In Tool you have Adam Jones, While not known for his blistering leads or vast speed, he’s self admittedly a better artist than guitarist. But he adds an ambiance to the music that is a crucial part of their sound. He experiments with tone structure and harmonics uniquely. He’s not sloppy and tight with his progressions. He has always been the leader of the bad Tool when most people think it’s Maynard. Also the one who does the claymation art in their videos on top of being a very good artist. He brings that side of him into his playing and while he doesn’t do anything outstanding lead wise besides adding to the element of the song you can tell he could shred if he wanted to. (Which is mostly muscle memory for unawares but looks cool).


Then you have

Billy Howerdel from A Perfect Circle. Who’s prob more advanced in different techniques and shares some qualities with Jones like setting the mood for any band that maynards singing for, but he adds more riffs and shows more lead in songs. Story is Billy was Maynards room at one point when Tool was coming up and had started a band of his own. He had the whole first album mostly musically written except the vocalist he was searching for was a female. After letting Maynard hear his works Maynard offered to be the singer. There’s speculation that the song by tool schism was written about Adam and Maynards fall out after Adam feeling betrayed by him considering it Tool was Adam’s band.





My opinion, over all Billy was technically more advanced but longevity wise Adam and his creativeness over takes book smarts when wanting something that’s unique and unconventional.


If it were my band I’d pick Adam.

adam jones and its not even close

Adam Jones




Good ol' Maynard overall......

my best concerts have been TOOL and AIC concerts. I haven't seen APC though.

Seen them all except pucifer. Some of its pretty cool but it’s all over the place.



Edit: chicks love tool or apc in the background for that bedroom activity.