I think you are grossly underestimating Yngwie's impact but that's OK. The sweeps and the neoclassical stuff are by themselves enough to place him in the pantheon but I think it is the overall package that combines these in the lightning speed (next level) that made everyone playing the guitar and had a remote connection to harder sounds shut up and listen. The guitar no longer sounded the same. The bar was raised way higher than it was ever raised before. A different instrument. Like I've said before (here!), you need EVH and Yngwie and you basically get all modern guitar playing derived just from those two.
This is something I have discussed time and time again with soooo many people of the era, totally unrelated people from all over the world. I mean you are saying his influence was on the lead guitarists of this world. Dude, like, this is HUGE by itself. I think it's unfair to limit his influence to Yngwie clones (which there are so many still) and euro power (which is an entire subgenre, add also "shredding", two subgenres, one man), while in practice it was pretty much everyone playing guitar seriously.
I will not take away anything from EVH's influence as you described it but I will continue to put Yngwie next to him.
I also came across this and I wanted to applaud, so I'll just paste it:
Source
some music business guy at quora wrote: “How significant is Yngwie Malmsteen”?
It would be hard to overstate his significance. He completely changed rock guitar as we knew it when he made his debut in the early 80s. It was a time when there were two guitarists every hard rock or heavy metal guitarist was trying to play like: Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads. They had both set a new standard for playing and then when Yngwie emerged on the scene, everything changed. He was playing the electric guitar in a way nobody had done before. He raised the bar for what was considered to be state the art technique. Randy Rhoads had added some classical influence to heavy metal but Yngwie Malmsteen used classical music not just as an embellishment to standard heavy metal, but as the foundation for it. His list of influences contained more classical composers than rock guitarists. He somehow managed to combine classical type melodies with the aggression and attitude of rock.
This is him in 1983 with the band Alcatrazz, with Graham Bonnet who had been Ritchie Blackmore’s vocalist in Rainbow. This type of playing was unprecedented then. His tone, the clarity, his vibrato, his precision, the complete authority he has over the guitar, combined with an innate sense of stage presence only the best of the best ever have are all evident here at only 19 years age:
The next year he quit Alcatrazz and released his solo debut album. Within a year of the release of his first solo album- Rising Force - if you were a hard rock or heavy metal guitarist, and I was, you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing guitarists talk about him. A lot of people have written one or two hit songs, or have a few successful albums, but how many have actually changed the way people play the electric guitar? Jimi Hendrix did. Eddie Van Halen did, and then Yngwie did.
It wasn’t just a style of music but a whole way of looking at playing the instrument that he changed. In the 1980s the only guitarist from the past who remained as big of an influence as he had been in the 70s in hard rock and heavy metal was Eddie Van Halen. Yngwie Malmsteen and Eddie Van Halen were the two most influential rock guitarists of the 1980s. They were the two players most people wanted to emulate. You could to any hard rock/metal club and hear bands with their lead guitarists trying to sound like Eddie or Yngwie. Even on the albums of bands with major record label deals, you could hear a difference in the playing. It’s what people tend to call “shredding” or playing with a state of the art technique. Bands were replacing their lead guitarists to get players who were keeping up with what what the new standard for playing guitar. If you were stuck in the past, if you still had 70s technique in the 80s, you got left behind.
Here is one of Yngwie Malmsteen’s best known songs: “Black Star” from the album Yngwie J. Malmsteen’s Rising Force. It was his opportunity to play the type of music he wanted without having to fit into someone else’s band. This was released in March of 1984 when Yngwie was only 20 years old. It is the album that changed electric guitar playing forever.
A new standard was set. The result was a tremendous number of players trying to emulate Yngwie Malmsteen. Not surprisingly, Yngwie and Eddie Van Halen were the two guys you were most likely to see on the cover of guitar magazines in the 80s.There were players who did manage to learn to do some of what he did, but one of the things they always lacked was the vibrato Yngwie has. His sense of freedom on the instrument, his complete sense of mastery over the electric guitar by 1984 standards was unparalled before he was even old enough to legally buy a beer.
How does somebody accomplish that? Here’s a brief explanation of that. Yngwie talks a little about his upbringing in Sweden, what caused him to move here at 18, and how quickly that changed his career:
Other players play solos they have rehearsed hundreds or thousands of times, but Yngwie improvises his solos. You could have followed him around every night and you’d never hear him play his solos the same way twice. He wasn’t just playing something he’d memorized; he was creating music spontaneously. His tone and vibrato alone are instantly recognizable. People have a harder time emulating those things than they do playing his music, which is saying a lot because it is not easy music to play. There are people who learned how to play the notes, but they still didn’t sound like him.
All the greats have their own distinguishable sound and it sets them apart form everyone else. If you’re great, people can recognize the sound of your playing immediately. Only a few have that and Yngwie Malmsteen is one of them. A lot of people tried to copy what he did, to the point a whole new term for that style of rock guitar playing was invented - “neoclassical.” It’s hard rock or heavy metal with a heavy classical influence. He has always wanted to play that type of music and that’s what he has always done. He’s one of the few hard rock/heavy metal musicians whom I’ve never once heard anyone accuse them of “selling out.” He follows no trends and makes no compromises. There have been many, many imitators, but like anything else, the innovator, the original is always the best.
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