Creativity and Inspiration for Guitarists

In my opinion there are few things that drive creativity more than inspiration. An inspired artist will create sometimes a seemingly effortless flow of new material while an uninspired counterpart with equal talent will toil for years with meager output. Inspiration can be finicky though at least for me. I tend to recoil at the thought of trying to force music or art and take things as they come. It's easy though to use this philosophy as an excuse to stay inactive and unproductive or just plain lazy.

A great way to rekindle inspiration to create music is to listen to different instruments and genres of music outside of your comfort zone or the style which you mainly create within. As an example I've posted a guitar lick that uses an altered tuning meant to capture the drone overtones you'd hear on a sitar or similar instrument with sympathetic vibrations. The tuning for this guitar lick has every note tuned down to Db. Please note every note is detuned so DO NOT increase the tension on the strings to hit the Db or they will break. For some notes the detuning can be significant and using a heavier gauge string will reduce the "spaghetti" feel of the slackened strings. Anyway here is the guitar lick I came up with. On a related note if you'd like to explore world music CourseA.org has a course starting tomorrow online that is free and looks quite interesting. You can read more about it here: https://www.coursera.org/course/worldmusic