At what point in your career did it become apparent that the new styles of music learning didn't work?
About 20 years ago, in the early 1980's, when I began to see transcriptions of rock guitar solos and bass solos. These solos that appeared in many top music magazines generally did not have any meaningful tonal content which would make them meaningful educational pieces. Because rock is an emotional, powerfully expressive music, this doesn't mean that it should be considered as educationally meaningful as jazz might. I think that in studying jazz or classical music, one would benefit from looking closely at the notes and harmony. Since rock music is generally neither melodic nor harmonic it doesn't really pay to pursue learning the solos of players in that genre.
What about players like Eddie Van Halen, or Yngwie Malsteen?
The transcriptions of these players were real popular with young players and certainly beautiful to look at on music paper; those transcriptions really looked like modern art. But if you slow down what they played, you would find that there is more technique than tonality, very little there to deserve the time trying to learn the notes that they played. You would actually do a whole lot better by listening to their records and trying to imitate what you were listening to. At least you'd be doing some ear training.
The truth is that you can't teach technical prowess via their transcriptions and you can't teach technical prowess via technique exercises.
