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
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