Last week we got deep into methods of breaking out of the “box” and a variety of different ways to get the creative juices flowing and inject new ideas into your playing and song writing.  We touched briefly on an idea about how to try new things with techniques you already know and it really made me want to dig a little deeper into that particular subject.  There are so many cool possibilities and, if you haven’t experimented with this yet, I can’t recommend it enough.

The fact that you’re here, reading this article, practically guarantees that you’ve already worked on or learned a variety of interesting techniques on the guitar.  You may be eager to expand your technique arsenal and continue to build outwards.  In fact, you may see other guitarists play a variety of interesting techniques and feel that you are limited by the techniques that you currently know. This isn’t necessarily the case.

It may be that the real limitation you’re dealing with is more about how you’re looking at the techniques you know.  You may learn a technique and then set it aside in the form that you learned it as something accomplished.  Now you can use that technique whenever you need it and you may think there’s not much more to that story.  Personally, I believe that would be a mistake.

You may have noticed that the best guitarists you’ve ever seen or heard seem to have their own signature and highly recognizable style of playing.  They’re not simply emulating their own favorite guitarists anymore but, instead, they have found a way to do something new and specifically unique to them.

From one perspective, what you’re seeing here is a single link in the long chain of progress on the instrument.  If every guitarist simply emulated their own guitar heroes then guitar playing would be virtually the same as it was when the guitar was first invented.  However, because of all the innovations over the years, guitar has evolved magnificently since its inception.  It’s evolved with each player and all the changing genres that it has participated in.  New music calls for the need of new techniques and new playing styles and it continues to evolve as time moves forward.

To me, this is one of the most exciting aspects of playing the guitar.  In many ways you are participating in something much larger than you realize and you become inextricably linked to that emergent process.

Whether or not that interests you, at the very least, innovating with techniques is an incredibly rewarding way to increase your abilities on the guitar and come up with unique ways to express yourself with it.  It can open up infinite new possibilities and will give you a signature sound that you can call your own.

It’s also surprisingly easy to do once you get rolling with it.  

While it would be a monumental task to attempt to list them all, let’s take a look at some fundamental techniques so it will be easier to visualize how you might combine some of the elements together.

Some basic techniques that you probably already know would include:

• alternate picking
• hammer-ons
• pull-offs
• slides
• bends
• finger picking
• rake picking
• sweep picking
• finger tapping
   

Now let’s take a look at a handful of musical elements that are often combined with these techniques in one way or another:

• diatonic scales
• pentatonic scales
• intervals
• arpeggios
• modified shred scale patterns
• accidentals
• chromatic passing tones
• atonality
   

There’s still one more ingredient to consider, and that would be rhythmic elements.  Of course there are incredibly basic things such as your standard quarter, 8th or 16th notes, but let’s see if we can think of some more interesting rhythmic elements that you could experiment with a little more. 

Some of these might include:

• triplets
• shuffle triplets
• syncopation
• polyrhythms (in terms of the lead vs the beat of the song)
• free time
   

There are other more basic dynamic elements such as staccato and legato that are also not a bad idea to keep in mind.  Unless you’re using polyrhythms, time signatures are entirely dependent on the song and therefore don’t really fit in these lists.

Now if these lists seem a bit daunting, don’t be discouraged by it. 

The point of all of this is to work with what you already know. 

The specific knowledge that you have at this current time easily becomes a positive limitation that will direct the types of innovations you can make.

With that in mind, you can effectively ignore everything in the lists that you aren’t familiar with – at least as long as you’re unfamiliar with them.  As you learn more and more techniques and musical elements, you can go through this same process again.

Now the list of techniques is where you want to focus most of your attention here at first.  But it’s important to remember that a technique has no shape or form without the notes that will be played and the rhythm they are played in. 

You can start with very simple melodic and rhythmic elements so you can focus your attention more on the technique side of things.  

Once you have that down, you can branch outward by experimenting with different types of patterns and rhythmic elements.  For example, you could create a pattern that uses an arpeggio with chromatic passing tones and is played using 16th notes, 8th triplets and syncopation.  But let’s set that aside for now.

For combining technique elements, you could very easily come up with a run that uses some hammer-ons, a slide and then has a tapped note at the end.  That’s a great thing to experiment with but is not exactly what we’re shooting for here.

What you really want to try to do is develop some combination of these elements that creates something that is entirely dependent on all of those specific elements.  In other words, you want to try to find some unique way of combining the techniques that use all of their advantages to play something that couldn’t be played otherwise.

A simple example of this is a tapped sweep pattern.  The sweep picking is necessary to play the arpeggio at a certain speed while the tapped note increases the range of the arpeggio in a way that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.  Utilizing multiple tapped notes on different strings throughout the arpeggio can create a fast and fluid pattern that would truly be impossible to play without both techniques.

Think about what each technique is bringing to the table.  What does it allow you to do that wouldn’t be possible without it?

Just play around with it and see what you can come up with.  Maybe there was a musical idea you had at some point that you couldn’t figure out how to play.  Is there a way to combine techniques that would make it possible or even relatively easy to play?

In one sense, techniques are a solution to a problem.  So you can think in terms of finding or creating new “problems” to solve.

The important thing is to have fun with it and see what kinds of things you can think of.  You will be amazed at what this does for your understanding of what you already know and how it will develop your general guitar abilities.  It’s also an amazing feeling when you come up with something new and interesting.

I wonder what kind of new things you will create through experimentation… Maybe one day I’ll have the opportunity to learn a technique that you innovated.

Dan Mumm

If you missed last week’s article, you can find it here:
How to break out of the box

Need some new techniques to experiment with?  Check out my massive catalog of guitar related products, covering everything from Metal versions of Classical pieces, Neo-Classical Shred technique, Sweep Picking, and more!  See what’s on sale today at the link below:

www.Sellfy.com/DanMumm

… and how to break free!

At some point or another, you’ve probably noticed an overabundant repetition of specific patterns, licks, runs or progressions from either yourself or some of your favorite guitarists.  There are actually a number of jokes out there about guitarists using a “signature run” or just reusing the same patterns in nearly every song they play.

The truth is, just about every guitarist runs into this problem at some point and there is a really good reason why they do…

Muscle memory.

That’s right, one of the greatest assets to learning and memorizing things on the guitar can also become a major hindrance.

You see, when you’re writing a melody, guitar solo or even improvising with the guitar in your hands, you’re not just thinking in terms of melody.  Instead, little chunks of scales and patterns come up as a result of your playing habits.

Your fingers have been trained where to go and it’s almost like that puts a fence around everything else…

Everyone has their own habits of playing and those habits can easily become limitations for playing style and even song writing.  But that’s not the end of the story.  The guitar actually has built-in limitations based solely on how it’s tuned and how the notes are laid out up each string. 

Scale and arpeggio patterns on the guitar, for example, hugely inform the types of music and melodies you might write with the guitar in your hands.  It can also boil down to simply which notes are parallel to each other.  This isn’t inherently a bad thing.

One of my favorite examples of this is the chord progression for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana.  Here is a progression that probably never would have been thought of if it wasn’t for the standard tuning of the guitar.

If you don’t know how to play this progression I highly recommend looking it up real quick.  It will only take you a moment to learn.  When playing it, you can easily see how Kurt Cobain could have been fiddling around with the guitar and stumbled upon this progression.

It seems that when Kurt Cobain’s personal tastes and music “sensibilities” were combined with the layout of the guitar, that chord progression emerged.

Now I should be clear that I’m not putting down Nirvana or that chord progression at all.  I personally really enjoy that progression and that song.  I also think it’s a great example of the benefits of limitations in music.  In fact, without any limitations it would be virtually impossible to come up with any finite ideas.  There are just too many possibilities otherwise.

The instrument, the genre and many other factors provide limitations that can help the creative process along.  The only trouble is, these limitations can also hurt the process and box you in.

Regardless of whether you simply want to continue to expand your horizons as a guitarist or a song writer, knowing some tricks to break out of these limitations will be invaluable for you.  As these things can either positively or negatively affect things like your melodies, overall playing style, chord progressions and even your rhythms, you definitely want to have control over them.
 

How to break out of the box

What you should do to break free from the negative effects of limitations depends on what you’re trying to do.  I simplified it by breaking it down into three applicable categories… and then I complicated it by elaborating on a variety of methods to try for each.

1. Chord progressions:

If you find yourself stuck in a loop, coming up with the same few chord progressions over and over again, there are a few things that I would recommend to help you break free.
 

Bring something new to the table

Something you can do immediately would be to start learning some chord progressions from different genres of music.  You can easily just incorporate some new and unusual progression into your practice time each week. 

You may not end up using any of these specific progressions for anything but this will help you get a sense of what types of options you have and how one chord sounds after another in different contexts.  After awhile, you’ll find yourself coming up with completely different (and more interesting) progressions than you otherwise would have imagined.

Use a different instrument

Another trick that is particularly effective is to try coming up with chord progressions on a different instrument.  The piano, or keyboard, is the most obvious choice to come to mind.  Simply because the piano has a different layout, you will find yourself working creatively in a completely different headspace than you do when working on the guitar.  The most important factor is that you don’t have any of the same habits for the piano that you do on the guitar.  Because of this, you’ll be forced to write the progression based solely on how it sounds without your playing habits or muscle memory getting in the way.

Notating with midi

If you work with midi, you can also try writing some chord progressions by building the chords one note at a time on the midi piano roll.  This takes some time to do, but it’s a great way to try out new ideas and learn more about how a chord progression really works. 

In truth, each note of the chord interacts with the previous and next chord in one way or the other. Certain notes can pull you in the direction of the next chord and even setup a transition for later in the progression.  It’s all about tension and release, dissonance and harmony.  Each note of a chord interacts with each other harmonically, but they also interact with the notes of the following chord both melodically and harmonically. 

With midi, you’ll see firsthand how chord progressions are actually just a shortcut for composing polyphonic musical passages.  I highly recommend trying this if you haven’t before.

2. Melodies:

Your ability to write new and interesting melodies is hugely influenced by your guitar playing habits. Thankfully, there are some very easy methods of breaking free and writing melodies based on what you hear in your head.

Hum a tune

The easiest and most effective method for writing melodies without the guitar is to record yourself humming them and then learn them on the guitar later. 

If you don’t already do this, you should. 

This is a trick that is used by a huge percentage of guitarists and musicians for coming up with and saving new ideas.  Keep in mind that the melodies you write on the guitar are influenced and limited by the specific scale patterns and scale types you know on the guitar while the music you hear in your head will only be limited by the scales you’ve heard used in melodies throughout your life.

The best music that you’ll ever write will come to you this way.  The problem is, when this happens you need to have some way of saving the idea.  Thankfully, most of us have audio recorders built right in to our phones.  Personally, I’ve hummed and recorded at least a few thousand musical ideas on my phone over the years.

Different instruments… again!

Like with progressions, writing melodies on a different instrument is also very helpful and worth trying.  Again, the keyboard is a great go-to.  If you don’t own a piano or keyboard of some kind, just get an old cheapie from eBay or a garage sale.  It doesn’t have to sound good as you’ll be transferring the melody to the guitar anyway. 

Also, because of how the notes are laid out, you don’t need any previous knowledge of the keyboard to write a melody on it.  You can just fool around with it and see what you come up with!

Midi works here too

Like with progressions, you can use midi to write melodies by “painting” the notes in manually.  This is something that takes practice to get the hang of but eventually you can do it by ear very quickly.  The cool thing about using midi is that you can play it back and easily make changes to the notes or rhythm until you have it exactly the way you want it. 

Like with humming, once you’ve got it dialed in, you can just learn it on the guitar by ear.  If you use Guitar Pro, then you can also import the midi into a new tablature file and take your time determining which note should be played on which fret/string.

3. Guitar solos:

The options can become a bit tricky when trying to break out of the box for your guitar solos, especially when it’s a shred solo.  Thankfully, there are some things that you can easily start on today. 

Bring in some new patterns!

First and foremost, it’s important to expand your repertoire of scale patterns and scale types.  If you’ve only ever worked with one or two scales and scale patterns so far, then that is where your limitation is coming from right now.  Go out and learn a couple new scales.  Better yet, you could take the time to learn the modes up and down the neck of the guitar. 

To break out of the minor Pentatonic “box,” for example, learn the patterns that surround the pattern you use most frequently (these will be the same notes of the scale you know, just in different locations and octaves). 

Out with the old, in with the new… at least for now

If you find yourself reusing the same runs and patterns all the time, you can simply practice improvising where you intentionally exclude any of the old patterns you normally use.  Before you know it, you’ll have built up some brand new habits of playing that you can then incorporate with the old ones.

In the example of the minor Pentatonic box pattern I mentioned above, practice improvising with those surrounding patterns and exclude the box pattern for awhile. Then, once you have them down, come up with some patterns that incorporate both the old and the new.

Bring in some new techniques!

If you’re good on scales and ready to take things to the next level, the best thing you can do to broaden your horizons is to learn new techniques and then practice improvising with them. 

Reach out to other styles and genres and incorporate ideas that you’ve never used before.  If you’re a Rock or Metal player, Classical music and Jazz are both great places to start with this.  You can also just learn a couple Fusion solos and you’ll stumble upon all kinds of new patterns and techniques.

Experimentation and hybridization

You can also try combining aspects of different techniques you already know or using techniques in a different context than what you learned it for. 

A good example of this would be to take the sweep arpeggio patterns you’ve learned and utilize them for creating runs instead.  A sweep arpeggio is really just an arpeggio after all. 

Try building a box pattern out of them by inserting one passing tone per string in between the notes of the arpeggio (a passing tone can be any other note of the scale or even chromatic notes as long as you don’t end a phrase on them). 

If you get creative with mixing elements of different techniques or patterns, you’ll find that there are infinite possibilities to tap into.

Hum solo?

Probably the most effective (but also extremely challenging) way of writing a guitar solo that is completely unencumbered by your habits on the guitar is using the humming method like we discussed before. 

You can have an audio recorder setup to capture your voice and hum out some solo ideas while listening to a recording of the progression that you’re writing the solo for. 

The challenge here is that you’ll have to play back that recording many times to try to learn the hummed solo by ear.  The other difficulty is that you need to hum a solo that is both possible to play on the guitar and that also matches your skill level.  This method takes practice by itself but is hugely worth the effort.

♫♪♫♪

Regardless of you’re level of playing or your personal guitar goals, these methods can help you along the way.  Everyone gets stuck in a rut eventually and it can be frustrating and discouraging.  If you keep these methods on hand, you can keep yourself inspired and growing at all times.  

Just by trying a few of these methods you will get some entirely new perspectives on the guitar that will benefit you from then on.  I can’t recommend it enough.

If you missed last week’s article, be sure to check it out here – Guitar Speed: How fast is fast enough?

Stay tuned for next week’s article where I will go into more detail about how you can get creative with the techniques you already know.
 

Dan Mumm

Ready for that next challenge?  Check out my massive catalog of guitar related products, covering everything from Metal versions of Classical pieces, Neo-Classical Shred technique, Sweep Picking, and more!   See what’s on sale today at the link below:

www.Sellfy.com/DanMumm