5 easy ways to adopt a creative guitar mindset

Why guitarists focus more on the technical side of guitar playing while struggling with the creative aspect + 5 easy and proven ways to enhance your creativity on the guitar

Creative guitar mindset: why do we need it? It may be trivial, but I think it’s important to stress the impact that our mindset has on our guitar playing and music creation. Out of the different types, I’m going to focus here on the creative mindset, which is fundamental for music as a creative art form.

Although this is quite a simple concept, I don’t think that many guitarists think this way. But I can understand why. One of the reasons is related to the way we begin learning guitar. The first thing we do is treat guitar playing as a physical activity. It’s understandable because controlling our fingers to do something they’ve never done before is a challenge. We weren’t born to play the guitar. 

So our initial focus is to see the guitar as a tool for finger exercises. This way, we might get the wrong impression that this is what the guitar is about. We may adopt a sports-like mindset, believing that we should focus primarily on techniques. This is heightened when we want to sound like the great, technically incredible shred guitarists.

Guitarist’s creative mindset

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against honing our technical skills on the guitar. But my guitar philosophy is that music is about conveying emotions, and the guitar is the best tool to achieve that. So in a creative mindset, guitar skills are meant to help us express the music we hear in our heads to create meaningful songs and compositions. This is my definition of a creative mindset in this context. A more general definition can be “think like an artist”. 

“Arts and crafts” is a good analogy for these two types of mindsets (sports and creative). “Arts” represents the artistic and creative side of music, and “crafts” is the technical and craftsmanship part of playing music. Each one relies on the other and complements it. To convey our emotions on the guitar, we need to be able to execute them well. To give meaning to our finger movements and guitar skills, we need emotional content. So there’s some balance we can maintain between the “arts and crafts”. 

There’s no shortage of resources for improving technical guitar skills, but it seems that guitar lessons on creativity are scarce. I can understand why. It’s much more difficult to teach guitar creativity! But because this is my true passion and purpose in life, I’ve spent a lot of time, effort, and energy finding ways to teach guitarists to be more creative and expressive. I’ve learned it from my guitar teachers, researched it academically, and tested it in the real world on myself, my fellow musicians, and my guitar students. 

After discussing the importance of adopting a creative mindset on the guitar, let’s go over ways of achieving it.

5 tips on adopting a creative mindset on the guitar

1) Embrace this daily habit

Enhancing a creative mindset is like adopting a good habit. Like any habit, daily repetition is the key to success. So you can simply allocate time every day to practising it. This kind of practice is about picking up the guitar and playing something you’ve never played before. You can improvise, jam, noodle, and explore the guitar from a new angle. Allow yourself to experiment with it. This can be even just 10 minutes a day, and you can treat it like your daily meditation or your “me time.” 

• Choosing the right time of day and place can help with incorporating it into your routine and life. For example, I practice mainly at night time when the house is quiet while laying on the living room couch. 

2) Don’t think too much

When you practice the above daily exercise (or when playing anything on the guitar), try not to think too much or at all. Mainly, don’t judge and critique yourself by thinking “it’s not good enough”, “it’s not original enough”, or “I don’t know what I’m playing”. We are our worst critics. Being critical is a great type of thinking for other tasks, like making progress and improving our guitar skills. But from an artistic point of view, it adds an unnecessary roadblock to the creative process. So decide that you’re going to clear your mind and enter a state of flow. The great drummer Vinnie Colaiut summarised it well with his mantra: “Thought is the enemy of flow”. 

• If you ever tried meditation, you probably know that it’s hard to stop our brain from thinking. How can you stop its main function…? But you can enter a mind-wandering state, or daydream. Anything is fine as long as you allow yourself to explore the guitar with no judgment. 

3) Shut your eyes

What can help you with the previous tips is to shut your eyes while playing. This simple act can block some distractions and disruptions in your environment. Because music is mainly an auditory experience, shutting down one of your most active senses, sight, can help. You can then focus more on the most important skill for a guitarist or musician: the ability to listen. This type of listening skill allows you to hear the potential of what you’re trying to create and immerse yourself in this creative activity. Besides, playing without looking at your fingers is a great exercise that builds trust with your fingers and the sense of touch. 

• Other ways to decrease your sight are by playing in a dark room (I even played in caves), or covering your eyes with a blindfold (maybe you have a travel eye mask from your latest flight…).

4) Do a warm-up

It can take some time to leave your thoughts behind, find something that excites you, or enter a flow state. So when practising the daily 10 minutes, it might take five minutes or even more to get into “the zone”. The zone is that state of mind where you feel comfortable and curious to explore new things after letting go of any annoying thoughts. This way, creativity is like a muscle that you need to stretch and warm up to exploit its full potential. So be patient with yourself and allow time for things to happen (and they will happen!).

• You can also do “normal” warm-up exercises before your 10 minutes begin. These can even lead you to a great creative session. For instance, did you know that Guns N’ Roses’ hit “Sweet Child O’ Mine” began as an exercise that Slash practised on his guitar?

5) Create a safe space

If you still struggle to get into a creative mood, it might be related to your surroundings. A safe space is a time and place where you feel secure enough to explore the unknown. It’s like the “sandbox” concept in the software development world, where you can try things out, test them, and make mistakes. So finding or creating your own safe space in an encouraging environment can help.

• I’ve found that these safe places can occur in the context of a lesson with my guitar students. Magic happens when you have trust and are encouraged to get your creative juices flowing. I’ve witnessed many a time students creating amazing music in front of my eyes and ears

Want to get more creative guitar mindset tips?

These five creative guitar mindset tips are just a few out of many! I write about them in more depth in my guitar book.

If you’d like to know what they are and can’t wait for the book, I can show you what they are and, more importantly, how to implement them. Contact me here.

I’m a guitar teacher in north London who mainly teaches online using a unique music education platform. If you’re looking into improving your guitar songwriting and composing skills – I’d love to hear from you. Use the link above or comment below to schedule a guitar chat with me.