Be curious about your instrument

One great piece of advice I received in college was to be curious about my instrument. Try to learn more about it. Try to find musicians that use your instrument in new and interesting ways.

Try to find different ways of playing your instrument and different styles of playing your instrument.

Be curious about your instrument.

Try to learn as much as you can about how people have used your instrument, and even look up variations on your instrument and how those instruments are used.

For guitar that would mean learning about all the different types of guitars; electric, acoustic, hollow body, semi-hollow body, steel string, nylon string, resonator. And any others. Learn about different styles of guitar playing and how different players have used the instrument. That’s a ton of different styles of music to look into for guitar. It also means looking into lute music and even instruments like oud and sitar because they have similar constructions and playing techniques to guitar. It could include mandolin and banjo if you want to include those.

But being curious about your instrument will mean that you have a larger base of information to draw from when you play your instrument. It also means you’ll have exposed yourself to more styles of playing. And you’ll be able to have a larger vocabulary of styles of music to draw from when you play your instrument. If you do further research and practice and learn those techniques you could potentially incorporate some of those techniques into your own playing.

So it’ll give you a larger musical vocabulary to draw from when you play.