Hey Whammy, I’ve been playing for a really long time and it all started way back before I had access to transcriptions, or the internet or any of that stuff; heck - it was a pain to even find cool music sometimes! Had to use your ears to figure stuff out. The cool thing though was that one had an opportunity to sit with an album for a while, and I spent a lot of time on David Bowie, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Rainbow before EVH hit. And after that, it got ugly… lol Yngwie broke and that changed everything hahaha So many crazy good guitar players came around after that…
I did go to music school in the early '90s, and ear training was the core of the program - if you washed out of ear training you were toast. I had always figured out a song by distilling it, diluting it down to it’s most basic elements and coming up with a single note version that really outlined the basic harmony. That eartraining course was the same one taught at Berklee, sight singing, relative pitch, singing chord types, modes/ chords, singing them in intervals, guessing/testing intervals, chord types and rhythms. Over the 4 semesters it got progressively more difficult, relative pitch with 2 and 3 notes, guessing tempos, etc. Since then it’s become a way of life, honestly. Really integrated with harmony and arranging, even reading.
lol You know what they didn’t teach there? Picking.
You got this, my man.