In high school, it was Hendrix and Neil Young at first. Then, Van Halen, Randy Rhoads

Later I got into Jeff Beck, SRV, Eric Johnson.

Then in the late 80s I was turned onto Living Colour and Vernon Reid just blew me away. 1992 brought the Praxis disk "Transmutation" and that's all she wrote.

I started getting into jazz after studying Reids stuff and I got into 'Trane and Dolphy. Free form jazz, post-bop stuff and Cool Jazz a la Miles and McLaughlin. And I tried to absorb the spirit of all the cool jazz guitarists like Hall, Roberts, early Benson, Farlow, Scofield, Stern, Martino, etc.

The stuff I do now is a perverse mixture of buckethead-influenced shred but more free-formed if that's possible and shying away from neo-classical phrasing; I play with a lot of triadic superimposition, chromaticism, and synthetic scales that neo-classical shredders avoided.
http://shredlikehell.com