Technique and soul are key elements, and not every guitarist has both in enough amounts to write or play good music. You also have to be aware of genre limitations, and how far you can go beyond those boundaries and still be "acceptable."
I remember seeing an old Steely Dan video. For those who don't know, SD is one of the prototypical bands in which there is a small creative core and everyone else is hired guns. In this case, the guitarist for that particular lineup was clearly talented, but he had no feel for SD's music: his solo- which was technically brilliant- was full of the high-energy blitz of notes typical of metal shredding.
IOW, it was completely out of place in the jazz-pop fusion of Steely Dan.
I remember seeing an old Steely Dan video. For those who don't know, SD is one of the prototypical bands in which there is a small creative core and everyone else is hired guns. In this case, the guitarist for that particular lineup was clearly talented, but he had no feel for SD's music: his solo- which was technically brilliant- was full of the high-energy blitz of notes typical of metal shredding.
IOW, it was completely out of place in the jazz-pop fusion of Steely Dan.