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We are all naturally creative, it’s part of being human. Just as we all breathe oxygen and eat food, we’re creative.

When we think of what it means to “be creative”, it is easy to dismiss our own abilities. We often associate “being creative” with peak performers, or people at the top of their field, such as Michelangelo, Bach, Steve Jobs, etc.

There are two mistakes that we often make when thinking about our creative potential:

If you’re reading this, them I’m guessing you and I have a few things in common:

1. We both love metal music
2. We both play guitar, or, are learning to (ideally the learning never stops)

If you are not learning to play guitar, then this is an interesting story for you to read. If you are learning, or you are thinking of learning, then hopefully this story will save you literally years of pain. Maybe decades.

Quite often when we are practising guitar, we are looking for “tricks” and “tactics”… but how often have you thought about… what you are thinking about?

(I’m dangerously close to a tautology here)

There are several factors that affect how fast we progress as a musician: • Having the right things to practice • Having mental focus when practising • Practicing the right way • What we are focussing on, when we are practising

2017 is slowly drawing to a close. Halloween has passed and shops are gearing up for Christmas - which seems a bit extreme as its only November, but whatever. This year was a tragic year for heavy metal, with a number of great musicians passing away. But, there were also some kickass releases.

So I thought it would be cool to look back at some of the top 9 heavy metal records from 2017. so here they are, in no particular order:

I read a great quote on music inspiration the other day:

The famous composer Schubert is said to have told a friends that his own creative process consisted in “remembering a melody” that neither he nor anyone else had ever thought of before

and it got me thinking about creativity. A lot of people have the false belief that creativity is something that “the chosen few” are naturally born with. I prefer to think of it as a muscle. We all use creativity everywhere in our lives. People that rise to the top of their game are always creative with how they get there… whether that is selling, being a CEO, being a mechanic, or writing music.

I’m just getting back into the swing of songwriting regularly the last few days (I know, I’ve not even released the first record yet!) and I forgot how, just like any other musical skill, it’s something that needs to be trained and practised. I haven’t done any writing at all for a few months and the last serious writing I did was over a year ago.

Writing needs to be just as big a part of my guitar routine as practising technique, theory, ear training, etc.

This is a very cool technique and will serve two big purposes:

1. Give you a new songwriting tool
2. Help fix up what is (probably) a weak area of your playing.

What we are looking at with this lesson is creating riffs using arpeggios based on two strings. Let’s quickly recap the intervals in the arpeggios that we are going to be using today:

Major: 1 3 5

Minor: 1 b3 5

Dimnished: 1 b3 b5

In this lesson we are going to look at how to build up a scale run on guitar. A lot of intermediate level guitar players want to be able to play awesome scale runs down the length of their neck, and it can be quite hard to know how to get started with them. So we are going to spend a few weeks slowly building a scale run up, bar by bar.

This is an interview I conducted at Hellfest with Par from Sabaton at Hellfest 2014. I’m very grateful for his time! The interview looks at Sabaton’s career and how the band has developed over the years. Par talks about some of the practicalities of running a touring band as-well as his attitudes and views to building a career. A must read for anyone interested in what it takes to be a pro!

This is a neoclassical tool we can use in lead composition. We are going to look at extracts from Bach’s 1st Cello Suite, Prelude and Courante, see how Bach uses pedal points, then look at how we can apply this in our own playing.

This extract is from Bach’s Prelude in his first Cello Suite.

You can see that from the second beat of this example, Bach is using the note D (fret 7 on the G string), and then chromatically ascending from D, and going back to D each time.