10 Guitar Tips to Make You Sound Unique

After you have been playing guitar for a while you find there are only so many rhythms, bass lines, chord progressions, and guitar scales. It can be difficult to sound different, you must play and think out of the box to go to new places. Here are 10 creative guitar tips to help make you sound unique.  

TRY DIFFERENT PICKS & PICKING METHODS

Picks are cheap; try every style, shape, and material! You can also use everyday objects like change for picking or lighters and glass for slides. Try antique metals, cards, or even modern 3D printed fingerstyle picks. However avoid animal materials, besides being illegal they often don’t have as great a resonance or boost as they claim.

Also try every picking and fingerstyle method you can,  it doesn’t have to be perfect, sometimes improper playing leads to new sounds. Not all styles were improper picking on purpose, Django Reinhardt started a whole genre after his hand was burned. And Tony Iommi lost his fingertips in an accident that ended up helping him revolutionize the vibe of heavy metal.

EXPERIMENT WITH STRING GAUGES & MATERIALS

Now this tip and technique requires a little more care and nuance. You shouldn’t put steel strings on a classical and the strings you use need to be a suitable material and size for your nut. It’s fine to try a lot of different strings out, but make sure you are aware of your guitar’s abilities.

And if you want to really get creative then work on beater guitars. Create franken guitars with various gauges and even rewired electronics if you want to dive deep into new sound. Take the frets off, create lap steels, it’s always nice to have a cheap guitar for odd experiments with strings and other parts.

TRY OUT GUITAR MODELING AMPS & EFFECTS APPS

Analog effects pedals are amazing and essential on the stage for most guitarists; however they are expensive and even cumbersome. One of the best outlets for guitar effects creativity is through digital effects apps, software and modeling amps. Most smart devices and tablets have a huge variety of guitar effects to choose from.

Of course to use a phone or computer for guitar effects you will need an interface to plug your guitar into the machine. If you really want to take your sound experimenting to the next level get a DAW like GarageBand, ProTools, Logic, Ableton, or any recording and looping software that will allow you to alter your guitar signal as you see fit.

LEARN ADVANCED MUSIC THEORY

Studying music theory and extended guitar chords is important for basic playing in most genres, but you need to seek out more advanced theory and technique if you want to sound unique on the guitar. The more you know about the basic rules and ideas of music, the better you can control your compositions.

Seek the same reading and learning material out of your favorite players and composers. The famous Slonimsky Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns was used often by both John Coltrane and Frank Zappa. There are many great sources like it that are full of complex musical info.

LEARN TO READ SHEET MUSIC & COLLECT IT

While you are learning more advanced theory, take some time to learn to read sheet music beyond guitar tabs. You do not need to be a master but know the basic notes and how they sound. It always helps to play the piece at the same time as reading to visualize it musically.

A lot of popular music is often just nostalgic rehashing of older music. If you really want to sound unique, find old sheet music and copy riffs, even if they were not meant for the guitar. The Beatles, Procol Harum, and many other famous bands used this method with classical music. You can do it on any sheet music you find, the more obscure the song, the better!

THERE ARE A MYRIAD OF TUNINGS

As you try out different picking styles and get a feel for your approach, try different tunings. Obviously ones like standard D, half step, Drop D, Drop C, Open G, C6, and more are as well-worn as standard tuning. You may have to experiment with some with wild tunings, so grab an online guitar tuner and just remember not to overtighten the guitar strings.

Nick Drake created his own guitar tunings, that is why his songs were so unique. Start out by making little changes to create your own tunings, and then you will need to reverse engineer where the chords go. Some guitarists have taken tuning to an extreme with microtonal guitars that allows the playing of more than just Western scales. These amazing guitars have oddly spaced frets to handle the semi and microtonal intervals.

TRY NEW TIME SIGNATURES

As you start finding new music and expanding your sonic horizons you will notice new time signatures are a great way to give a song a potential new feel and vibe. 4/4 is most pop and rock, 12/8 doo wop, 6/8 folk and traditional, and modern progressive and heavy metal can use very complex times like 19/16, 13/4, 11/8, and really any combination of notes per measure.

There is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to all the different time signature examples out there. Some can get quite complicated, but that is certainly a great way to find some unique sounds. Like learning sheet music, time signatures can be quite challenging to fully comprehend.

USE DRUM MACHINES FOR IMPROV

One of the best ways to spark creativity is to have an actual talented band to play with, however next to that, a great drum machine or app is perfect for helping with new ideas. Especially if it is a drum machine or backing track that can help with swing and syncopation.

It’s best to have a variety of genres and styles to riff over, this is another great reason to have a DAW as it offers a lot of variety. Take the other ideas on here like advanced theory, old sheet music riffs, new picking methods, and play them over different rhythms, pads, and soundscapes.

USE THE GUITAR AS ANOTHER INSTRUMENT

Different tunings and strings can give the guitar new and unique sounds, but so can playing the guitar in a manner that it wasn’t meant for. One of the most common examples of this is techniques like tapping and extreme string bending with Floyd Rose Tremolos and country style B Benders.

But most of all using your guitar as a percussive tool can lead to a lot of unique sounds. This can involve rhythmic and odd muted strums or striking the body as a drum along with the chords. See how many different parts of the beat, rhythm, drone, overtone, harmonics, and melody you can play all at once.

STUDY A DIFFERENT INSTRUMENT

You don’t have to necessarily buy a new instrument but take any chance you can to try different ones out. Early guitar riffs were taken from boogie woogie and jump piano. Country guitar picking is based on old banjo style playing, and of course guitar shredding is mostly classical piano arpeggios.

You will often find that many great and creative guitarists are multi-instrumentalists. You can read why many of the world's best guitarists play the ukulele HERE. Their approach with different sounds and methods gives them a better view of the big picture in music. The more aspects of it you study, the more you can do with it.

As you can see, these 10 guitar tips to make you sound unique are not secrets. The more you know about music, the more you realize there are no new ideas. However if you study often and keep a focus on being creative and trying new ideas, your guitar playing will have a stamp that sets you apart from other guitarists.

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Content courtesy of Shawn Leonhardt of Guitar Tricks and 30 Day Singer

Main image: The V.O.I.D (@the_void_uk). Image credit: @abbie_barton_