Hey Friend,
What have you done for yourself lately? So many of us are running around "takin' care of business" that we forget to grab a moment to just chill, relax and let our brains quiet down for second.
Between family, work, school and all the normal little details of daily life, it's really hard to completely empty your mind and relax. That takes dedicated patience and practice.
Like guitar.
Learning all the chords and scales, musical theory and the hundreds of little guitar techniques is fun, but it can feel like a job. You can find yourself working at the same thing every day - maybe the chord changes, but you're still working at memorizing the fingerings and positions, strumming through, practicing smooth chord changes and speed.
Have you taken a moment to break out of the daily mold and just play around?
Think about the chords you've learned so far. Forget about keys and which chords belong in each one. Just randomly pick two chords you've learned so far and play them.
How do they sound together? Do they work as a pair?
Play each chord as an arpeggio (pick each note individually). If the chords don't seem to fit together, do the notes played individually make it any better? Can you find any common notes between the two chords?
If you've been following along for a while, I think you'll see that most of the chords will have some commonality. Each key we've studied so far has common notes and chords between them.
If they worked together, great. If they didn't, better still! Here's why.
You recognized they didn't seem to fit. The sound didn't feel right to you. You heard that the notes don't line up properly to fit the pattern.
It means your ears are getting it.
Believe it or not, you have an intuition about what pitches work naturally together. You can feel when two notes or chords don't fit together properly. It's an innate human ability.
But the beauty of that fact is, even though you can instinctively tell two chords or notes don't seem to work together, you can choose to put them together anyway in a progression or riff.
Yes, music has rules, but rules can be broken or bent to work in your favor.
Our music is based on Western music theory. But there plenty of other cultures that have different musical rules and scales. There's nothing stopping you from melding two different types of music together to create some new form of Rock.
Today, try this out. Play random chords and listen for anything that sounds good to you. Then play that combination and let your mind focus on how they sound together. Listen for inspiration - an idea or feeling. Allow yourself to let go and have fun with it - no rules today!
Peace~
Dave | 
