Guitar lesson - sweet child of mine

In my guitar lesson today, we looked at the song 'Sweet child of mine' by Guns n Roses which is part of the grade 5 song library. When I played the opening riff (an arpeggio figure), my guitar teacher, Barry, said that I play the right notes, but I don't play it right; I use barring a lot in this riff, as a result it sound like the notes bleed into each other which doesn't sound right. He said to not bar it and play the notes individually but still make sure it flows well and is it staccato; he showed me which fingers to use on which notes and I practised it slowly a couple times, and already it sounded a lot better. The very last lick in the riff just before the first kicks in, is very hard because it uses pedal notes (where you keep going back to the same note) - I found it hard because again I needed to play the notes individually - no barring - and still have that nice flow to the play. It was really just a case of educating my fingers and trying to lock it into my muscle memory. The first solo I found very hard because it is heavily dependent on tone bends (including pre bends) and i find tone bends as difficult as it is let alone pre bends. I first became familiar with how the solo goes before I started to worry about the tone bends and educated my fingers of where they need to go throughout the solo. When it came to learning the bends (note they are all full tone bends, so a whole step up, as a pose to a semi tone) I figured out the position of the string during the bends so that for the pre bends, I knew where to bend the string to because obviously I can't sound the bending upwards (hence why it's called a pre bend). I practiced the solo slowly and gradually got a bit faster, but I still need to continue to practice it because I'm still not very comfortable with doing it.