It's Not WHAT You Play, It's HOW You Play It
If you are like most guitar students, you want to acquire more skills and knowledge about guitar playing. You want more things to learn, practice and play.
Our appetite for MORE is what pushes us to keep learning, but it often also prevents us from ever feeling truly satisfied. Why? ...
Well, as we continue to focus on ‘what to play’, we typically neglect to improve our ability to play it in the most passionate, powerful, expressive or artistic way possible.
Today, instead of thinking about ‘what to play’, think more about ‘how to play things’. You can begin to practice the ‘how’ by taking something you already know (a lick or melodic phrase for example) and create 10, 20 or 30 variations of that same musical idea.
Each time you create a new variation, change some aspect of the original
idea.
Here are some quick ‘variation ideas’ to get you started.
Change the rhythm.Change the articulation.Change the pitch range.Change the dynamics.Change the accents.Change the vibrato.Change the approach of some of the notes (bend, slide, hammer-on, pull off into the notes).
Then you can create more variations by changing more than 1 of the above elements in a single variation. For example, change the rhythm and the articulation.
What you are really doing here is beginning to improve your “Guitar Phrasing”.
