7 Tips for Jam Beginners
After yestrday’s post about starting to jam, here’s 7 quick tips to keep you less frustrated:
- Sit in a circle with your friends and ask questions about how other people’s instrument works. It’s important to know your instrument yourself first, but knowing why a bigger drum sounds deeper can be as useful to a drummer as it is to the trumpet guy.
- Stay simple: Try to keep the riffs and jam songs simple and clear. If in doubt, don’t play - less is more. If you think you can genuinely contribute, then play - and play hard :-).
- Practice hacks: Include scales and chord progressions into your practice schedule. A good way to practice both is to play along to rock songs that have improvised solos.
- Try themes: We once did a jam about colors. Each of us got a color (blue, red, yellow) and each one had to come up with a riff that he thinks fits the color. Pretty amazing (and unexpected) results.
- Try styles: If you like hard rock, don’t jam hard rock, because hard rock is - well - really hard. It’s easier to start out with something like reggae or ska, because the more complex your genre is by nature, the harder it gets. Hard rock is like classical music on the electric guitar. You can’t really “jam” it (at first).
- Keep the songs short: Time yourself to play the song and wrap it up within 4 minutes. The worst things most jam beginners do is stretch things over 10 minutes to half an hour. Just get in, play, get out. Keep things crisp and fresh.
- Discussion: After a jam, find out what works and what doesn’t. Try to pin point areas of improvement and try criticizing each other - constructively.
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POSTED IN: Listening Lessons, Music Theory, Your Instrument & You
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