Clapton is a more of a traditional blues player in line with the American blues niggers he was listening to, he simply congealed the best of American blues and repackaged it for the UK (don't get me wrong, he's great and he could play circles around me but that's the formula). Hendrix was basically an FX pioneer with whimsical psychedelic idiosyncrasies that he leaned on heavily. Both are kinda overrated and are only enduringly famous because they are also front men (Hendrix especially). Though also to his credit Clapton evolved quite a bit in his later years and re-invented himself quite a bit. "Tears In Heaven" might be daytime easy listening to a lot of people but you can really feel the real pain and loss that inspired it, that shit makes me want to cry.
Hendrix is harder to play if I had to make a call (partly because he played a righty guitar strung upside down lefty) but SRV makes them both look slow.
Ps. If you like Eddy, Paul Gilbert will make you cream your pants.
To further digress, if you dig Jimi, Roy Buchanan will make you say, "why the fuck have I never heard of this guy?"
Many in music have said over the years that SRV was the best. Clapton's base is blues, just like Led Zep.
I think SRV was the best of the three technically for sure, stylistically he was inspired a lot by Hendrix and had the luxury of coming later. Hendrix was a great rhythm player but SRV was inhuman on both rhythm and lead and was every bit as much a showman. Hendrix had more mass appeal than SRV in terms of genre and was probably the most original song writer. Clapton became the most refined/polished/well produced of the three and I probably play/listen to more Clapton than any of them, Clapton and Allman together on Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs that album has so much more to offer than just the (amazing) title track... Though again he was the one who lived to produce a lot more material.
Page is/was the best/most prolific riff writer who ever lived probably. Yeah he did a lot of straight up blues stuff (for instance Lemon song is really Killing Floor). A lot of his early stuff is just power chords and minor pentatonic but played with a ton of rawness and energy (he would go for anything and didn't care about making small mistakes). Then in later albums he evolves to writing shit like Stairway. He was probably the least colorful/musically sophisticated of this bunch (especially early) but there is a reason you hear as many Zep songs on the radio as you do all of the rest of these guys combined. You could go from beginner to advanced playing nothing but Page songs.
Ps. All three of them have a version of Little Wing so you can actually kinda compare them directly.
Good points. Clapton just made it to his 60s, whereas the other two did not. SRV was taken too young. Hendrix too, but....drugs.
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