I don’t consider them shredders but the rest of the world does; Vai and/or EJ. They’re pretty much neck and neck for me.
EJ’s tones are enough for me to dig into for the rest of my life without even thinking of the music, but I’ve been listening to Ah Via Musicom and Venus Isle a lot again recently and they’re really perfect albums. His chord work is so out of my territory I’ll most certainly never even get close to the ballpark and while he improvises the majority of his stuff live, when he’s on he’s really fucking on.
And Vai just marries the emotion with technique for me. The shred aspect of his playing is so far at the bottom of the list of why I listen to his music I don’t even consider it a reason at all. I get the same feeling from Vai as I do Gilmour and am fortunate as fuck to have grown up with him as my biggest influence. It wasn’t so much the guitar itself that he inspired me with, just his outlook on creativity and being a musician. Whenever I see people calling him a shredder I can’t help but think they’re not really listening, especially if the example is one of his more orchestrated songs where he’s basically writing symphonies to play guitar over.