I'm in a rut with my playing

This may not be big news for you, but I recently saw a harp guitar on www.youtube.com and it made my day! I think it's always inspiring to watch people who know what they are doing and that instrument is something so visually elegant, and sonically captivating. A harp guitar is basically an acoustic guitar with a harp on top. It looks like usually the harp serves as the bass although on some of the videos I saw other variations too. Just search for harp guitar on youtube!

What helps me is to watch YouTube videos and get inspired by other players. If I sit here and watch YouTube videos for awhile, soon I'll be wanting to play something myself as well and I'll start practicing.

Things I do are: find a song I wouldn't normally learn and play it, play a song I already know but in a different style, play a different guitar (12 string, resonator, electric etc.). Everybody elses suggestions sounded great too. I'm gonna try those and I'm not even in a rut right now.

Another way to get out of a creative rut is to learn a scale for your style of music. I don't play alt-country so I can't suggest a scale, but I'm sure if you played some notes from a scale you would learn which sound you liked best from the scale. What I'm getting to with this is you can take some notes that are close together or "modes" and play the notes by improvising. You can add some tremelo, some bending. Also, you may adjust your tempo of playing to suit your style or genre of music. Hope some of this helped. Here is a site to learn some guitar scales. Even though it is for soloing help, you can learn some modes and scales here: http://www.myguitarsolo.com/