Tips, Tricks and Ways of Boosting Your Guitar (and Music) Creativity

Creativity is one of the most important assets that you could have as a guitarist, a musician or a song-writer.

But creativity is something that comes and goes with time. At times, making any sort of headway and progress with your guitar playing or song writing because sometimes, you can be devoid of all creativity and inspiration.

You could play for hours on end, but make little or no progress. You could even end up getting immensely frustrated and dropping out.  

If you’ve experienced something similar, or are just looking for ways to boost your creativity, here are some solutions:

1. Take a break. Take a couple of week, or maybe even a month off from playing or practicing the guitar. Pack it and put it away somewhere. Only resume once you have a strong urge and motivation to pick up and play the instrument once more (yes, it will happen!). Once that happens, you’ll return with a fresh perspective and increased levels of motivation, which means you’ll automatically be more creative. Taking a break from your music, and the guitar might just be the thing you were looking for all along!

2. Listen to all sorts of music. All artists, all genres, all kinds of records, the whole deal. Doing so might just be the inspiration and the creativity boost that you were looking for all along!

3. Play all kinds of music. Don’t be afraid to experiment, or step out of your comfort zone. If you’re predominantly a rock guitarist, or a county guitarist, try your hand at playing a bit of reggae, folk or jazz. Do something completely different, it’ll help you freshen things up. Playing something completely different might be the caffeine your brain needed all along.

4. Learn and play Violin and Piano pieces on the guitar. Create a piano or Learn chords or melody for the piano part and arrange it on the guitar. Similarly, take a violin piece, such as Mozart piece, and arrange it for the guitar. These sound brilliant on the guitar, they can have an amazing bearing on your technique, and above all, can provide you with some much-need inspiration and allow you to be creative by doing something totally different and untraditional.

5. Assess your Passions. One of the best, most proven ways boosting your creativity is to find ways of improving your passion. Perhaps your source of inspiration could be something that is close to you, or something you hold dear. For instance, a lot of musicians tend to find inspiration on topics of love, family, wealth and money, etc. Looking at things close to your heart and close to you, things that inspire you will allow you to channel that inspiration into your music.

6. Step out of the house. Go on a long road trip, a vacation, simply hit the beach, the park, or go on a trek or a hike. Move out of the place where you usually practice. People tend to find inspiration when they’re close to nature, or away from their usual surroundings – getting exposed to new people, cultures, languages, and maybe even music can be a great source of inspiration and might just be the thing that gets those creative juices flowing.

7. Jam with friends, a band or a group of musicians. This is personally my favorite method of finding inspiration and getting some much needed creativity-boost. I find that whenever I’m playing with another guitarist, or jamming with a band, ideas are thrown around, people tend to share stuff with one another and there is energy in the room. Inspiration and ways of being creative are easy to come by, especially when you’re in the company of fellow musicians.

8. Watch gigs, performances, and concerts of your favorite guitar player or artist(s). Trust me when I say this – nothing can provide you with greater inspiration, motivation and creativeness than watching your favorite artist ‘do his thing.’ Search online, look on Youtube, or pick up a DVD. Depending on who you look up to as your source of inspiration, there should be plenty of material for you to watch.

9. Enroll for an online guitar course. Learning the guitar online, or simply honing your skills online is easy, and can be a great way of finding sources of inspiration. GuitarTricks.com, for instance, is an absolutely fantastic resource for all guitarists out there. The best thing about GuitarTricks is that they have something for everyone. So even if you’re an experienced, professional guitarist who’s been practicing and playing the instrument for many years, chances are that they’ll have something for you. Their database of lessons is huge. I won't go into a lot of details, but you can check out this great review of GuitarTricks instead.

10. Use Tom Hess’s 5-pronged topic-approach. Tom Hess, one of the biggest names in the industry, recommends a 5-pronged approach to playing the guitar to boost creativity. First off, he recommends writing an instrumental music piece (sans words/lyrics, and just music), because according to him, most artists and guitarists rely too much on words to express what they want to. His 5-point approach involves (a) choosing a topic – preferably something that you want to express through your music, (b) writing it down, (c) dividing it into sections, (d) figure out how the 7 different elements of music (rhythm, harmony, melody, texture, form, timbre, dynamics) can each be used to express your chosen topic through music, and finally (e) think of where the climax in your chosen topic is (for example it could be a kickass guitar solo), and how you build up to the climax through the parts that precede it. Hess recommends writing this down on paper, before writing the actual music for your composition.