No one could accuse Joe Bonamassa of not staying busy. This year alone, the guitar sensation has released three albums—a solo disc titled Dust Bowl; a group album titled 2, with Black Country Communion; and a duet album of soul classics, titled Don’t Explain, with acclaimed singer Beth Hart.

13 could be a lucky number for alt rock fans with a slew of heavyweight releases due this year. Here’s a possible Top 10 of skewed and inventive guitar goodness coming your way.

Conventional wisdom when playing slide dictates that guitarists mute with the palms of their picking hands in order to keep extraneous sonic activity to a minimum. That’s part of how Duane Allman, Joe Walsh, Ry Cooder, Derek Trucks and scores of others have achieved warm, buttery well-defined tones over the decades. This is especially true when playing electric guitar, where strings can rattle, buzz and sustain wildly given a little gain and a hard-driving picking hand.

There’s no getting around it: for any beginning guitarist who aspires toward excellence, practice is the essential component in achieving that goal. But what about players who’ve already reached the pinnacle of their craft? Do they continue to practice, and what exactly does “practice” mean to them? Below, ten six-stringers who’ve climbed the ladder to greatness share their thoughts on the topic.

It's pretty common for groupings of two or three notes in scales. Perhaps the most popular guitar scale of all time, the Minor Pentatonic, is built on a two-note-per-string 'box' shape which keeps every note easily within reach, promotes the option of big bends, double-stops, super-fast repeated sequences and of course the much-copied 'Chuck Berry lick.' It works because it's easy to play, it's expressive, and it allows even beginner guitarists to sound like they know where they're going, because it's very hard to hit a wrong note with this scale (and even if you do, you can easily find the next note to make things right again).

Gary Clark Jr. is the new blues guy on the scene. Well, new in the sense that he is just now getting the attention he deserves with the release of his major label debut Blak And Blu, but Clark has been releasing music for the past decade.

Before Nirvana released their sophomore album Nevermind in 1991, punk rock and indie music was considered niche-- something the masses would never touch. Punk certainly wasn’t getting any mainstream airplay, and the focus was on the hair metal bands of the era: Mötley Crüe, Poison, Warrant. With Nevermind, Nirvana brought punk and indie rock into the popular music realm and made alternative music ubiquitous.

When it comes to guitar effects, there’s something about the “talk box” that listeners especially love. A collective roar still rolls through the crowd whenever Peter Frampton breaks out the unit during live shows.

With the CD and DVD set Celebration Day riding high on the Billboard charts, we need no reminder of the potent magic Jimmy Page created as the leader of Led Zeppelin.

Eddie Van Halen, like many of his constituents at the highest level of musical ability, is both a revolutionary and a traditionalist.