If you've been told that being able to re-vamp musical ideas is a good barometer of your overall competence and flexibility as a musician, then you're right, and you need to watch this video. In it, I’m going to show you why you'll want to stop playing the same things every day and instead use the process that I describe for you in this lesson as an alternative...





All you have to do is look at the long term implications of playing the same things everyday and how that can lead to stagnation. Instead, by learning to "recompose" a musical part, it can lead to many creative benefits of how you interpret music.

By understanding this technique, you'll create more flow and balance in your playing and you will quickly find out why it’s something you will want to keep doing from here on out to help you feel more flexible and more creative both as a guitarist and as a musician.

WATCH THE VIDEO:




FORWARD:
So, do me a favor and ask yourself how many times you go and play the same things every day you sit down to practice guitar?

If you answered yes, that’s ok. It’s a common problem, and it’s one that many guitar players feel like they need to search out some type of deeply involved approach in order to fix.

But, it doesn’t have to be that way. Playing the same things over and over again is common, but there’s a very easy way to start fixing this. And, it involves a concept that we can just refer to as stretching ideas.

What we’re going to do in this lesson is take two guitar ideas. A melody, and a chord progression. Then, once the foundation for each of these parts is established, we will use a simple but effective procedure to modify the parts so they become new arrangements of themselves.

Sometimes musicians will refer to this concept as applying the principle of; recomposition.




CREATIVE APPROACH:
Now, if you’ve never heard this term before, Recomposition is a creative approach that takes on a prior, or an already existing musical piece and then we use that to re-work things in some NEW way which creatively re-organizes the part into a similar but yet an different idea.

This work is similar to what we’d find done across song mash-ups, and also with changes to the works of various contemporary classical pieces (in order to more or less modernize them).

You could also interpret this approach, as a method of doing some analysis with a musical part first, then you’d move over and take that analysis and use it to organize a creative re-invention of the musical idea.

What ends up happening is we will produce a unique, modified idea that’s based upon another musical part.

Let’s get into doing some recomposition starting with a melody line…




RE-COMPOSING A MELODY:
Let’s begin with our foundation melody. It’s going to sound and operate on the neck like this.

Foundation Melody:



In order to re-organize how this melody line is performed, we’ll need to analyze it first.

This melody has mostly 8th-notes operating throughout, with a few areas of sustain that end up totaling into the value of a quarter note duration. As far as the scale tones being used, this melodic phrase applies notes out of the key of “G.

For our recomposition, I’m going to grab into a new ending note, as well as, add in a few phrasing ideas that will include a bend along with a legato part done by way of a pull-off. So, here’s how the melody line sounds now - after the re-make...

The Melodies Recomposition:





RE-COMPOSING CHORD PROGRESSIONS:
The next idea that we’re going to work on will be based upon chords.

For a lot of guitar players, there’s generally “far too much time” that gets spent in using the common open position chords, so we’ll start there.

When we apply our recomposition, we’ll switch to another region of the fingerboard with the chords to help us open up the neck.

Let's get things started with our foundation chord progression.


Foundation Progression:



As you can tell this foundation progression operates using the open chords of “A Minor,” the “G Major,” and the “D Major.” There’s also a suspended chord in there for a brief moment with the appearance of a “D sus4.”

The technique and the rhythm of this idea is based around drop picking a series of bass tones, performed largely using eighth-notes into quarter-notes.

Let’s perform our re-make (taking this progression more centralized), and we’ll also incorporate some 16th-note feel along with some open string effects as well.


The Chord Progression Recomposed:





CONCLUSION:
As you can tell, there are many benefits if you go that extra mile and dig a little deeper into what your playing. You can further develop your skills just by performing some re-makes out of the musical parts that you either already know!

Or, you can also do this using musical parts that you’ve invented that are original ideas.

Overall, if you never do this “recomposing” work, you’re not going to stretch yourself and you’ll constantly feel like all you’re doing is just playing the same stuff day in and day out.

If you’re playing the same thing every day, that’s not really doing anything much for expanding your horizons as a guitarist. And, it’s not going to help to get you to where you need to be!