I was a bit late to introduce myself in this forum, so I take the chance now. This is also my personal experience of playing guitar.
My name is Shiva Krishnan, I am coming from India.
During my childhood days I didn’t know what this instrument was and had no influence on any guitarist, this is because our country is dominated with Indian classical music more than western and our native music doesn’t hold guitars up high in their compositions.
My inspiration for guitar playing came out by accident. During my school days there was a choice for every student to take up a co-curricular activity from a list and the school arranged teachers to train them, the activity were conducted on Wednesdays of all weeks.
My choice was to enter art classes but unknowingly my name were on the list of guitar students. I bought an acoustic guitar after a month. The guitar was cheap, very cheap, it costs Rs 2000 (around 40 $ I guess),Guitar classes in my school were boring because , there were only one teacher (he was a classical guitarist) and 30-40 students and the allowed time were only 2 hours and also once in a week.
Coping up with that situation, after 1 year of learning process all I had learned was to play ‘Twinkle Twinkle’, ‘Jingle bells’ and some open chords and C major scale in open position. He didn’t correct me when I used 3 finger grip like Steve Morse did. That grip came in handy when I was strumming because to me, it allowed more supinated and pronated motions (which I feel more comfortable) .But the grip was some sort of limiting when I started to play lead lines, so I got used with 2 finger grip and it felt okay, but not okay for strumming. I just worked on this and eventually became used to it.
I didn’t had any guitarists to idolise and understand their techniques because there were no information available apart from guitar teachers. The internet was pretty much starting to develop in my area and no magazines or tapes related to this topic were sold in the shop.
I eventually quit my guitar lessons. That was when I am in 8 grade.
During the course of 10th grade, one day my friend just showed me a bunch of pop songs of Ed Sheeran, Michael Jackson, among that a couple of rock songs caught my attention. They were Stairway to be heaven by Led Zeppelin, and Highway to hell by AC DC .For the first time I felt how rock music tastes like. I thought it would be cool to learn their riffs and solos and play them on my guitar. I had to solely depend on ear and it was difficult without some information on music theory .Also I am pretty much unaware of rock guitar techniques .I am only aware of alternate picking and when I used alternate picking to play Stairway to heaven, It became too difficult.
Another song I found was an aggressive form of rock music (later I discovered that it was called ‘heavy metal’ or Thrash) .It was ‘Master of puppets’ by Metallica. That was fast, really fast, and I really had goose bumps when I hear this each time.
While everyone urged to play strumming pop song chords and vocal lines of our native songs on their guitar, I played mostly rock riffs on my acoustic guitar, and anyone hearing my playing would scratch their head saying “What was that, I didn’t understood anything”, I thought it might be because I have been playing on an acoustic guitar rather than an overdriven electric, but my technique and dynamics also sucked and I can�t play cleanly while standing up. With less interests of metal music going on with everyone around me, I stopped my playing (because no one knows what I am playing and eventually no body paid attention to my playing). But I didn’t stopped listening to rock songs, many of them had blistering solos and bone crushing riffs performed by virtuoso guitarists and many were slow songs also and they were yet melodic and rocking.
I changed to a new school when I was in 11 th grade. There was a classical guitarist in the school .He played fast yet melodic classical songs and captured everyone’s attention. He also plays riffs of Guns and Roses, AC DC, Metallica.
I got a chance to perform with him, during the rehearsal time he said �Let�s jam in C mixolydian�. I had no idea what he was talking about. I was a bit down after that incident, but that made all the change, an urge towards learning to play the instrument perfectly, quickly got up in my nerves.
Luckily, easy access to internet was possible and I learned almost every content from there.
I became a learning guitarist more than playing; I learned fundamental music theory, about playing techniques rhythmic subdivisions, Ear training, off beats and syncopation, guitarists of different genres, shredders and much more. Although I was more inclined to heavy metal, I favoured shred rock and neoclassical players and their songs. I also loved songs that made nice melody lines and phrases with guitar particularly instrumental songs.
Paul Gilbert, Steve Vai, Yngwei Malmsteen, John Petrucci, Joe Satriani, Eddie Van Halen, Randy Rhoads, Vinnie Moore, Guthrie Govan were my idols. These modern players influenced me to see rock music in more interesting yet technical perspective. I also like bands like Metallica, Guns n Roses, AC DC, Extreme and Pantera. I also was blown away when I heard Mediterranean Sundance by Al de meola and Paco de Lucia. There are more songs yet to discover and listen to as it is an on-going process.
Internet became my hero, It acted like a teleporter that took me from one part of the planet to other where informations and ideas piled over , It helped me to achieve as much information as I could within this short amount of time, otherwise I would not be knowing the information that I need to play rock guitar. Instructional videos, web articles, YouTube guitar videos, wiki, all contained tremendous information about all aspects and techniques of guitar playing.
Short after my 12 th grade, my acoustic guitar accidently fell down from my cupboard and literally broken down into pieces. Although I was 'studying guitar�, the immediate urge for applying the concepts and achieve playing guitar came to my mind and I probably needed an electric guitar, which is the most dynamic instrument and I can cover a lot of territory with it, and can do things which are practically difficult on acoustic .So I ended up saving money .During this course of time, I discovered Troy Grady and Cracking the code series .Ctc were very much entertaining and technically informative video series.
These series addressed many of the technical challenges that many guitarists including myself struggled to achieve. Among them string hopping were the most familiar one.
I encountered this problem when I was learning the solo to stairway to heaven with pure alternate picking. I didn�t knew legato at that time.
I didn�t had the determination to solve this issue as troy did in Ctc. All I had done was to keep the pick in neutral position with edge picking and to economise the movement, I think most people are taught to alternate pick in this way if they wanted to play fast. Until I learned Pick slanting from cracking the code, it opened doors for eliminating the string hopping movement.
I found that I am naturally an upward pick slanter, this might be the cause of accessing strings over the larger upper bout of my acoustic guitar, or due to my short arms. I sucked at downward pick slanting and can’t follow its diagonal surgical motions at larger tempos. At high tempos the pick slanting follows the basic right left neutral pick movements instead of being the 'towards the string, above the string movement�. And it is weird, it�s like the pick is slanted but still the motion is of neutral pick movements. This resisted the upstrokes. Sometimes it followed a curved path (I doubt it as a smaller movement of string hopping), but this motion doesn’t allowed to play at faster tempos. The only comfortable thing I have is upward pick slanting.
When I found two way pick slanting, my mind urged to immediately try this movement, I might be doing this subconsciously, but I don’t know. I decided to work out this movement. But I have currently no guitar, and I am impatient to try this movement, so I followed different ways to mimic this hand movement with 3 nps sequences in air and when I became too impatient, I pinned some stapler pins in a book and the pins acting as strings, I picked every pins following TWPS right hand motions for 3nps scales (MAB movements) and also practiced Paul Gilbert 4s pattern.
They day came when I bought my electric guitar, My right hand were perfect to execute scales using TWPS ,I considered that an achievement, as my string hopping motions were starting to disappear.
But my left hand was unsynchronised terribly and I am practicing to synchronise both hands, and as I didn�t have guitar within reach in early stages for a considerable amount of time, I should polish and perfect my technique again. The process is still under progress and I am very much satisfied with what I can do right now, I don�t really find any technical inefficiencies most of the time. Thanks to Troy Grady and the Cracking code team for providing the right information, ideas and solutions to many techniques and licks that I thought impossible to play fast only with metronome.
I think I have been too ambitious to write these many words
Pardon me for making my experience a large article. I hope I could get many ideas and technical solutions and answers from this forum.
Peace 
