Your opinions on where to start out to be a versatile guitar player.

[devreaux]

the facts:

i started out learning system of a down and children of bodom songs, mostly riffs, some slower leads. after 4 years of doing this i quit playing. 1,5 year after that i started playing again. playing that same major and minor scale up and down the neck, and some gilbert. got faster and faster, started playing some stevie ray vaughan, robben ford, and scott henderson blues. here's where my brain started working (improvisation). which has led to some dann huff, steve lukather, michael landau type soloing. both technique and brain. so thats where i am now.

the question:

do you think it matters where you start out? if you start playing blues like jimi hendrix stuff and then speed up so you can play faster music? i know a lot of players who have an awesome phrasing and often play things i would never had thought of, but they have a very very poor technique. maybe it's better to start with music that requiers alot of technique and then develop the thinking and theory? after i got my technique down a bit i started transcribing other guitarists. good or bad? maybe it's better if it comes right from your own soul?

give me your opinion!

[Endrik]

You're asking different things. Faster music means increase of tempo. All tempo variations are useful no matter what kind of music you play.
To be versatile you gotta have a large vocabulary so you'd sound good and appropriate in any musical context.
That is extremely hard to do. You gotta listen to a lot of different music to get the feel down and play with tons of different musicians.

It's always about the feel first and then the licks. There's so many rhythmic variations out there. You gotta know how to play on the beat, behind the beat and ahead of the beat, drag or push. You gotta know how to play different shuffles, swing, dotted notes, half time or double time grooves, playing against the beat, polyrhythms etc.. Some things require playing straight, some things require a lot of shifting in time and dynamics. Blues, Irish and Chinese music have a lot of similar note combinations based on pentatonic scales but they all sound so different because they all are played with totally different feel and rhythm. For modern western music the most important city is New Orleans where all kinds of rhythms were popularized, swing, second line, the One groove (putting emphasis on the backbeat which is how 95% of modern western music is now made) etc. But what's remarkable is how different the rhythms are also timing wise, dixieland jazz can push really hard, the swing patterns played on the ride cymbal can be very ahead of the beat but New Orleans R'n'b rhythm is very laid back, some gritty funk bands like The Meters play so much behind the beat that you can fall on your ass. It's all about the feel.

Then keep in mind all the dynamic variations, some things require played very softly, some very hard, some things have a lot of dynamic contrasts. A lot heavy metal guitar riffs are played pretty straight but when you listen to some old school hard rock riffs which influenced heavy metal then there's more dynamic contrast going on... Jimmy Page for example played with very funky feel, take "Whole Lotta Love", the muted riffing on the E string isn't played straight at all, the whole riff has dynamic variations.
Pretty much all adequate drummers can play James Brown's "funky drummer" beat but most of them don't sound good at all when they do it, they don't nail the dynamic variation that's going on, all the ghost notes should be played extremely lightly but most try to play them with regular hits.

Then you got tons of different harmonic contexts and how they are arranged. For example take some complex jazz and western classical music compositions, it's important to notice not only the differences in chord progressions but also in voicing. The chords in jazz can be very complex but they are tightly together, the intervals are within one octave mostly while in western classical music the arrangements may have big spaces, things played in many different octaves etc.

Different instruments can have different roles in different situations, in rock you can have the guitar up front most of the time but in some situations when there's a lot of different instruments you have to find the right spot where to sit in and serve the music, maybe in some Latin band you can play all kinds of tricky singular lines but big power chords would sound out of place, in some situations the guitar sounds the best as a purely rhythm instrument, some funk tunes require that but not all. It all depends of the specific song not the genre so much.

And yes you got all the different licks and riffs but without getting the right feel down the licks may not sound really good.
But it's really hard to sound authentic in all the different forms of music. Its much easier to combine all kinds of different elements into your own playing instead. But no matter what you do, the feel comes first. And it helps to have some anthropological knowledge of different forms of music. It's important to know why (and not so much what) certain things are played like they are. Everything has its social and cultural background. If you understand the motives behind the birth of different languages in music then it helps you becoming a better player.

But as a start I guess a good idea would be following the session player routine. With guys like Larry Carlton it became a standard that you got blues, jazz and rock down, later you can add other things. This formula was followed by guys like Lukather and Landau etc. In Nashville you gotta make country playing your priority too of course. I guess it's a good way to start, get comfortable with those 3 things and then seek out whatever else you might like wether it's Bossa Nova, Japanese classical music, bluegrass or polka.

[Newc]

Technical accuracy is great for Speed Metal and Jazz and Classical, but that's about it. A blues solo that is dead-on with no slurring and no slop has no feel. Yeah you can bend or trill a note the same WAY BB King does, but not with the same FEEL. It comes out sounding robotic.

Phrasing is not just about where you put the accents, but how much accent you put on it, and whether or not it fits the song or the part of the song where it is placed.

I don't think it matters where you start out i.e. Blues and progress up to Classical or Classical and progress up to Blues. All that matters is what you do with what you know.