One of the most inventive rock guitar players of the 1970s, Ritchie Blackmore combined blues and rock riffs with classically-inspired phrasing to create a new soloing vocabulary. His scalic passages and Baroque harmonies added a new regal drama to the sound of rock, inspiring a legion of followers that includes such charachters as Yngwie Malmsteen, Jason Becker and Vinnie Moore. His style is widely regarded as the very basis of modern metal soloing.