Sometimes we have to break free, right? While we (hopefully) include a healthy dose of guitar-based music in our listening habits, sometimes it can be refreshing to understand how other instruments approach music.

Now, many of our readers play other instruments in addition to guitar, and that is always a good idea. However, this article will focus on how we can take influences from other non-guitar instruments and add in some of those elements into our guitar playing. Sometimes breaking out of our guitar-centric world will lead us to new inspirations, and maybe even new creative expressions. Of course, we should still listen to guitar, but maybe we can hear other instruments in a whole new way.

Learn to Work the Saxophone

Saxes work quite differently than guitar. Besides the reed and the stream of air vs the pick and the string, a sax player has their hands on all of the notes available on the instrument pretty much all at once. You don’t have to physically move your hands up the sax for the higher notes, so a sax player tends to not play as linearly as a guitarist. There are more notes jumping around outside the order of the scale. A guitar makes it easy to play up and down a scale (we all practice that way), but since it is so easy, our improvisations include running up the scale or playing it in an rhythmic sequence (like 1234, 2345, 3456, etc). A sax player doesn’t think quite like that. Since they have access to all of the notes at once without really moving, they tend to avoid scalar phrases and tend to stick to strong melodies or improvisations based on arpeggios. Guitarists use arpeggios too, but we tend to sweep across them quickly, with all of the notes in order from lowest in pitch to the highest (and back again). A sax player will jumble the notes in an arpeggio, to give a less predictable result. A sax player has to breathe too, so you never hear a cascade of notes that never stops.

Sax players can also shape the notes by using their breath as well as pressure on the reed. As a result, they have a very dynamic sound, from quiet and reedy to loud and brash. Notes don’t have a percussive attack, so they tend to spill out so the end result is more legato phrases. The sound of most saxophones tends to be more mid-heavy and dynamic. In guitar terms, this would mean a more vintage-voiced humbucker and a technique that minimizes pick attack and maximizes dynamics. Check out Allan Holdsworth for a player who listened to more sax players than guitarists.

Keys, I Play ‘Em All with Ease

Well, it was a nice idea, but no.

Growing up listening to fusion and prog mostly, there were some pretty bold keyboardists who soloed as much as the guitarists. Transcribing a few of these solos, I hear that many of the players are as distinctive as the guitarists. They, too, use scales, sequences, and arpeggios much like a guitarist. Some even put their Minimoogs (a monophonic keyboard) through distortion pedals and Marshall amps to sound more like guitarists. But they all went for their own sound, and could generally play faster than most any guitarists since only one action- pressing down on a key- is needed to make a sound. They have 10 fingers to work with, while we have 4. Chords based on 4ths and 5ths are easy for a guitarist, but other than maybe Andy Summers, you don’t hear them much in contemporary guitar playing since the stretches of the fretting hand would be too wide. I am making my way through the Emerson Lake & Palmer song ‘Fanfare for the Common Man‘ and some of the chords are nothing like what a guitarist would choose. I think I will start using them more.

It is as difficult for a guitarist to sound like a keyboardist as it is for a keyboardist to sound like a guitarist. But there are a few things I have picked up from studying and working with keyboardists. An easy tip is to pluck the strings of the chord all at once, rather than let the pick hit them in (fast) sequence. A simple thing, you can try this either fingerstyle, or as I do it, with hybrid picking (pick and fingers at the same time). Add some chorus, tremolo, or phaser and the same boring guitar chords before sound a lot more interesting. Bonus points if you have the facility to emphasize particular notes in a chord when picking this way. Pianists tend to be very dynamic players too, so making quiet parts very quiet and the loud parts really loud can make parts of a song really stand out.

Bang on the Drum All Day

Any guitarist can always advance his/her rhythm game. So much guitar music today is rhythm & riff based, and we can expand our rhythm chops by listening to good drummers. We start with simple rhythms, and then move on to complex ones. I work with a metronome, but don’t rely on it for good time. Having good meter will help you navigate through tricky time signature changes, or even something basic like 4/4 but with very syncopated (broken up) rhythms. I have taken famous drum breaks and wrote new music. Or there might be a wonderful drum groove with strange accents that I steal and use for a guitar rhythm. I remember learning a song where the keys, bass, guitar, and vocals were in 4, while the drummer played in 5. The snare always hit one beat away from where I thought it was going to be. I, um, borrowed this idea and had the whole band play in 4 while I played a repeating figure in 7 over it. We lined up on the 1 every 28 beats. Very fun!

Of course, some musicians have taken the idea of being influenced by the sound of drums too. Slapping and popping percussive rhythms on the bass seems to have more in common with drums than guitar, and can really drive a sparse drum groove. Of course, this type of playing is much louder than typical finger- or pick-style playing,  so a device like the Seymour Duncan Studio Bass Compressor can even out the dynamics making sure the volume is consistent no matter what technique you use.

An alternative to the percussive slapping sound, bass player Tony Levin invented the Funk Fingers: 2 small drumsticks that Velcro to his fingers. He hits the bass strings with them, giving them more of a percussive thwack with a little of the pitch of the fretted note thrown in. He first used this sound on the Peter Gabriel hit ‘Big Time’, but since refined the design and can play very complex rhythms with just 2 fingers. It takes a little practice to play the right strings, but as you get used to the hand position to hit each string properly, you can get pretty good at it.

Theme from a Summer Place

Stringed instruments have been emulated on guitar for decades. The characteristic fading in, or getting rid of the initial attack sound Early players and many modern ones use a volume pedal for this, while others (like me) use a volume knob. The idea is that you pick the note with the volume down, and then turn the volume up once the string is ringing. Once you hear the pitch and it sustains as much as you want, you stop the sound of the note by turning the volume down again. This way, you have control of both the attack, sustain, and release of the note. Much of the way we perceive the sound of the guitar has to do with the initial attack, and by getting rid of it, the listener might not know what he/she is listening to. I have used this technique on recordings for string pad sounds. I build up chords one note at a time, just like an orchestra. I also use a first -generation Ebow, which tends grab the notes more slowly than newer ones, so it works to change the timbre (tonal quality) of the instrument. I wrote a whole article on the using the volume knob of the guitar to change how the notes you play are shaped.

Who are your favorite guitarists who emulate different instruments? Do you have any tricks you’ve learned from other instruments that you apply to guitar?