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Agree entirely re the benefit of music theory in opening up your playing and understanding of an instrument! Switching between guitar, banjo and mandolin really did this for me, made me look at and eventually understand chords in a way I never bothered to do when just playing the guitar...
owl-
Hard agree. From my experience, this comes from the different tuning steps - the violin style tuning on mando/(Irish tuning)banjo totally altered how I visualised scale patterns
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Agree on the theory. Training my ear to learn which notes give the quality to chords really helped me. And figuring out lots of different inversions.
I’ve got short fat fingers and large palms so thumb over a lot. Also way easier to comp bass lines on the e string.
jackbepablo
Jung
I think there are techniques in rock guitar playing that are probably complete anathema to classical technique, such as wrapping your thumb over the top of the fretboard and using a fretting finger to mute an adjacent string (I don't know, I'm not classically trained). On the other hand, I think being able to place your fingers precisely is going to be useful whatever genre you play in. More importantly I'd say the most useful thing from classical/traditional teaching is to absorb enough music theory to understand why chords look like they do i.e. which notes make up chords, rather than just learning shapes. Once you learn that, you realise that all the notes are all over the fretboard and that chords can be constructed in various different ways so that (i) they sound better and (ii) you don't have to fret them in ways that are awkward to you.