I’ve recently been teaching myself to play the guitar and one of my favourite ways to relax is to fire up the PC, open up my mammoth music library, hit ‘random’ and just extemporaneously jam with whatever comes on. I’ve got fairly eclectic tastes (rock, jazz & electro are my faves) and I don’t think there’s a single tune in my collection I couldn’t jam with fairly decently the first or second time out. Incidentally, by ‘jam’, I mean just pick out counter melodies and harmonies that seem to ‘fit’ whatever happens to be playing at the time. A friend of mine (who’s much better at the guitar, btw) mentioned she couldn’t do that, but I just thought it was something everyone could do. Is this an uncommon skill?
I was just jamming with old songs I know on the drums, when I stopped to rest and see what new threads were posted! I’ve played with records my whole life. I play keyboards, bass and guitars as well, and can play with about equal facility on each. I love being able to play what the guys on the record are playing. These are the people I learned how to do it from emulating, so being able to keep up with, and replicate their playing is an achievement for me, and my highest form of tribute to them.
Can everybody do it? No. The vast, overwhelming majority of people cannot do it, even a little bit. My wife has two degrees in music and can play circles around me on the piano, but she is loathe to improvise. She says she couldn’t come up with something on her own. That’s an alien concept to me. I come up with stuff off the top of my head all the time, and I always have. But I learned how to do it from listening to what those guys on the records played. Now, off I go to play “Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get” by The Dramatics.
I think that one reason many people say they can’t jam is because they set their expectations too hihgh right from the start. Usually, when I do what you are doing, I simply find a few notes that fit and start getting more creative as I feel my way around. Learning bluegrass helped me learn a better style for jamming too. Too bad I haven’t played in a while, my fingers no longer have the dexterity required.
Incidently, it is for this very reason that I loath jam bands. It’s just too easy to noodle along with whatever for me to have any respect for it.
I think jamming has to do with the type of person - I’ve played the guitar for 10 years, but could never really make it over that “hump” to get to the ability to jam. I just don’t hear music as well as some people, and while I can play almost anything (great at mimicking), I find it almost impossible to just compose a new song, or play a random riff. I’m sure if I dedicated my entire day to the guitar I could figure it out, but it doesn’t come naturally.
I also find it hard to sing in the correct key, but I can match anyone’s voice once I hear it. Yet I have a sibling with perfect pitch.
Now some friends of mine on the other hand with less “technical” ability than me on the guitar (i.e. meaning I can actually read music and know the physics behind notes and chords, and they do not) can write music and jam 100X better than me. So honestly, I’ve concluded that ‘jamming’ is a gift. Appreciate it
IANA musician, but I recall an old CBS Sunday Morning story related to this. Their music editor, Billy Taylor, composed a jazz song and hired the Julliard String Quartet to rehearse and perform it. The story showed early rehearsals through the first (and maybe only?) public performance.
These musicians, and I’m sure they were extremely technically proficient, simply COULD NOT go beyond the music written on the page. Taylor was exhorting them to, basically saying that the theme as written was more of an outline or suggestion that they should build upon. But it was a no-go, IMO the public performance sounded more like a sewing machine that a jazz performance.
Howver, my uneducated guess is that this result is more a reflection of their musical education that their innate musical ability. Their training enslaved them to what was on the page – they were like newly freed prisoners who sat in their cells because they just didn’t know how to cope with freedom.
The problem is that this is entirely too typical of what I have experienced. The experienced well read musicians that didn’t try to jam from the beggining, can never jam, but the idiot that picked up the guitar to impress chicks does it after a few months. I just think it’s because the “jammers” don’t know enough to know that they are doing something wrong so they just plug along, while an educated musician will cringe when they hit a wrong note and stop.
They key to jamming, is just to barrel on no matter what. As long as your in the same scale, your bound to resolve on a note in the right chord sometime. Then when you do, you act like you meant it that way all along.
I certainly can’t–I can’t play my way out of a paper bag on anything.
Although there is a CD floating around of me jamming on a computer program where I mapped wav files to keys and then pressed the keys to play them, while my buddy was scratching records on a turntable. Good times. Sounds awful, though. There were times during that session where he got irritated at how bad my part was sounding and just cut my computer out with that slider thing while he scratched for a while.
The short answer is - no, not without practicing. I grew up learning songs by ear and playing in rock bands: a clear recipe for an aptitude for jamming. Friends who learn via more classical training? Not so much.
As a side note, there are few things more fun to me than working out a song with a friend or a band. There is a period of open-mindedness AND focus as we pull apart a song and experiment with different parts to capture a certain feel. There is jamming going on, but none of that unfocused, meandery jam crap I hate. My friend and I just worked out an arrangement of Underneath It All on acoustics - tons of fun…
I can only confirm what the others have said. I’ve generally had no problem improvising on guitar. I find it easy and fun…if sometimes what comes out is absolutely horrible…well then sometimes what comes out works plenty well. It’s a mixed bag.
But I worked with a young woman ten years ago who was a stunning violinist. The sort who drops thousands of dollars on her instrument. She was playing in two local symphonies and a visitor to one in Atlanta when needed. The idea of improvising horrified her. She just claimed she couldn’t do it and wouldn’t try. Mind you she was about 1000 times a better technical musician and player then I was. She knew every damn thing about the history and development of music, notation, and so forth. But this one thing wasn’t ever going to happen. Weird.
As others have said, no. Some people play the piano like a typewriter. Put the music in front of them, and they can play very complicated music, but they need a written transition to get from the key the first hymn was in to the key that the second hymn is in.
Othe people can jam but only in a particular style–I had a college friend who could improvise classical sounding music, but coudn’t improvise jazz sounding music to save his life. (His description).
And other people can jam, but never develop much technical ability.
Training is part of it, but I think personality is also a factor.
*NEWBIE ALERT *
My first post to SDMB. Please be gentle with me.
Seasoned bass player here. I recently sat in with a jam band. I’m used to the 2:00 - 4:00 minute 60’s - 70’s rock song format. It was one of my all time disaster gigs. I played well, but I couldn’t wait for it to end. Jamming most certainly takes a specific type of personality. I found 12:00 to 22:00 per song to be tedious and repetitive. But these guys really enjoyed what they were doing, and they were good at it. I’ll pass next time.
