Too many guitarists see creativity as something that will just come to them on a whim. Practise your scales, learn some songs, and you'll naturally get more creative. I don't think that's true. Creativity is a skill. It's a muscle you can train, and you should train it.
Some of these tips are more philosophical and some are very practical. A few might change how you play straight away. Most of them need putting into practice. You can't just think them into existence.
1. Use the 80/20 rule ▶ 0:52
I cannot begin to tell you how 80/20 I've become. Here's how I think about it. Say it takes me six weeks, realistically longer, to write a song that's 100% the best thing I could write. I could probably write a song that's 80% of my best in a week or two.
So in the time it takes to write one song at 100%, I could write three, four, five, six or more at 80%. And through each one, you improve. So much so that your 80% will far exceed what your 100% was even six months ago. That applies to improvising and loads of other creative things too.
I want my 80% ability to be so good that it makes my old 100% look embarrassing.
2. You don't have to hear the note before you play it ▶ 1:42
A lot of accomplished guitarists will tell you that you need to hear a note before you play it. I actually think this is nonsense, or at least overrated.
Being able to hear where you want to go and then play it is really freeing. But imagine all you could hear in your head was a major scale in order. Your playing would be pretty boring. I'd argue the notes you hear in your head are the ones most likely to keep you in the same patterns of thought, in the same box.
So use every tool you've got. If a pattern feels good under your fingers, use it, change it and adapt it. Play a fret you wouldn't normally expect to play. I do sometimes hear a note and think, right, I know where I want to go. But so often I hit a note by mistake, or play a pattern that feels good, and find the right path that way.
Be careful, though. Your hands can deceive you and lead you down the same path as well. The point is that how you get to the note doesn't matter. What matters is whether it's the right note. If you can't hear notes ahead of time yet, don't worry. As long as you have a rigorous creative process, you don't need to.
3. Restriction and randomisation ▶ 3:17
These are the two most important principles for creating something, in my opinion.
Randomisation. You need to surprise yourself from time to time. A random number generator is one of my best friends for making things. I'll generate a number from 1 to 12 to decide which fret I start on. Why not? You could number a list of techniques and randomly pick which ones to use and in what order. Or allocate numbers to time signatures, scale positions, anything. Roll a dice if you like. If you rely on old habits you'll play the same things over and over. Sometimes you have to stumble into ideas, and randomisation forces that stumble.
Restriction. A lot of modern players try to do everything all the time. Some of my favourite riffs and solos are great because they isolate one motif, technique or idea and develop it. They don't throw in tapping, then legato, then palm muting, then a time signature change. They pick something and give it a character. So restrict yourself:
- Only use one technique in the song or solo.
- Only play with your first and third fingers.
- Don't play any higher than the 6th fret.
This gets harder the better you get, because you have so much at your fingertips and you want to use it. Sometimes you have to hold back and get interesting with a small set of ideas.
4. Play what sounds good, not what feels good ▶ 5:23
This isn't the same as point two. How you get to something doesn't really matter, but don't let your fingers dictate what you create. It's easy to play something that feels great physically, or is really mentally stimulating, and that's how you end up with very busy riffs and solos.
The person listening isn't playing the instrument. They're not feeling that sensation. They're just listening. So ask yourself, do I love listening to this, not do I love playing it? Honestly, the only real way I know to do that is to record what you play, go away for an hour and listen back.
5. Check how loud you're playing ▶ 6:23
There are two extremes to avoid. Play too loudly and everything sounds good. Crank your headphones or a loud amp in a big room and whatever you play feels great. But play really quietly and everything sounds a bit unexciting, because you don't get that physical feeling of the music going through you.
So if you normally play quietly, turn up every now and again. You might be writing great ideas you're just not hearing loud enough.
6. Get the reps in ▶ 7:02
This is similar to the 80/20 rule. If you've never written a solo, improvised or written a song before, don't expect number 20 to sound good. Think in hundreds. If I asked you to write 100 songs, or improvise 100 days in a row, I think you'd struggle not to get better.
What you need to avoid is procrastinating, watching hour-long tutorials on this, that and the other. This needs creative action. If you don't like what you're writing, there's a very good chance you just haven't written enough. Create more, don't dwell, and see where it lands you.
7. Explore the extremes ▶ 7:50
A lot of people's creative bubble exists in a very small space. Take picking dynamics. Most people's range is pretty narrow. So pick as gently as you possibly can, so you hear more plastic from the pick than note. Then go the other way and bash the string so hard it goes sharp and twangs. Find the extremes, then decide where in between you want to settle.
Same with legato. If you like legato, play everything legato and don't pick anything. Then pick every single note. You might find you've been doing too much legato and actually like a bit of picking in there. You don't know what treasure there is at the extremes until you go looking.
8. Write in the style of someone else ▶ 8:53
Take an artist you love and tease out their ideas. Mark Tremonti is my favourite guitarist, so I have to watch myself with this one. Take a short section of a song or solo and, without actually learning it, try to rewrite it from what you can hear. Is he playing fast? Lots of palm muting? This technique or that one? You don't need the specifics. You just need to hear them and replicate them in some way.
A lot of old-school players say much of their sound came from trying to work out other people's parts and not quite getting them right. We have tabs now, so we tend to get it about right. But there's beauty in figuring something out yourself and then putting your own style on it. They did a hammer-on and you'd prefer a slide? Do that, and see how it sounds.
9. Go with or against the grain ▶ 9:54
This is for parts that sit over something else: a guitar layer, a solo over a track, even a vocal part. Is what you're writing going with the direction of the track or against it? If there's a really flowy part underneath, do you want to flow with it or fight it?
Going with the grain might be a direct harmony of a part, or doubling a little riff you hear under your solo. But if the part behind you suddenly becomes more rhythmic, you might decide to keep your flowy line and stand on top of it instead. If you want to build with the track, flow with it. If you want your part to stand above it, go against it.
10. Lean into your level of complexity ▶ 10:57
I like writing quite complex parts, but I don't always love listening to them. That used to stump me. It's not actually a problem. If you write a complex part or tapping lick, use it as your foundation and simplify afterwards. What are the key motifs in it? There are probably three or four little ideas, rhythms, techniques or melodic shapes you can tease out and build around.
I often find a really simple three or four note motif in there that sounds great on its own, because I know where it came from. If I'd just written those notes from scratch, I'd think, cool, what now?
If everything you write is simple, that's fine too. Start simple and add a layer of complexity: some techniques on top, a different rhythm, going against the grain a bit. Don't fight your writing style. Lean into it, then build on it after you've created, not during.
Bonus: develop your phrases ▶ 12:35
When you get a good idea, run with it. So many people improvise across the fretboard and move on the moment they come up with something good. I had a student come to me once, really nervous, and after he improvised a bit he said, "Ah, that probably all sounded the same." None of it sounded the same. He just kept playing loads of different stuff. He needed to pick something and develop it.
Simple ways to do that: play a short phrase and change the last note, add one note on the end, or change the first note. Repeat the idea three or four times, maybe more, with small changes, and you build a story the listener can follow.
And if you're learning licks or riffs, learn to change them and play them in different places. What makes a lick sound like itself isn't mainly the note choice. It's the direction of the movement, up or down and in what order, and the rhythm. So you can play most ideas pretty much anywhere on the neck as long as you keep the same trajectory and feel. You won't bore people as long as there's some development.
Where to start
Pick one of these and actually do it today. Generate a random fret from 1 to 12, put on a backing track, restrict yourself to one technique, and record it. Then go away for an hour, listen back, and take the best little phrase from it and develop that.
