Finding Your Voice in One Chord: A Creative Practice Routine

Most players want to enjoy their music playing and practice time — I'm willing to bet every player wants that. There's a school of thought that puts practice in the "no pain, no gain" category. If the person in question is aiming to be a professional, or is currently enrolled in music school, there might be a place for that — minus the sharp pain. My mission is to help music players find their own voice on the instrument and make their playing experience more enjoyable.

Below is a practice routine for a beginner to intermediate guitarist focused on creativity and musicianship, while still covering the fundamentals.

The Warm-Up

The Main Event: Esus4

This is where the variations start to add up. Each of these takes 1–5 minutes.

• Strum the chord to get the sound in your head.
• Slow-motion strum the chord down and then back up — this always reminds me of a harp.
• Alternate-pick the chord, but keep the same sound as the harp-style pick.
• Skip strings within the chord to hear what the different intervals sound like in isolation.
• Find and experiment with different fingerings of the chord. Can open strings be used musically if we temporarily remove a finger? Almost always, yes.
• Add tempo, either with a metronome, drum machine, or foot tap.

Phew — that was a lot. Shake out those fingers that have been holding down the chord this whole time, if you haven't already.

I suspect most people look at this routine and assume it'll sustain them for the full 45 minutes. Not so. I'd be surprised if it takes much more than 6 minutes. The next step is where the time really starts to compound.

The Multipliers

• We played Esus4 and ran through our routine — now play Asus4 and redo all the steps above. Prioritize patterns you liked from the previous section and try to reapply them here.
• Picking and rhythm variations could easily fill the remainder of your practice time on their own.
• Take a song you like and use this chord as a transition or substitution.
• Record this chord — or by this time, it's probably a sequence — and improvise over it. This naturally leads you to pick a new practice subject and restart the whole process, inception-style.
• There are 12 keys. Just saying.
• Pair this chord with one you learned last week, last month, or last year.

Advanced Practice Room

• How would Hendrix play this chord? Lenny Breau? Frank Zappa? Chopin?
• Can we tap harmonics over the open strings to extend the chord?
• If we arpeggiate this sound, how can we weave it into our more traditional playing?
• Can we sing or hum the tones of this chord?
• Can we sing or hum tones not in this chord?
• Can we displace that rhythm we thought up earlier by an eighth note, while counting aloud in 4/4 time?

This can get so involved that it's easy to feel overwhelmed. When we know just enough about any subject, we realize how little we actually know. Welcome to the club — hopefully someone brought snacks. Now's a good time to take inventory of the musical journey and remember: the only guarantee is that this pursuit is endless. What a great feature.

All the energy you invested in this musical journey today was net positive, and it's now within you forever. Repeat that too.

I'd propose that at the end of each of these practice sessions, we focus on writing down or recording some original material from the session. Learning new material is a gift because it forces us into a beginner's mind. If we're lucky, that gives us moments of creativity that are hard to access otherwise. Maybe that's just me.