One of the best pieces of advice I ever heard was from Sonny Osborne when he said you have to try and be the most complete player you can be. What he meant by that was to try and embrace all the aspects of playing with equal weight - such as backup, rolls, breaks, melody, vamping, straight time, waltz time, how you do your all your embellishments such as hammer-ons, pull-offs, playing in different keys out of different inversions etc etc. These days that stretches even further with all the different styles that have developed over the years. He felt that it wasn’t much use in a band or even a jam situation if for example, you could play great breaks to fast tunes but did not really have a grasp on something like tasteful slow backup. He will be missed.
Conor.