Dear Fellow Guitarist, 

• Do you feel like you can express yourself with your guitar? 

• Do you have no trouble at all generating creativity? 

• Can you develop your ideas with ease?

• Do you find yourself writing/improvising different and exciting riffs and solos every time you pick up the guitar? 

If you answered yes to all of these: Congratulations! Now leave.

If you answered no to any, or all of those, I have good news. You are the normal one. The overwhelming majority of guitar players go through a stretch like this, I certainly did.

In fact it wasn’t until 15+ years into my journey, when I went to university to study guitar, that I started to be able to express myself freely on the instrument.

What was the turning point? 

I learned the fretboard. 

It’s simple really. I finally had the “words” necessary to craft musical sentences and paragraphs, and articulate exactly what I wanted to say.

The truth was: before I knew the fretboard, I didn’t have the ammunition to develop my ideas. 

Being creative felt like such a guessing game to me. I was just trying things randomly, waiting for my ear to tell me if it sounded “right” or not. Trying to find that next note, that next chord to develop my idea, was like trying to find a piece of charcoal in a pitch black room. 

After the last 7+ years of teaching, and hundreds of students later, I have realized that this is an extremely common plateau that guitarists, especially rock and metal guitarists, have trouble escaping. 

Whenever I post videos like the ones below, the comments are often filled with guitarists who currently feel stuck.