Have you ever asked yourself, “how many genres are there? How many even exist?” You may have been frustrated to see that there is such thing as pop rock, progressive rock, soft rock, easy rock, and jazz rock. Aren’t they all just ‘rock?’ The answer: yes and no. There are sub-genres of genres, and even sub-sub-genres that are part of a greater whole, yet still distinct in nature. Some websites endeavor to count how many genres/sub-genres/sub-sub-genres exist, and a few have gotten up to 858. Others over 1,000.
Unfortunately, there is no universal standard for choosing what song applies to what genre, and as time goes on more genres are created. In addition, contemporary musician Kyle Trager said, “Whatever you call a certain type of music depends largely on context and who you are talking with. Humans instinctively categorize things, and we notice patterns in musical styles that form our ideas of genre. These ideas can be useful to describe music that fits within a definite style, but genre categories are also formed to describe artistic movements, works created within certain time periods, or a group of styles that are marketed to the same audience.”
Some genres of music are geographically specific, like Caribbean mambo, and Guatemalan marimba. Others are combinations of two separate genres like electronic funk. Some bands have even taken advantage of Spotify’s song suggestion algorithm and have created mixtures of genres to create “never-before-heard-of” music just for the heck of it. In short, genres are an unstandardized form of music categorization, and can sometimes overcomplicate things.
When it comes to Buckethead, at this point it is obvious that sources vary on the ‘official’ list of genres he can play. His Wikipedia page lists eight but seems to be leaving out quite a few distinguishable ones like bluegrass and pop.
Frankly, at least in my opinion, sub-genres are about as far as I am willing to go, though others may feel strongly about sub-sub-genres. Perhaps we need to draw a line between sub-sub-genres; after all, thrash metal, black metal, speed metal, and death metal all seem the same to me, but to others they are distinct. So, depending on your personal criteria, Buckethead genres can play between 8 and several dozen genres. Neither are wrong, neither are incorrect; it just depends on your criteria.
What amazes me about Buckethead is that he has explored several general genre categories outside of rock and metal, i.e. funk, bluegrass, pop, ambient, etc. with a seemingly unlimited number of sub-sub-genres within them. These general categories are so different from each other and harder to master, and though Buckethead is considered a shredder and rock musician, he is full of surprises and will pull out Blues or Jazz out of nowhere and blow us away.
Here is a link to a bunch of Buckethead genres clustered together in a short video.
Also, here is a link to the starter pack YouTube playlist which lists some great places to start listening to Buckethead categorized by genre.