Malmsteen was born Lars Johan Yngve Lannerbäck in Stockholm, Sweden, the third child of a musical family.

[1][2] At age 10, Malmsteen created his first band, Track on Earth, consisting of himself and a friend from school playing the drums.

[3] As a teenager he was heavily influenced by classical music, particularly 19th century Italian virtuoso violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini as well as Johann Sebastian Bach.

[14] In 1984, Malmsteen released his first solo album Rising Force, which featured Barrie Barlow of Jethro Tull on drums and keyboard player Jens Johansson.

[12] Then he recruited Jens Johansson's brother Anders to play drums and bassist Marcel Jacob to record and tour with the band.

[12] The tour was cancelled after Malmsteen was involved in a serious car accident,[12] smashing his V12 Jaguar E-Type into a tree, which put him in a coma for a week.

New line-up changes for the next album with former Rainbow vocalist Joe Lynn Turner joined the band,[12] along with session bassist Bob Daisley, who was hired to record some bass parts and help with the lyrics.

Shows in the Soviet Union during the Odyssey tour were recorded and released in 1989 as a fifth album Trial by Fire: Live in Leningrad.

[12] The classic Rising Force line-up with Malmsteen and the Johansson brothers was dissolved in 1989 when both Anders and Jens left.

Malmsteen's neoclassical style of metal became popular among hordes of guitarists during the mid-1980s, with contemporaries such as Jason Becker, Marty Friedman, Paul Gilbert, Tony MacAlpine, and Vinnie Moore becoming prominent.

In 1996, Malmsteen joined forces with former band members Jeff Scott Soto and Marcel Jacob on the "Human Clay" album where he played lead guitar on the track "Jealousy".

He also guested with Saxon on the song Denim And Leather on their live album The Eagle Has Landed – Part II (released in 1997).

In 2003, Malmsteen joined Joe Satriani and Steve Vai as part of the G3 supergroup, a tour showcasing guitar performances.

As stated in an issue of "Guitar World" magazine, he titled this album after an infamous 'airline incident', which occurred on a flight to Japan during a 1988 tour.

He was drunk and behaving obnoxiously, until he fell asleep and was roused by a woman pouring a jug of iced water on him.

The DVD chronicles Malmsteen's first time playing in front of a live audience with an orchestra, an experience that he describes as "fun but also extremely scary".

[17] February 2008 saw the replacement of singer Doogie White with former Iced Earth and Judas Priest and current Beyond Fear singer Tim "Ripper" Owens, with whom Malmsteen had once recorded a cover of Ozzy Osbourne's song "Mr. Crowley", for the 2000 Osbourne tribute album Bat Head Soup: A Tribute to Ozzy.

On 10 March 2009, Malmsteen's label Rising Force released Angels of Love, an all-instrumental album, which featured acoustic arrangements of some of his best-known ballads.

On 6 August 2011, Malmsteen made another appearance in the United States, playing a rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" before a game between the St. Louis Cardinals and Florida Marlins at Sun Life Stadium.

[23]On 8 May 2021, Yngwie Malmsteen was reported to have launched the Parabellum album and video for the "Paganini-referencing" track "Wolves at the Door".

Yngwie uses a variety of backing tracks pulled from 10 of his most popular songs as the framework for the masterclass and the way in which he demonstrates his creative process, technical skills, and performance insights.

[28] A Ferrari enthusiast, Malmsteen owned a black 1983 308 GTS for 24 years before selling it on eBay,[29] and a red 1962 250 GTO.

Malmsteen's listing, however, appeared to be sardonic, as the article concluded that: "The Swede's superfast 'neoclassical" style' – he credits Bach and Paganini as influences – is a blur of scales and technical precision.

"[32][33] Malmsteen has been a longtime user of Fender Stratocasters with DiMarzio HS3 single-coil pickups "for playing at blistering volume with no hum or screechiness".