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I am confused as to why John Mayer is not considered par with other guitarists like BB King, Eric Clapton, etc. when he can and produces so difficult songs to play even for advanced level guitarists like Neon, Stop This Train, and many more.

P.S: I've been playing guitar only for about a year, which could be one of the reasons for not understanding the music of Eric Clapton and BB King.

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    You might get better responses on musicfans.stackexchange.com
    – Michael Curtis
    Dec 4 '18 at 19:49
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it belongs to Music Fans and was already asked there.
    – guidot
    Dec 4 '18 at 22:44
  • He seems like a pop musician and they usually are not recognized for musicianship as much as popularity (right or wrong). I don't think his music is "complex" by any stretch of the imagination, but why should it be? I agree that this quest should be closed. It's really an opinion comment and not a question about music theory or performance.
    – user50691
    Dec 8 '18 at 20:08
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It's not just about difficulty. There are lots of guitarists who can play pretty insanely difficult stuff but are virtually unknown, even among guitarists. Especially in Blues, it's all about feeling. Now, for sure John Mayer does have feeling, and he is indeed pretty well-regarded among Blues fans. Just, he's not revolutionary. BB King and Eric Clapton did a lot of stuff that nobody had done before.

For that matter, even on the technical level, I'd say John Mayer is actually mostly following in the footsteps of Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck and Clapton, and perhaps Stevie Ray Vaughan. If there's something where he supersedes these clearly it'd rather be his voice than guitar, and indeed that's probably the main reason why John Mayer is so famous on a pop-star level.

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  • You need to have a word with your auto-correct, but not before you've checked out who John Major actually is ;) Wikipedia, for the serious version & also Spitting Image for his public perception, as a dull, boring & above all, grey man :)
    – Tetsujin
    Dec 5 '18 at 7:07
  • @Tetsujin I'll have a word with the auto-correct in my brain, that somehow seems to have corrected Mayer's name to Major whenever I read it...
    – leftaroundabout
    Dec 5 '18 at 8:21
  • Difficulty --- compare Chopin to Mozart. Technical ability is one kind of difficulty; spot-on pitch and phrasing is another.
    – Carl Witthoft
    Dec 5 '18 at 13:37

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