Biography
Yannis Spathas was the lead guitarist for the Greek rock band Socrates Drank The Conium in the early 1970s. His style is very similar to that of Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Duane Allman, Eric Clapton, and some of Tony Iommi's bluesier music. Of these, Hendrix's influence was probably the greatest, evidenced mainly by the fact that Socrates Drank the Conium covered several of his songs at their early concerts in the clubs of Athens, Greece, where they were discovered.
Guitars and style
Like several of his most prominent influences, Spathas produced his blues-rock/hard rock sound with a mid-sixties sunburst Fender Stratocaster and a black Gibson Les Paul Custom. During the 1980s and the 1990s he played a Candy Apple Red Roland GR-505 guitar synthesizer controller with a pedalboard that included a GR-700 guitar synthesizer bank, a GR-300 polyphonic synthesizer floor unit and a PG-200 guitar effector. This Roland guitar synthesizer was primarily used for clean guitar work. This was in part due to the influence of Eric Clapton, who used a similar equipment during the Edge of Darkness period in 1985. Spathas used this guitar extensively for live and studio use until 2004. In addition to electric guitars and guitar synthesizers, Spathas also uses a variety of Ovation, Guild and Larrivée acoustics.
Technique
Spathas' way of playing was characterized by speed, fluency and cleanness, much like Deep Purple's guitar virtuoso Ritchie Blackmore. It is also highly reminiscent of the melodic playing of Tony Iommi, lead guitar of Black Sabbath. Despite his confessed love for the music of Jimi Hendrix, his music, and moreover his touch while playing, reminds one of the great British guitarist Ollie Halsall, during those years playing with Patto and then with John Hiseman's Tempest (where he substituted for Alan Holdsworth in the late 1973). Spathas can be considered one of the most talented, original, unfortunately unknown, guitarists in Europe during the '70s, maybe the most "guitaristic" decade for rock & roll music
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