What is the tune or compositional theme..

The flight of the Bumble Bee is played rapidly..
Vivaldi's Four Seasons is an exercise in multiple time signatures, but it is a vibrant portrayal of the seasons.
Comfortably Numb is about disassociation from reality.
Rock is dead is a completely in your face wretch, repulsive in its aggression, but a great song
White Wedding falls in this latter category
Stray Cat Strut is an entirely different aural landscape.
Wooden Ships paints another canvas.

It has to be about the song first and foremost, this is where Theory and Composition studies come in.
I know it's Rock or Blues or whatever the genre, the greats didn't study so it is not required.
I think that is an incorrect assumption of great players.
All music is based on theory and compositions.
Blues is actually quite rigidly structured, from it's time signatures to the prevalence of minor to major keys and their intermingling to wring out a feeling or mood..

This is a great thread, because it really asks you to sit down and think about what you are playing.
Is it Musical Notes arranged in a melodic pattern... So to evoke a response...
Or is it just Notes mechanically sounded in an equally mechanical format....

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"C'est parti mon Kiki "

Man guitslinger! i'm suffering from the same thing! It's a real downer sometimes, especially fingerstyle. I've got it in the picking hand and i used to love playing Ted Greene type fingerstyle which is pretty near impossible nowadays. That style involves a lot of 3 and 4 note pinches and this is what i find hardest.

I'm thankful that i can still play, some people get it so bad they can't play at all. Liona Boyd the great classical player had to give up her concert playing career because of it. Brazilian guitarist Baddi Assad was the same and she was out of action for years, though she has now recovered from it.

They say we get it throught practicing too much and repeating the same patterns over and over to perfect them.

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Luck won't do it and ignorance can't

George Van Eps.

One of my favourites, Daivd Gilmour, doesn't play a lot of notes compared to many, but they sure do sound fine.

There is a scene in the movie Amadeus, Mozart just finished playing a new work for the king and asked the king for his impression. With the court surounding them and waiting with baited breadth the king said, fine but there were too many notes. Mozart didn't take that too well.

Absolutely!! I'll add my "+1" to that. Dave can play fast but he rarely does. He is a master at the careful and tasteful placement of notes. In fact one of the things I loved about Floyd was the way they weren't always in a hurry to change chords or get busy with melody. Sometimes they could just let a chord hang there for a while and Dave would class it up with some truly tasty work. He may not play a lot of notes but he makes the notes he does play count.

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Just think of how awesome a guitar player you could have been by now if you had only spent the last 10 years practicing instead of obsessing over pickups and roasted maple necks.

I love to be able to feel the notes. To me playing fast = loosing feeling. Playing slow with vibrato and feeling is like singing the notes. But thats just me