How To Turn Your Thoughts Into Musical Emotions

Do you want to be able to fully express yourself with your guitar? One of the most powerful aspects of music is its ability to serve as a tool for expressing our ideas and emotions. It is for this reason that musical expression should be one of your greatest goals. In order to enhance your musical expression and clearly communicate your ideas, you must understand how to think creatively when you play guitar. Once you have mastered this, you will be able to use your guitar to create very deep connections with those who listen to your music.

Most guitarists want to be able to express themselves better with their guitar playing; however, the majority of guitar players have no idea how to actually practice this skill. This leads to a lot of time being wasted on practicing guitar in a way that does not produce big results. The solution to this problem is to develop a more accurate fundamental understanding of how to develop musical creativity.

Many people play the guitar songs and melodies of great guitar players hoping that they will soak in the same musical expression abilities through time and experience. Although it is cool to play nice guitar riffs, and learn your favorite solos on guitar, doing this alone will not give you musical creativity. The reality is that copying other musicians will bring very few results on its own. There are essentially two things you need to understand in order to become highly creative and express emotions in music:

The truth is, music theory is neither of these things. Music theory is the idea of connecting one's thoughts, feelings, and emotions together through musical expression. It is the ability to explain WHY we feel emotions in music, and how we can continue to use musical creativity to recreate our emotions.

Change The Way You Think About Music Theory

In order to really understand music theory, you need to first get rid of any of the current misconceptions you have about it (as described above). Once you do this, you can truly unlock your greatest potential with musical expression and creativity. The main thing to understand about music theory is that it is very useful for explaining how music makes us feel various emotions.

There are many ways to demonstrate this, and here is one example of how I teach my guitar students to become more musically creative by applying music theory. First, I have them take out a piece of paper and write down all of the thoughts, ideas, and emotions they want to convey through musical expression. Once they have done this, I ask them to try to figure out the various music theory tools that can be used to express these things. The key here is to emphasize "applying" music theory in a creative way so that you integrate the music world together with everyday thoughts and situations.

Using exercises such as the one above is great for helping you to understand the connection between raw music theory concepts and their application for specific expressive uses. This helps you to learn to associate musical concepts with the ideas you have in your mind. If you would like to hear a more detailed explanation of these ideas, watch the video below:

Here are the most important skills you will get from learning music theory:

What Do You Need To Do Right Now?

If your goal is to become highly skillful at musical expression, then you need to follow these steps to start achieving this on guitar:

Remember, it doesn't matter if you know a lot about scales, chords, and other theoretical concepts. The most essential thing when it comes to music theory, is understanding how to consistently integrate your music knowledge with the thoughts and ideas in your mind. Once you can do this, your musical creativity will be overflowing!