After years of experience and reading/watching countless interviews on my favorite musicians, it seems that whatever you practice is exactly what you'll master.
Pretty obvious right? Well it wasnt for me for awhile and I dont think it is for a lot of people.
It mainly clicked for me when I read an interview of a musician. He said that he wasnt one of those guys that was shredding scales and learning his bands favorite songs, instead spent hours upon hours writing his own songs. And this is the pattern I see within my favorite songwriters.
For me, I believed for a long time throughout my teen years that the more I shredded scales and learned as many songs as I could, I would naturally start writing awesome music. But man ill tell ya thats not the case. My writing techniques are crap, to be frank. And I literally have to pry a good riff (let alone a whole song) out of my brain with a crowbar. But the more I did that prying, the more it started coming a little easier and naturally because thats what I was practicing.
So If you want to be the fastest shredder... just for the sake of being the fastest shredder (a Rusty Cooley type comes to mind) than shred them scales for hours. If you want to have awesome impov skills, well improvise for hours. And of course, if you want to write music (and actually like what your writing..), well you have write music for hours. You get what you practice for!
