Hyphen Nation wrote:buy The Guitar Grimoire and run through all of the modes/scales.
Is this easy to learn or you need to already know some of the basic stuff?
I found them to be really useful. They are pretty well laid out charts.
Another thing that could be good is some lessons with someone you like in your town. A few of my friends take lessons as adults [usually with some talented local musicians] and they are great players.
I think the biggest thing to open up guitar for me was learning how to travis pick and getting familiar with triads/inversions. I'd always kinda learn rock songs and play them and never really play with anyone else and it always sounded so lame, I'd always be thinking this sounds so bad without a bass and drum set playing. Playing a bunch of chords with some riffy stuff in there, or even little lead embellishments by yourself never sounds complete or satisfying to me. Travis picking or finger picking goes a long way in solving that and just playing the guitar by itself actually sounds more like 'real' music. It made me much more enthusiastic toward creating music.
Learning/experimenting with chord inversions or triads is really good because you can just move one note up or down and listen the the completely new sound or texture it creates. Combine that with open strings and see what works and what doesn't, or just listening to the different feelings you can get from one chord changed a little bit here or there is really inspiring and interesting. You get so many different things in there ...dark, sad, mysterious, nostalgic, weird, strange, boring, droning, happy, combinations of any of those and way more. Then work on stringing the new slightly altered chords together to try and make it sound to something like a sentence.
Listening to any kind of guitar player where he uses stuff to fill out the sound if he's the only one is really good for that, guys like Johnny Marr with lots of open strings, Chet Atkins, John Fahey etc.
Also helps to look outside of music for inspirations. Maybe that is much more important than looking at guitar players you like? Read an article, or watch a youtube vid on some strange political discussion or watch a movie from the 80s and think about what kind of music to create around that.
That was always the thing that killed me as an artist in other pursuits. Complete over load in the media I was working in. Looking at every single artist that I thought I would like or was similar and then I could ween inspiration or rules about what was right and what wasn't. Only thing I learned is that everything has been done before. Killed my creativity and interest. Put me in a box. Stay away from like minds!!! Don't read guitar forums!!
