It’s really easy to get carried away when you reach a certain level of ability on the guitar, and equally it’s really easy to get bogged down in your own desire to write and play cool and interesting stuff. This is somewhere I’ve found myself regularly over the years – loads of knowledge and ability but everything I play sounds stale.
If this sounds familiar then I have a work around that might help – limiting your options. I can’t take credit for this as ideas of a similar nature can be found all over the place and in every field, and I first came across it whilst flicking through a set of ‘Oblique Strategies‘.
It may sound weird, increasing your creativity by reducing your field of creative vision, but I’ve found it to work very well particularly in the way it focuses on the job at hand and the principle can be applied to almost anything. Let’s say you’re struggling to find that killer riff for the middle 8 of a tune and all your typical scale choices are sounding flat and boring. Pick 4 notes at random within the appropriate key. Play them in every order you can, in a variety of octaves, with every conceivable technique and stick rigidly to those notes. Something will come right as you live within those notes for long enough. The awesome Ron Jarzombek uses two similar, yet more advanced, principles when creating riffs for Blotted science, something he calls the twelve tone clock or twelve tone fragments. It’s similar to the twelve tone compositional system popularised by classical composers such as Schoenberg and can create some extraordinary results in terms of riffs and chordal passages. I shan’t go into it in detail as Ron has written plenty about it on his website and helpfully most Blotted Science tabs have the appropriate ‘clock’ and ‘key’ indicated next to each section. In any case, it’s a way of limiting your choices to force maximum creativity.
Where I find this sort of thing most useful is when I am practising improvisation. It’s all well and good to know scale patterns and be able to play them in 3rds, 4ths and every other interval but there are so many interesting little patterns and arpeggios within each scale shape that can be exploited when improvising, thus creating more expressive phrasing and developing more exotic note choice from conventional scales. Let’s use a three note per string C Ionian shape over a simple Cmaj7 vamp. We’re going to start with pairs of strings, first up 6 + 5, and we’re going to jam over that Cmaj7 for at least 5 minutes playing those 6 notes in every possible order and use every technique we can (hammers, pulls, bends, slides, taps, whammy etc) until they become so familiar it’s like breathing. Melodically the obvious things to notice are the C major (CEG) and D minor (DFA) arpeggios. Slightly less obvious to the beginner improviser are the Dm7 (DFAC/CDFA) and C6 (CEGA) arpeggios, and even less obvious are the F major (2nd inversion – CFA) and A minor (1st inversion – CEA) arpeggio. 6 notes. All those choices. Once we’ve done that we can move onto strings 4 + 3 and do the same.
It’s very easy to get carried away when you reach a certain ability level as the pressure is to constantly prove that ability by flying around extended scales and arpeggios at lightning speed. There’s a time and a place for that, and of course it’s loads of fun, but it’s often at the expense of note choice. Look at early examples of Vinnie Moore, Reb Beach, George Lynch et al, all obviously hugely talented yet their solos sound more like technical exercises than compositions. Then look at the majesty of Steve Vai (I know, an obvious choice), and jazz guys like Mike Stern, John Scofield and Pat Metheny. Fast at times, but the speed is sprinkled gently over long passages filled with glorious note choice. Rather than simply playing scales over chords they deliberately target each chord as its own individual entity and accent the defining chord tones (i.e the 3rd and 7th rather than the root and 5th). In the case of extended chords they’ll then target the #11, b13 etc. What this means is that they can actually solo with no accompaniment and as listeners we can still hear the chords that should be played underneath because their note choice is so expert. This takes lots of practice and lots of getting it wrong, but this ability doesn’t come by tackling the whole neck in one go,it comes from carefully breaking it in to manageable chunks and becoming 100% comfortable with all of your options. It takes ages, but it’s a fun road to travel and I’ll no doubt bump into you somewhere along it.
Phil Rochard Guitar Tuition 