The Nomadic Philosopher, The Martial Artist and Guitar Creativity

You’re going to have to bear with me on this one…

What does a 16th Century philosopher, Bruce Lee and a metronome have to do with playing guitar?

I recently found myself reading an article¹ about a 16th century philosopher called Giadorno Bruno. Born in 1548 in Nola, Italy, Giadorno travelled all over Europe trying to find a place to be free to study and teach his ideas without persecution from the church.

He had a few revolutionary, and heretical ideas:

• He advocated the heliocentric model of the universe
• He postulated that there were infinite worlds out in the cosmos, potentially inhabited
• Existence is axiomatic
• He advocated pantheism

And, more relevant to playing guitar (I’m getting to the point, I promise), he had a reputation for being an expert in mnemonics, which is the study and development of memory². He was renown for this was great enough to earn the patronage of King Henry III.

But what does this have to do with being creative on guitar?

To quote from Tom Malone’s article³:

Bruno saw memory as a dynamic system for synthesizing new insights, enabling the mind to make connections beyond the stored data.

Giadorno Bruno recognised that in order for the mind to think creatively, it had to first properly commit existing facts and ideas to memory. This doesn’t mean ‘be vaguely familiar’ with an idea, but to have it properly committed to memory so that it can be recalled in its entirety at a later date.

The mind has a conscious and a subconscious. What we think of as creativity at its peak, the spontaneous generation of new ideas… new melodies… new riffs… comes from the subconscious mind processing data in the background of our everyday lives. These new ideas are then “blurted out” from the subconscious to the conscious during mundane activities of low conscious effort, such has having a shower or doing some gardening. But in order for the subconscious to process ideas this way, they have to be fully committed to memory.

So to finally get to the point, how does this relate to being creative on guitar?

The majority of guitar players are chronic dabblers. We recognise what a root position minor arpeggio looks like, we played it a few times, and if you gave us a tab for it we would be able to play it again… but we can’t play it in any key, in all it’s inversions, on the spot. It’s not properly committed to memory.

We recognise the fourth position of the minor pentatonic scale and if reminded we could probably stumble through it to a metronome, but if put on the spot and asked to play it in the key of Eb, we would have to sit and think about it for a while to figure it out. It’s not properly committed to memory.

We often mistake ‘being vaguely familiar’ with knowing. If we are vaguely familiar with something, it is not properly committed to memory… and our subconscious can’t work with it. Ask a guitar play if they ‘know’ the harmonic minor scale and they’ll say sure, ask them to improvise in it over a G minor minor backing track and you’ll see the cogs start grinding harder than a 18th century flour mill.

It’s the difference between trying to hold loose cement and trying to hold concrete that has set. Loose cement will run through your fingers. Set concrete can be held, turned over in your hands, picked up and set down… it’s the same with ideas. An idea that you are only vaguely familiar with will go in one ear and out the other, your subconscious can’t work with it, it slips through the grasp of your mind like cement dust through your fingers. An idea that is properly committed to your memory is like set cement, your subconscious can work with it, turn it over, pick it up and put it down… and do something useful with it.

If we properly know something, then it is fully committed to memory and our subconscious will play with it in the background of our minds… which is where peak creativity comes from.

So one method to being more creative on guitar, is to properly train different techniques, scales and arpeggios. Which can seem unorthodox, because training a scale in all positions with a metronome through all keys hardly feels creative… but by doing so we commit the exercise to our subconscious, allowing it to work with it in the background of our minds.

So what’s the take-away here? Don’t dabble in all sorts of random lessons, but pro-actively train one scale, arpeggio or idea until you can play it blindfolded while hanging upside down. Work hard to really master an aspect of your playing, rather than be vaguely familiar with all sorts of things.

As Bruce Lee said, “I fear not the man who has practised 1000 kicks once, but the man who has practised one kick 1000 times”.

Stop dabbling. Whatever you’re working on, stick with it for a couple of months. Train it to death. Commit to committing it to memory and see the results for yourself.

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All information on Giadorno Bruno comes from an article by Tom Malone in the Spring 2025 issue of The Objective Standard, titled Giadorno Bruno: Herald of the Enlightenment. Read more on the TOS here

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