>I say this as it is an interesting case of 'more than one way to skin a cat'

You're basically skinning the cat the same way, you just don't know the terms of the steps involved or the theory (the "why") behind them, and can't generalize it to ways to skin all kinds of other animals, and even do taxidermy on them - things that the author does.

You however might have picked some special tricks of cat-skinning, and self-taughtingly built your own small conventions, that the author might not know, but which still follow music theory - which, in musicology, is way broader than "common practice" music theory -, (and the author could also delve into them and explain their function theoritically if he played the same genre and bothered to check them out).

Blues guitar is kind of the odd one out in terms of the field of music, its one of the few styles where you can get by quite well without note reading or theory. Everything changes if you have a horn section in your blues band though. Music notation exists to facilitate people with different instruments playing together.

As someone who learned the same way you did, on tab and modern pentatonic blues riffs and improv, but over time learned (still learning) more theory and reading music, I’d recommend learning more reading & theory because it really seriously expands on what you can do with blues guitar. A lot of early blues and pretty much all jazz don’t stay in the pentatonic scale rut, they move around and mix other scales. It’s really helpful to know which diatonic scales you can seamlessly blend with pentatonic, and the reverse: when you can blend pentatonic into a modal song structure, just for two simple examples.

BTW 1/4 tone bends are definitely in the traditional system, they are common even, and in fact are quite directly related to what this article is talking about. The “blue note” in blues is a well known microtone example, but microtonal music in general has theory and notation hundreds of years old, there’s a lot of stuff taking these ideas to new levels. Wikipedia’s article is just the tip of the iceberg, microtonal music history is bigger and broader than this suggests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtonal_music

Music is kind of great like that. Much of music theory is over my head but I have spent time to understand a good bit too and I’ve gained a lot of respect for it. Everything you’re doing as a blues guitarist can be explained well by a music theorist who really know their stuff.

I read an interesting article by a music theorist breaking down the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and remarking on the genius and uniqueness of the chord progression and how it violates a lot of what theory says would “sound good” and hence why it’s genius. It can be presumed Kurt Cobain was not too interested in music theory and if he would have been he may have never even considered the progression and other interesting aspects of that song.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. It's more productive to think of "music theory" as a way for musicians and composers to talk about what they just did, or what they are just going to do, than as a way to generate those things.

Giant Steps "violates" jazz music theory on the surface but sure enough Coltrane knew his basic chord progressions. If you look close enough Giant Steps builds on traditional ii-V-I progressions and applies (also well known) tritone substitutions to achieve quick key changes.

the progression you are referring to is I-IV-bIII-bVI, where are all these chords are “power chords” i.e. dyads comprised of a root and fifth.

it is an awesome progression but violates absolutely nothing in music theory.

we can find examples of similar progressions across jazz and classical music, most of which was composed by folks who have mastered western tonal harmony.

Same here, I know how to read music and tabs but gave up on it and now just play by ear, it’s way more satisfying. Western music theory is so baroque. The book Brainjo basically killed my interest in it.

A lot of those in-between notes hark back to times before the scales were rationalised into the "well tempered" system we mostly use today. Often they are harmonics like the 5th harmonic which lives between the minor and major 3rd on the scale.