Sometimes it's a good idea just to take stock of where your playing is at the moment, what you know, what you don't know, and where you'd like to go.
The odd thing about playing guitar is that not only can you never learn it all, but you also don't really have good checks on where you are at the moment. That can make it feel like you haven't progressed, even when you have. One common trick to get around this is to try to play things that you know you couldn't do a year or two ago. Normally you'll find that you can learn them much easier now.
Another trick that I sometimes do, and which I found recently that Ted Greene also came up with, is to turn the guitar around and try playing with your other hand. It's incredible just how difficult it is to play that way. That's what playing raw, new guitar feels like (except that the strings are the wrong way around of course!).
So the guitar experience is difficult because you can be always reaching for something and not feel like you've achieved it. This is especially true if you're listening to people like Hendrix and Page all day, comparing yourself to them. You know you're not going to play like them, so if you use them as a yardstick you'll certainly progress since you've set a very lofty goal, but you're not going to reach it. And anyway, the guitar should be a personal instrument. It's not just about being a technical virtuoso, but expressing things, making great music. That's a huge element of what makes Hendrix and Page so great in the first place: they're so original, so characteristically them.
In my own playing, I was happy for many years with the kind of things that I played and wrote on guitar. I used modal and other alternative tunings a lot, and played a strange kind of classical-folk genre in a light-rock style. I don't know of any other person who played that way, so it felt like I was making something worthwhile, something that I couldn't listen to anywhere else.
Then over the course of a few years, I noticed that I began not to make new ideas as much, because for some reason the clichés in my playing started to grow. There was a mixolydian cheat pattern that I used a lot, for example: going up and down the fretboard in whole step intervals, skipping up a fret at The Schism (between the G and B strings). My chords just tended to revolve around the same old things that I'd normally play. I also didn't write very many difficult songs anymore, tending instead to concentrate on very simple chord progressions with soloing over the top. I used to play a lot more fingerstyle and arpeggios, but I preferred jamming and grooves now. That just led to my music being stale, and my playing also became quite sloppy.
In April 2012, I decided that I'd change my way of playing entirely, and do what I did when I first learned guitar—finding as many different styles and ideas as I could and learn from them. I discovered that there were many basic guitar concepts that I was yet to learn, and tried to integrate them all into new practice routines.
Many things changed in the process. For example, I'd been playing in the Clapton blues style, using only my first three fingers, thumb looped over the neck, and ignoring the little finger for all playing. I thought it would be interesting to use the classical style too, with the thumb behind the neck and using all fingers. At first this was very tiring, especially with chords, but I practiced really hard at it until I became very fluent.
In soloing, I found two interesting things. One was three-note-per-string scale expressions, and the other was the idea of Holdsworthian legato. I found this through an instructional video by Marshall Harrison which just about blew my mind. This in turn got me into Holdsworth, which opened up a new musical world, as somebody who was coming from a predominantly rock and blues background. I learned three-notes-per-string in the ionian family, in each position, but then I found that I normally only used the positions with the tonic on one of the first two strings. I also wrote a little web app for displaying scales and figuring out what scale is what.
I didn't do much work on chords at first, but eventually I figured I should learn music theory, and especially western harmony. This I did in considerable detail, and got to a reasonable level of understanding very quickly as a result. For some reason this didn't translate into my playing very well until I found a video by Justin Sandercoe talking about jazz chords. Immediately I looked into jazz chords and this fused with my love of Holdsworthian legato. I learned not just new jazz voicings, but also how to construct my own chords based on intervals. I came up with a lot of interesting chords, and fit those into what I'd learned from harmony.
Despite working on these things very hard, I still had to, in fact still have to, think about them quite a lot in order to get them into my playing. In other words, they're not yet very natural. But it's certainly true that my playing has changed shape a lot. Annoyingly, I still use the mixolydian cheat pattern quite a lot, and I'm starting to get complaisant with my choice of harmonic voicings too. I think that the key is to try to always push the boundaries.
I learned that there are about as many "systems" for learning the guitar as there are guitar players. Some people have more useful, well-rounded, better developed systems than others of course. One of the best that I've found is that of Ted Greene. What a genius that guy was. He absolutely loved the guitar, and just thought about it inside and out. I think Ted Greene is the best proof that actually thinking about the guitar, working through the melodic and harmonic theory and fusing the two, doing your utmost to understand the guitar, actually can make you a much better player. I think you have to love music too, and probably also have a natural aptitude for it. But you're not doing to ruin your expression by learning more.
I just discovered that Ted Greene made some arrangements of Very Early, one of "Bill Evans's ballads" to use a lyric from my friend William Loughborough. I'm interested in learning more of other people's music in order to bolster my understanding of how songs are made and work. I'm looking for particular kinds of thing though. I think the key is finger forms, in melodic terms. If you start to let your fingers lead you too much, you lose expressive potential. Greene talks about this, saying that even he has a problem with it, and I think he says overall that you just have to get the balance right.
I'm trying to figure out ways to "regularise" the fretboard in my mind, so that when I play I can select intervals very quickly relative to a tonic and not have to worry about what I'm playing since I know how the melody will fit relative to an underlying harmony. The problem is that the regular, Spanish tuning is, though regular in terms of everybody using it, very irregular in terms of intervals. You have mainly perfect fourths between strings, which means that every other string you go down an octave, and then there's a major third between the G and B strings, which I call The Schism (or The Schizz) which messes everything up even more.
I tried making an alternative tuning, C F# C F# C F#, which is extremely regular, but of course then the problem is that you can't play anything because all of the simple voicings are extremely difficult. You could probably find some interesting melodies using it, but harmony is going to be more or less impossible to develop in that tuning.
Some months ago I watched the instructional videos by Joe Pass, and they have lots of interesting things. They got me to start experimenting with voicings ("grips") more. One great thing that he says is that if you can't repeat a line on the guitar an octave higher or lower, then you don't really know what you're doing. This links nicely with a Ted Greene instructional sheet that I found recently where he tries to outline how the fretboard works by showing how to play a single phrase all around the fretboard.
Another interesting thing that Joe Pass says is that he plays melodies within chord shapes. This is a great idea when it comes to playing unaccompanied, often rubato, guitar, because melodies by themselves are often oversimplified so as to give harmonic expression, or they are satisfyingly complex and expressive but lack a solid harmonic basis. Playing both together, a melody interspersed by chords, sounds pretty good. There's a great video of somebody who teaches some very simple fingerstyle patterns where the patterns he's using just make you instinctively want to come up with lots of Mississippi John Hurt style melodies. There's also a great video of a guy who can play seriously great rockabilly guitar who says much the same thing as Joe Pass, that you can find scales just by figuring out how some notes fit around standard chords. I wonder if you can imagine "skipping" from one voicing of a chord to another in order to figure out melodic possibilities.
I watched a video by Steve Vai where he says many good things—it's like an hour long—but the two biggest take-aways for me are that you can come up with lots of different and interesting forms of vibrato to really spice up your playing, and that using a metronome is quite important. I looked more into using a metronome, and found a website that does an online click which is adequate. I think both of these things are great to have a tighter, more professional sound in your playing.
I've been trying to learn more sweep picking for arpeggios, and I'd found that the Garsed-style fingerpicked version is much easier than using a pick. It also gives a more legato sound, as noted by Marshall Harrison. But just yesterday I discovered that one of the reasons I found it difficult to use a plectrum when sweep picking is that I'm holding it too tightly. If you let it sort of pivot between your thumb and finger when sweeping, then it makes it much easier to do.