The illusion of "Style"

I expect a ton of disagreement on this article, and encourage anyone to voice their disagreements below.

Style doesn't exist.

The building blocks to Jazz are the same building blocks of Punk, and country, and rock, with only a little variation.

Jazz is built on using the full chords – any regular reader has seen that I always use four note chords to explain something – because it's easier to visualize and understand that way, therefore you should learn how these work anyway.

Rock music is based on a simplified version of that, usually triad or dyad chords, but the progressions are the same, and believe it or not the way you should approach improvisation is the same (the Internet is filled with shortcuts that should be ignored.)

Country is built on the same foundation as rock, only without the dyads, and the distortion, the rhythm and bass line is what drives country.

Blues is formed in the way the chord progressions happen, based around the dom7 chords.

So to truly understand music you should be able to play all style, and if you have aspirations of professionalism you'll want to know it all.

A studio guitar player won't be hired if they can only play one style – whoever is hiring you would then have to hire a pile of different musicians depending on the song, they want someone who can play everything.

A freelance guitar player will find way more work if they can be hired for any type of gig.

I tell my students you need four things to become a good guitar player.

Technique/Chops
Music Theory
The ability to read music
Good Ears

All four of these things can be learned forever – with the possible exception of reading music, until your reading can keep up to your chops (ie you can sight read anything you'll ever be able to play.) It can be improved.

The illusion of style is given by how the notes are approached, learn the notes, then learn to approach them from all the angles.

The only exception in this article comes with classical, which is a very different beast from Modern Guitar.