take a break or explore a new genre. If you play metal start learning country. If you play country check out some jazz.

I don't get in ruts very often, but years ago I started feeling like I just kept making the same kind of improvs, running the same scales and doing the 'shapes' that felt comfortable and easy. I put the electric guitar down and didn't touch it for 2 years. In the 2 years I bought some classical guitars, grew the nails on my right hand and started playing Flamenco guitar. At about the 2 year mark for playing Flamenco I was traveling around and playing music with a troupe and having a damn good time when it hit me how much I missed electric, (I hadn't touched a guitar pick in 2 years.) So I bought an electric and it was like it was new again. I loved it. Volume, distortion, crushing death metal with harmonic squeels, lol.

Not only did I make it throught my 'rut' just fine by studying another style, when I went back to my usual style on electric I was easily twice as good as when I'd stopped. Alot of the theories and ideas I'd learned from Flamenco carried over just fine to electric, and my improvs were a million times better.

(flamenco taught me to just let go and let my fingers fly sometimes. As long as you're in key it almost doesn't matter what you do when it comes to flurries and speed, it's about trying to capture that feeling of excitement!)

You're always going to be a student, even if you play and teach music full time you're still a student. There's always more to learn. Hell I'm even studying some country guitar now and I generally can't really stand country. But I know there's some techniques and tricks to it that will only help further my goal when it comes to my own music.

(said goal of course being complete and total world domination through the power of my guitar! Mwu ha ha ha)

In a nutshell if you're driving down the 'road of guitar' and you feel like you're in a rut? Make a violent sharp turn in either direction and see where it takes you. I promise you once you're done exploring you're going to come back to the road you're on. It's really hard to leave the style of music that made you want to play in the first place. If you picked up guitar because you love metal, if you study blues, jazz, flamenco, country, classical, whatever, you're still (usually) going to come back to metal because that's what you love. But now you've got a lot more technique and tricks then just the standard metal cliches.

Good luck man, don't give up, it happens to us all. Don't sweat it until someones paying you to write a song and you have writers block, lol. THEN it's time to start sweating a little.

Put the strat money in the bank, slack the strings on your current guitar,put the guitar in it's case and give yourself a 2 week break. Get out, smell the last of the summer. After Labor Day you should have a pretty good idea about what the next step is. Just look both ways before crossing

John.E