at the guitar shop asks you if you’re looking for a guitar for your boyfriend.”
All three are multi-instrumentalists who become hyper-alive when holding a guitar. The HAIM sisters’ fans and supporters include icons like Mike Shinoda, Arctic Monkeys, and Taylor Swift.
Maybe lady rockers will take over the world (or at least music) after all.
Support your favorite female guitarists this month, and every month!