How do you feel about copy-cat guitarists?

Almost everybody starts out by imitating. At one time, all Eddie Van Halen played was Eric Clapton solos note-for-note.

As far as YouTube goes, it's a different game - you get a lot more viewers for posting an impressive rendition of a cover rather than posting an original. In fact, if I were to use YouTube to promote my band, I would post a cover first to draw in a lot of viewers, and then hit them with something original.

Some people just enjoy learning other people's riffs and it stops there. I never found the urge to criticize them as lame. Are they having fun? Are they learning something? Then great! There are worse hobbies a person could have. There's plenty of people doing original stuff, too, there are hundreds of thousands of them out there if you want to try to find them.

Oh, I see what you mean now - I guess I was just responding to the second paragraph about the guy who plays Tool covers on Youtube.

My brother-in-law recently purchased an SRV Strat. He's quite an experienced guitarist with his own sound, but happened to love the feel of the big frets and the sound.

Personally, I would rather hope that someday, somebody will want a copy of my own heavily customized Strat...But I know I'm being ambitious!

Don't have a problem with them. If it weren't for idols, most people would never pick up a guitar at all. However, I do think that playing a guitar ONLY to sound JUST LIKE your idol is rather silly. Different strokes for different folks, though.

Well, I'm a dog person, so I don't think I can give an objective answer 

mystic fred wrote: Jimi Hendrix played many guitars;  acoustics, Gibson flying Vee - but especially Strats, and in his hands they sounded fantastic - the point is he got through many (some say hundreds) of American strats, and the only practical modification he had done was stringing a right handed guitar the "wrong " way round as he was a left handed player. If he had picked up an Epiphone Les Paul or a Squier he would still sound like Hendrix - you can spend as much as you like on vintage Marshall amps and a so-called Hendrix replica but you will never really get it to sound like Hendrix - like all guitar gods the magic is not in the gear, it's in the fingers...

Very true, and there's plenty of footage of Hendrix playing a Flying V to prove it. Same with Eddie Van Halen playing his Gibson Explorer, Jimmy Page when he played Strats in the later Zeppelin years...in all cases, these weren't the guitars that people naturally associated those players with, but they still sounded like the same brilliant guitarists nonetheless..

I've always thought it was best to go for your own sound and style really.
I think it's occasionally cool when you get someone who dedicates their entire life to, say, play like someone who has passed on, learn how to capture their playing style, the nuances, their guitar tone as accurately as possible.
It's cool to see guys do this and play for a younger generation of people that missed the original the first time around.
I mean, we have guys playing Liszt and Chopin on piano, note for note, nuance for nuance perfect, why can't a few select guitarists do the same? It's cool when a few guys do it, but when everyone tries to do it, ohhh lord, save me.
The problem is, when you have people that want to sound like a player, but they totally miss the mark, because of reasons like not being educated on music either, not understand how to catch the subtleties of the playing, not being able to get close to the guitar tone etc.

Oh also, the seemingly never ending stream of Stevie Ray Vaughn clones is pissing me off to no end as well.
Leave it to a few guys, not entire hordes of people wanting to play like him, arghhh.
You get all these guys, that call themselves "blues players" and you realize, it just sounds crap.
It just sounds going through the I-IV-V motions and some of these guys have the personality of a brick and it just shows in their playing, just crappy, stock pentatonic licks I cannot care for for the life of me.
That's the thing you see, Stevie Ray Vaughn had a larger than life personality, but was humble too, and it just showed in his playing, it was pure, 100 per cent him SRV dripping in each and every note.

Me personally, I go for my own sound and style.
My general goal is to get a set up that works with the 3 main sounds I need, which is a clean sound (I'm talking clean without a hint of breakup, uber clean), a fairly high gain rhythm sound and a saturated and sustaining lead sound.
Because the amount of possibilities in the gear world are not endless, you will end up buying an amp or guitar somehow has used in the past to great success (musically or otherwise).
I mean, a lot of guys bought the Peavey 5150 amp, and some of them couldn't give a flying poop about Eddie Van Halen.
A lot of guys are playing Progressive Technical death metal on these amps, pretty far removed from the hard rock of Van Halen, but it so happened some guys heard this amp and though "holy sh*t, this amp has some serious balls to do extreme metal with" and they bought it.
I guarantee some of the guys that play the 5150 (or it's successor, the 6505, same amp, with a different badge) have never even heard Van Halen, or hate Van Halen's music and don't listen to them. They just like the tone.

The sounds I use on my amp modeler, is a clean tone (generic, non amp based model), A Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier amp model for rhythm guitar sounds and a Soldano SLO-100 for lead playing.
Mesa in particular,  is very widely used in metal.
I personally couldn't care less about "this artist uses it, so I must use it", I use them 2 amp models because I found those 2 worked the best for what I need to play.
As for the Soldano SLO-100, I'll be completely honest, I couldn't name a single guitarist that used that amp, because frankly, I don't know, and don't care enough to research who has used one.
The tone just ended up striking me as a good lead tone, so I stuck with it.

I guess it's true that your playing style largely dictates what sort of equipment you use.
For me, it's modern day high gain amps (the amp models anyway) and super strat style guitars, and in the future, 7 string super strats.
I can't work with vintage amp tones or guitars or pickups to get my sound, because it just wont work well and wont sound good for the way I play.

I spend a lot of time on guitar forums, I spend a lot of time talking to guys who have been in the guitar playing business for ages, whether it be guitar teachers, sometimes guitar techs, sometimes even fairly well known players (I mean, fairly well known as in widely revered among the type of guitar style/players I associate with, so not THAT well known:P), guitar builders, or just guys that have been gigging for years and just know what works on the stage, know how to get the best out of gear etc.
You want your own sound and perhaps ultimately, the most satisfaction out of your current and future playing endeavours, you would probably be a guy like me who,. away from this website anyway, is always doing his research and asking the right questions, in order to get that bit closer to the tone in my head.

Or, you can just be like a 14 year old kid at Guitar Center (or whatever equivalent guitar store is in your country GC being American and all) and just buy stuff because it has some guys name on it, because you want to sound like them, because you're too lazy to do reearch on what you really need, and ultimately, possibly end up disappointed because in the end you wanted to carve your own playing style and sound and realize you wasted all that money and time on crap you don't want anymore.