Canadian Guitar Heroes

Fretboard gods of Canada, we salute you. Your skills with the strings have underscored our emotions and transformed our lives, from the Marshall-blasted note-wizardry of Rush's Alex Lifeson — showcased to perfection on "YYZ" from Moving Pictures — to the blues-rockin' brilliance of Jeff Healey (here electro-plating George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps") and the mercurial rock 'n' rollin' show-boating of Frank Marino (with his super-charged "Johnny B. Goode"). Chart your course from mellow pedal to frenetic shred, in Next Steps.

These homegrown guitar heroes are absolutely united in genius, but not in delivery — super-producer Daniel Lanois stretches out long pedal steel notes like telegraph wires across an endless horizon on "Panorama" from 2005's Belladonna, Joni Mitchell heralds the '70s with her signature strum on the easy, breezy "Big Yellow Taxi," and Annihilator kingpin Jeff Waters varies the pace from steady riff-skimming to all-out thrash delirium on "Alison Hell." Clean jazz and dirty blues each find a niche, in Deep Cuts.

Metal has its fair share of fast fingers, but so does jazz — check out Andrew Scott's clean, stunning work on "My Shining Hour" before taking a trip to Lester Quitzau's blues swamp with "Home On the Range" or visiting Kristin Sweetland's paradise of folsky jangle and chime, "Above Hotevilla." Multi-faceted Shalabi Effect – pairing the experimental guitar skills of Anthony Seck and Sam Shalabi — touches the void with "Apparitions."

Fellow Canadians: our nation's surplus of guitar talent runneth over, so we figured we'd borrow a load and offer it to you as this prize batch of heroic and eclectic Essentials. Blues, folk, hard-rock, thrash metal, jazz, country . . . it's all here, every fretboard inlaid with the mark of the maple leaf, even if some of the featured bands had roots outside of our national borders: the late, great Zal Yanovsky from the Lovin' Spoonful ("Do You Believe in Magic?") was born in Toronto, and Ottawa's Glen Drover blazed a trail in Megadeth ("Tornado of Souls") from 2004-2008. Skills like these don't grow on trees, (unless they're Canadian trees).