There’s a quote I came across recently that stopped me in my tracks.

“The only way you will get to play beautiful jazz lines is to practice beautiful jazz lines.”

My first instinct was to agree. Then I started thinking about what it actually means — and that’s where it got interesting. Because if you take it literally, it sounds like imitation. Copy beautiful lines until they become yours. And there’s some truth in that. We all learn by absorbing what we love. But what if it means something else entirely? What if “practising beautiful jazz lines” means developing the capacity to create them — not copying, but reaching? Not imitation but intention.

That one shift changes everything.
Almost every guitarist starts in the same place. First position. Open chords. The crowded, awkward end of the neck where beginners wrestle with finger pressure, string buzz, and chord shapes that bear little relationship to anything melodic. There’s a logic to it. It produces recognisable results quickly. Three chords and you’re playing songs. The family is impressed. Progress feels visible.

But underneath that logic is an assumption that goes largely unquestioned — that expression comes later. That you have to earn the right to be musical. Technique first, feeling second. Build the foundations, then somewhere up the road, if you work hard enough, the music will follow.

It’s a pyramid. And you start at the bottom.

Most teaching methods, most beginner books, most YouTube tutorials are built on this model. It’s so deeply embedded that it feels like common sense. Like there couldn’t possibly be another way.

But there is.

What if we’ve been doing it the wrong way round?
Not wrong in the sense that nobody learns anything. Clearly people do. But wrong in the sense that the pyramid model quietly teaches something unintended — that musicality is a destination rather than a starting point. That creativity is a reward for technical diligence rather than the engine of it.

There’s a different position. A radical one.
Foster creativity from the outset. Not after the foundations are laid. Not when the student is ready. Now. From the very first note.

This doesn’t mean abandoning technique. The mechanics still matter — they always will. But it means keeping the expressive intent visible at every stage of the journey, rather than deferring it to some future point that may never arrive.

Think about what that means in practice. A beginner reaching for something that feels musical — however clumsily, however imperfectly — is doing something more valuable than an advanced player drilling patterns without feeling. The reach itself is the practice.

You don’t accidentally become creative. You have to practise being creative — and you have to start now, not later.
So where do you start? If not first position, then where?

The middle of the neck.
Around the fifth to seventh fret. It sounds counterintuitive — isn’t that where you go after you’ve learned the basics? But spend a moment with the idea and it starts to make sense.

Physically, it’s a more comfortable place to be. The hand sits naturally. The stretches are manageable. You’re not fighting the instrument from the first note.

But more importantly — melodically, it’s where the guitar starts to speak. You’re in the voice of the instrument. Single note lines feel natural there. Phrases suggest themselves. You’re not wrestling with open strings and awkward chord shapes — you’re in the middle of the conversation.

And that’s the point. From day one, you’re thinking melodically. You’re reaching for phrases, for shape, for something that sounds like music. Not chord shapes to be memorised. Not patterns to be drilled. Music.

The creativity isn’t deferred. It starts here. Right in the middle.

But here’s where it gets really interesting.

I’ve been thinking about this as a beginner concept. A different starting point. But the more I sit with it, the more I think the real question isn’t about beginners at all.

It’s about the player who learned conventionally, worked hard, made progress — and then somewhere along the way, got stuck. Not stuck in an obvious way. They can play. They know their chords, their scales, their positions. But something is missing and they can’t quite name it.

They search for more complexity. More techniques. More things to learn. But the feeling doesn’t change. Because the problem isn’t what they know. It’s how they’re relating to what they know.

They were taught to build the pyramid. And they built it. But nobody told them what the pyramid was for.

For that player, the middle of the neck isn’t a starting point. It’s a way back in. A way of stripping away the accumulated habit of thinking technically, and rediscovering something that should have been there from the beginning.

The creativity that was deferred. And never quite arrived.

I should be honest. This is a theory, not a proven method. I haven’t taken a complete beginner and started them in the middle of the neck. I haven’t run the experiment.

To do it properly I’d need the right subject. Someone with enough faith in an unorthodox process to resist the pull of conventional milestones. No Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door after three weeks. No grade exams. Just the slow, patient business of learning to reach for something musical from the very first note.

That subject hasn’t appeared yet.

But the question feels important enough to ask out loud. Because if the pyramid model quietly teaches players that creativity is a destination rather than a starting point — and I believe it does — then we’re producing a lot of technically capable guitarists who don’t know what the guitar is for.

And that feels like a waste.

So I’m leaving this here as an open question. Not a conclusion. If any of this resonates — if you recognise yourself somewhere in these pages, whether as the stuck intermediate or the teacher who suspects there might be another way — I’d genuinely like to hear from you.

Maybe that’s how the experiment begins.