My Guitar Influences - My Personal Top 5 Guitar Players

Thanks to @pechichemena I'm going to have a go at choosing my top 5 guitar influences, not necessarily my favourite players, but the ones that shaped my ear and hands.

Some info about me:
I am just about 40, have played the guitar off and on for 30 years - mainly putting it aside for a while after having kids and building a family - of course I still noodled but it's only recently that I have truly come back to try again.
This "off and on" approach has had some benefits and some drawbacks - the main benefits been that I kinda forgot who I was trying to emulate and just play what I play, of course I can listen to someone and be inspired by them but mainly my own stuff is my own which feels pretty good. The main drawbacks have been having to relearn/repractice some techniques and forgetting a lot of the tracks I used to play... but they are coming back to me a little as I come up with goals for the weekly openmic entries, steemit jams and Lick of the weeks.

Anyway, enough blather - on with the.. show?

Number 1:

No surprises here I would think - Steve Vai is the dude I most aspired to emulate growing up, Passion and Warfare and Alien Love Secrets were my most thrashed albums. I actually learned For The Love of God note by note with a Digitech RP7 that had a phrase trainer so you could slow things down.. should have bought the book because it was very time consuming as a young guy.
One of his best performances:

Number 2:

Although I don't listen to any of his music Frank Gambale had probably the most impact on my technique early on.
His instructional videos changed everything - I started using a pick and this is when I started actually practicing.

Number 3 4 and 5 could be in any order, they are all very much loved by me.

Jeff Beck - the legend that can still make me cry with his pure talent and amazing technique. Funnily enough, even though I knew of Jeff as a young lad it was through Roger Water's Amused To Death album that I was driven to seek him out and listen to everything I could find.

David Gilmour - another god-tier player, my first guitar idol. My Dad was a huge Pink Floyd fan so I grew up with great music in my ears - I was trying to play David's solos on rulers and air guitar long before I even picked up a guitar.
I loved this for years before I knew it was a pedal/lap steel.

Brian May - My first cassette tapes given to my by my Aunty for my 10th birthday were: Genesis - Invisible Touch and Queen - Greatest Hits, I just listened to them over and over - at this stage I could play maybe a few chords but I remember asking my guitar teacher to teach me Killer Queen and I still remember the laughter as he explained it might take a little while before I can get there.

There are other honourable mentions of course but I will just list them briefly:

Kirk Hammett (interesting really - I am pretty sure Joe Satriani helped write a lot of his best solos early on)
Joe Satriani
Greg Koch
Chris Poland
Dave Mustaine
Yngwie Malmsteen.. many others.

And then there was my main mentor from the age of about 17, he is special in that he was the one that picked at the bad things I did to help me to try and fix them, I still have some bad habits but it's thanks to this dude I have semi-ok vibrato and a Boss GT5. His name is Dion Hall and we still chat but we moved to different parts of Aussie so.. yeah.

Thanks for reading and again thank you to @pechichemena for the inspiring trip down memory lane in his post.

outoftune