Ways To Get Creative Juices Flowing For Guitar

Have you hit that wall that’s called writers block? Well I know how you feel, today we’re going to talk about some different ways how to get past that wall you hit when you’re trying to write a song. So the first one I want to talk about is learn a riff from one of your favorite artist, I’m not saying to copy that artist but notice as you’re learning that song or a riff from that person, or just listening to a song from your favorite artist during each of those processes ask yourself how would I play this if I was in that artist’s shoes. Another way you can spark creativity is change the rhythm up of a riff, here’s an ex

Notice how all the notes are exactly the same but they all have a different feel to them when you change the rhythm. Also one little tweak you could do, is literally take this exact riff and change the dynamic of it. What is dynamic? Dynamic is controlling the volume of each note that is in the riff, ex: let’s take the riff above, pick the first note soft and the second note hard you’ll notice how the riff will sound completely different. Here’s another thing you can do, you can change when you start and end the riff. What I mean is, let’s say you normally start the riff on the one beat, instead start the riff on the two and rest on the one and that will change the whole feel of the riff, here’s an example below.

Another thing you could use is bends, bends can completely change a riff into a different riff.

Now you know about bends, another thing you could also think about how far you want to bend, above is a full step bend, you also could do a half step bend instead here’s an ex:

How about what if you took the top two riffs combined them and then add some legato with some vibrato.

Or another thing you could do is change the time signature of a riff this will completely change the riff here’s an ex:

Notice how through this whole article I’ve basically repeated the same notes besides the part using legato , the reason why I’m doing this, is to illustrate that you don’t absolutely need to use more notes to create different riffs for a song and also you can take these concepts and apply them to any key you want. The goal here is to look at songwriting from a different angle instead thinking, I’ve got to have all of these notes to write songs. Some of the best songwriters in the world, literally repeated the same two or three chords over and over again but might have just tweaked like one little thing and that one little tweak created a whole different riff.

About the author, Zach Payton is a guitar teacher based out of Lewiston Idaho that likes helping his students grow to become better musicians