So you play guitar and you want to get creative? Are you sick of practicing scales to where you lose sense that your fingers are even attached to those hands of yours? Do you want to actually come up with songs that no one else ever wrote, songs that you wrote?
Coming up with new licks, new melody lines, and new song ideas is not too difficult. While some guitarists have little problem devoting themselves to perfect their rendition of Crazy Train or Villa Lobos' second prelude and yet cannot come up with an original song idea to save their fingers, others can churn out new ideas just by putting their finger tips down on the fret board . The same may yet dread having to beat out something as trite as Spanish Romance for the umpteenth time just to get that key change right.
As someone who strongly associates with the latter, I am here to give out the basics on how I come up with a new song idea just about each time I start strumming away.
1.Chords. Play around with what chords you know. Switch them around. Play them in different voicings and just switch between that Bb Maj7 to that Am7. Learn new chord types. Do you know all of your major and minor inversions? Good. Now learn the major seven and minor seven inversions. Don't neglect those delicious diminished, diminished sevenths, augmented, augmented sevenths, and the like. The more chords you know, the more colors you have for your palette.
For those who get easily discouraged by simply churning out songs written by others, this will help you gain greater competency with chords and will help train your ears and hands to find ear-pleasing harmonies by switching chords. Sometimes, you go to that one major sixth to that diminished seventh and it sounds so right. Then you try to find the next chord that sounds perfect after that diminished. You will probably find a melody being spelled out on the higher strings, meaning the E and B open strings especially. With various voicings, you can develop chord melodies that sound great.
2. Scales. Learn new scales. Learn the chief formations. Learn the notes. Scales aren't just good for solos. Scales can be an effective way to generate new licks as well as full-fledged melodies. Of course, the primary scales you will want to know all along the neck are your Ionian and Aeolian scales which, simply put, are your major and natural minor scales. You'll went to know the harmonic and melodic minors, the Dorian and Phrygian modes, blues scale, and such. As you simply play around with the scale formations, you'll probably find yourself developing little leads. Don't trash them. Keep them in mind, make note of them.
A site that has an extensive amount of information on mainline and exotic scales is http://www.looknohands.com/chordhouse/ which I have found innumerably useful. Not only will you be learning scales, you will, hopefully anyways, be having fun doing it and find that scales are easier to learn and are easier to utilize in playing in general.
3. Play around with single notes. Sometimes you are playing around with simple single notes on the fret board without thinking in terms of scales, though hopefully you will know if you are playing in a major or minor key and which key at that. However, as someone who is also a keyboard player, I find it much easier to come up with melodic lines on guitar than on any other instrument I play. Playing with single notes serves as a great opportunity to train your ear and hands to create coherent leads. It also allows room to work on slides, slurs, and string bending. But as mentioned previously, single notes can be a reservoir to generate beautiful melodies.
If you don't know how to play a keyboard instrument to match up a harmony with that melody, you can try to work chord voicings to carry both the melody and harmony, thus creating a chord melody. If full chords become too much trouble, you can simply play two notes at a time, one being the melody and the other to be the bass line or harmony. Listen how different harmony notes change the mood of the melody. The results of this process can be quite rewarding.
4.Hum and play. For some reason, the voice seems to have a better comprehension of melody than our fingers and intellect do. Perhaps this is why I have often been told to hum and play. Play what you hum. Hum what you play. Through this process, melodies should come much easier for those who struggle with the above method. Melodies developed through this process should also sound fresher than when just fishing for notes. Your voice will get worked on a bit, especially when challenging your vocal range, but in this way there will be presented a prospect of unity with the voice and the instrument which can be of a valuable asset for the guitar especially.
5.Improvise over chords. Some computer programs, like Band In The Box, allow the user to create a chord progression for the program to play for them. They can then solo over the accompaniment. There are also MP3s and MIDI files across the internet that are just harmony. If you know the chord progression or even just the key, or if you know how to find the key, you can also improvise your own melodies and licks. Even with songs you have that have the lead and the works, you can still improvise a lead if you know the song's key at least. If your ear has not been trained to fish for notes until you find the note that the song resolves to, there are ways to accustom your ear to do this at whim. However, the point is that this is a good way to practice improvisation as well as come up with song ideas aside from training your ear.
6.Play around melodies of songs you like. Perhaps there are songs that you enjoy playing. You enjoy the melody or whatever and know how to play the song or can read the notes off of tablature or sheet music. Play those songs and gradually veer off from the actual melody into a melody that sounds similar but is yet original. I have done this on not only guitar but piano as well where I recently came up with a full fledged song and chord progression by playing the first two or three notes of the song and then venturing into a melody entirely my own that still captured the mood of the original piece. Many great composers have created their own opuses by being directly inspired by a predecessor. Music is about creating possibilities by arranging and rearranging basic elements as it is in visual art. This is not plagiarism in that it is more like creating a rather unrelated idea from a phrase, a quote, or a thematic element in a literary work or television show. Being inspired by another's work and producing tangible results of that inspiration would be far more a compliment to the artist than anything else and is how art trends develop through decades and centuries. Art is unique and yet is interconnected. Don't forget that. You could be someone's inspiration in years to come, after all.
7.Be passionate and have fun. Enjoy what you are doing. Often I hear that if you do what you love, the rest will follow whether the rest means money, success, acclaim, whatever. Life is too short to waste it on selling dreams to be so security seeking that you lose the richness of experimentation and exploration. But whatever it is you are doing with your instrument, it should be meaningful to you. Doing what you want to do versus what you have to do yields better results more quickly, often. So while music requires discipline and hard work, don't be afraid to once in a while step away from the instrument for a day or two when you feel locked in a senseless routine. Always keep your creative juices flowing, but above all, love it and have fun with it.
I strongly recommend you to record what you think are good ideas through audio recording devices or by writing down the chord progression with the position listed under each chord, if you wish. You can write out your ideas in tablature or standard notation. If you don't have notation software, you can find blank staff sheets for free off of the internet. Print some out and leave some to make copies where a copy machine is available. Keep your ideas dated. You never know if your idea could become a hit song. If that were to happen, it would be a shame if someone took the credit and got away with it because you couldn't prove that you came up with the song first.
I am of the belief that music means different things for different people. I can say I am not the narrow-road sort of musician but when I do what feels right, people sense that there is a lot of talent going on there. Don't let the sophists drive you bonkers by telling you that what you are doing isn't right because it doesn't follow their narrow view of how music ought to be played. More likely by denying your own ingenuity by confining yourself to such mentality, you'll be increasingly dissatisfied with the instrument instead of enriched. There is always room for improvement but it needs to be on the terms of being creative and true to yourself.
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