Greg Howe
American musician
Gregory Howe (born December 8, 1963) is an American guitarist and composer. An active musician across four decades, he has released ten studio albums in addition to collaborating with a wide variety of artists.
Recording career
Solo
After leaving high school and playing the club circuit around the New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania areas with his brother Albert Howe (a singer) for most of the 1980s, Greg Howe officially began his solo career after sending a demo tape to Shrapnel Records in 1987, upon which he was immediately signed by founder Mike Varney. His self-titled debut album, Greg Howe, was released in 1988 during the popular shred era, and went on to become his highest-selling album; a 2009 article in Guitar World magazine ranked it tenth in the all-time top ten list of shred albums.
The following year, he joined with Albert to form a Van Halen-inspired hard rock group named Howe II. Through Shrapnel, they released two studio albums: High Gear (1989) and Now Hear This (1991). His second solo album, Introspection, was released in 1993. At this point his style had changed radically from the straightforward instrumental rock of both his debut and the Howe II albums, to a more jazz fusion-laden approach which remains unique and identifiable to this day; some of his signature traits being fast left-hand legato passages (having been influenced greatly by jazz fusion guitarist Allan Holdsworth), and the frequent use of tapping and odd time signatures. One particularly noteworthy aspect of Howe's legato technique is the "hammer-on from nowhere", in which a note is hammered-on to a different string without first being picked.
A trio of albums spanning the middle part of the decade – Uncertain Terms (1994), Parallax (1995) and Five (1996) – were all a consistent evolution of the sound he had adopted on Introspection. During this time he collaborated twice with guitarist Richie Kotzen for the albums Tilt and Project in 1995 and 1997, respectively.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q200732. VIAF identifies the subject as 79816155. The Library of Congress control number is n2010079082. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1963, 1987, 1988 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Greg Howe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.