Three tips to become a great guitar player:
#1 Play with records. Learn directly from the pro's by ear.
#2 Learn entire songs. All parts, start to finish. It builds your repertoire of skills.
#3 Find the groove. Keep time. Rhythm is everything.
There is a concept in the arts called "masterwork copy." Painters copy a piece of art stroke by stroke. Through this practice they begin to visualize and understand the building blocks of how the piece was built. The imitation starts to reveal the artist's identity when they take what they learned and apply it in their unique voice to a piece of work.
That's a long way of saying: build your repertoire and play what you feel. The real magic happens when you get to the point where you can only play that way. Here's what it looks like:
Freddie King is a stone cold killer and ain't on nobody's time but his own.
