I’m learning to play guitar and every so often someone will suggest that we get together over a few beers and jam.
My repertoire consists of three or four badly played Black Sabbath songs. In no way could I listen to another guitarist playing some Little Feat and just “pick it up” and play along. To me it is sort of like a football QB and a sprinter getting together to “sport” some afternoon.
So, more experienced musicians, how does this work?
Thank you very much.
Typically we play some songs we all know. Play a little 12 bar blues in A or E or both. Someone will teach someone else how to play something. Someone will play around with a chord progression and someone else will either play along or play lead over it. That’s what happens when I get together with my buddies who have all been playing for 20+ years.
For you it will be different. Don’t worry too much. Have fun. That’s all that really matters. Think of it less like getting together to “sport” and more like getting together to throw a ball around a bit. It’s just an excuse to hang out and do something.
Well, this is a very broad question and difficult to answer. I would just say, just do it and figure it out as you go along, but that’s obviously not helpful in the least. (Though that’s pretty much how I learned how to do it, although I’m coming from a piano/keyboards perspective. And, yeah, the first dozen or so jams are just going to be awful, but still fun if you’re playing along with the right people.)
Are you comfortable with soloing and know something like a basic blues scale? Typically, what might happen with a jam is that one of the instrumentalists shows us the chords for a tune, we memorize it, and then we play it over and over, trading solos as necessary or just knocking out the chords and providing support for the lead instrumentalist to improvise over. In more advanced jams, an instrumentalist might start playing and we can just “read” the chords off the guitar or use our ears to find the chords and play along.
But, basically, it’s just something you have to do, and the first few timed you will suck, and it’s okay that you suck, and it’s okay to let the person you’re jamming with know that you’ve never done this before and they should, hopefully, be understanding and help you out.
Jamming is playing music together for fun. Literally together, not taking turns.
No matter who you are or what kind of music you play, jamming is best done with people who play a similar type of music at a somewhat similar skill level. EXCEPT that when you’re new you just jump in and try it out even though everyone is better at it than you are.
With experience, you can recognise common chord progressions pretty easily and have a clear idea what you can do with them.
With experience, you can hone in on the key pretty easily too. Though given the amount of people who don’t really grasp how keys work that can be more difficult. But a bit of major/minor clashiness can be cool too.
Chord progressions are fairly standard (and even when not standard tend to be repeated in a single song). After that it’s like asking how improv comedians to their job.
The key that opens the door to this world is learning the shapes and notes of the major and minor pentatonic scales. If your friend plays the chords C F and G repeatedly, you can experiment with improvising using the notes of the C minor pentatonic scale (C, Eb, F, G, Bb), which will sound bluesy with those chords, or the C major pentatonic scale(C, D E, G, A) which will sound brighter and happier.
There’s a physical, rote part to this, learning the physical shapes of these scales up and down the neck, and then there’s an ear-training component, when you start hearing chord changes and choosing the notes that sound best to you.
Hmm. Let me noodle a bit. Here’s what I have for now, but I will post more if I think of other insights.
Okay, you play metal, rock. Some Sabbath - Zep? Metallica? Think about: if you had to write down, say, 10 grooves that you are comfortable playing, what would they be? Not the full song - just the main groove, a verse if it is different, and a chorus. 2 or 3 of the most important “bones” of a given song, yes?
From the sound of it, your goal is NOT to connect with someone to figure out how to play a full cover of a specific song. Good - you should NOT target playing exact covers, or exact parts. Bad for early jamming. Bad. When some idiot wants to navigate the group through a Coheed and Cambria song, you’re fucked. Simply refuse to do it, nicely - offer to listen to them playing it if they need to get it off their chest, them come back to reality.
You SHOULD focus 100% on establishing a groove. If you are playing with just another guitar player, or with bass, drums, whatever - the goal is to establish a steady groove. That is why most guitarists start off with a Chuck Berry rock/blues groove and leading over that. It is a groove everyone knows. Same with old three chord circular songs like Louie Louie (A D Ed D) and Good Love (C F GG FF) - easy grooves to pick up.
And that is why you focus on having a handful of Song Parts that you can cycle through - as grooves, not as songs. Plan to set up the verse and chorus of Paranoid and just cycle through it for 15 fucking minutes. I need to add a few ingredients, see below, but this is the foundation of jamming: can you (collectively) or you (specifically) set up a cool, steady groove, which then all of you can figure out how to play with.
And by the way: please note that jamming is 100% about ONE THING: communication. The whole reason you are jamming is to have some back and forth, yes? We haven’t discussed what kind of back and forth yet, but if you guys are looking at each other and navigating changes, you win, right? THAT is why the first ingredient to a jam is short list of steady grooves that you can establish as platforms - because they set up a situation where you can focus on communication.
Okay - what are the different ways you can change things and have some back and forth communication?
[ul]
[li]Rhythm and Lead: the obvious one - one of you plays a rhythm and the other leads over it and you switch off. Set up a Chuck Berry groove in A and boogie away. [/li][li]Complementary Parts: for examples, if you play The Romantics’ That’s What I like About You, you can play E A D A open chords, and your partner can play the E with a D shape at the 4th fret, then the A which is an F shape at the 5th fret, and D that is an A shape at the 7th fret. If you play Jumpin’ Jack Flash by the Stones, 1 person plays the intro B E A, and the other plays the B E-D-Db-B chord riff over the top off it. They sound great together. You want to set up two parts and just groove on them for a minute or two - and more importantly, VARY THEM, e.g.,: play one part then drop out and let the other part go for a bit, then build your part back in by only playing the first chord of it while your partner cycles through, then add another bit of your part but leave “holes” in what you are playing. [/li][li]Or figure out the single-note equivalent of your chords and while the other person plays their chords, you simplify your bit into just notes, and maybe add a cool note or two. YOU ARE NOT PLAYING LEAD - you are adding a low-end ingredient to the chord-based groove, okay? KEEP IT FUCKING SIMPLE. Tuck it into the pocket of the chords your partner is playing, yes?[/li][li]Vary the lengths - play a set of verse chords 5 times longer than the actual verse - give the other person a longer runway to work with. Or only play the chorus. or whatever![/li][li]Chop it up - isolate a part of the chords that sound very cool and just play that a few times, especially if you are listening and hear that your partner is playing lead, say, particularly well over that partial bit. Give 'em more runway - you’re communicating, right?[/li][/ul]
A few last points:
Hmm, guess I had a bit more in brain than I thought 
It’s a start.
ETA: Here’s a thread on how to approach solos that I had shared my $.02 in years ago - Guitarists - How do you Approach Your Solos? - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board
Yes, the pentatonics are a good place to start – at least they were for me as a keyboard player, and I assume the same lessons translate just fine to any other instrument. I had no idea that I was even capable of improvising until I started playing around with the pentatonics (and then the “blues” scale, which is just a minor pentatonic with an extra note added.)
The bonus is, you get two for the price of one when you learn them! IF you learn a C major pentatonic, C-D-E-G-A, you also have the notes for an A minor pentatonic, just start on the A, so A, C, D E, G!
Major pentatonics will sound "country"ish, and minor pentatonics will sound “bluesy.”
After you get comfortable with a couple scales and the idea of improvising and making up solo lines/melody lines as you go along, you’ll add more notes, learn some more scales, or just figure out for yourself what extra notes work and which don’t.
This is not to say that playing solos is absolutely necessary for jamming. You can have a jam session just playing rhythm and coming up with cool progressions and that sort of thing. Like we might use a “jam session” to work out a song, for instance. Another player might have a riff he likes, so they’ll play it repetitively, and other players will add their own parts until it sounds cool and cohesive, and then maybe another player will figure out a B section to move the song to, etc. It does not have to be lead-playing based (although, in my experience, they often are.)
DON’T OVERTHINK IT!!
Play, play, play. Play alone, along with sounds. Easy songs, simple songs, Beatles songs and the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead and the Ramones or whatever. If you’re watching a basketball game, play while you watch it. If you’re watching cartoons or a show, play along with whatever music is in the background.
Chord charts for almost every song are available online for free. My advice is to stay away from TABS. I think there’s nothing more disruptive and counterproductive to trying to learn to play guitar or bass, than having to fall back on tabs. Do not look at tabs. Learn basic chord voicings, including simple movable shapes that work universally on the fretboard. If you’re trying to learn a melody, play it by ear until you’ve got it. Also, DO NOT try to practice to a metronome. This is so counterproductive. Play whatever you’re practicing at WHATEVER slow or irregular or uneven tempo you want, stopping and starting as needed to get the fingering and muscle memory down, until you’ve mastered it enough to play it in time.
Those two things are, in my opinion, the biggest mistakes that beginning musicians make. I think it’s totally holding people back from getting better, and also leads to frustration and potentially giving up.
pulykamell, the pentatonics are even more magical on guitar, because the shapes are identical no matter what key you’re in, no pesky black/white keys to worry about. When I first learned them, I didn’t even know what notes I was playing, just that if I played the right pattern of notes at the third fret, it sounded good in G. And if we switched to Bb, move the same pattern to the sixth fret.
I’m a keyboardist, but I’ll tell you what I mostly do. The main trick I was taught is to know the circle of fifths well. As long as you are doing functional harmony, all chords will sound like you either stay still, move to the next chord, or move to the previous chord. Then you just adapt to the chord quality: e.g. In C, if you have a chord that sounds like Dm, but is a major chord, then it’s actually F, so play that.
The rest is just knowing how to know when a chord is about to change and how to make wrong notes sound like they were intentional nonharmonic tones. Once you get the chord progressions in your head, you can work with it.
That is, if you aren’t just given chords or playing songs you already know. Early on, I’d say it makes sense to give out chords. Heck, I know many quite good players who just can’t improvise without chords.
To put this in terms I think the OP will understand, here’s a helpful illustration of what’s known as a “blues box,” in this particular case a minor pentatonic: http://guitardomination.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/pentatonic-minor-box-1.png
The top horizontal line is your high E, the bottom horizontal line is your low E. All the dots are valid notes. Note that those aren’t the only valid notes, but that is the basic pattern. Move it up and down the fretboard as appropriate for the key, based on the low E note, e.g. a song in E would be open position or the 12th fret, a song in G would be at the 3rd fret (or the 15th), a song in A would be at the 5th (or 17th) fret, etc.
Exactly - just like my thread above!
Seriously, you are correct - when you’re playing the goal is to just play. I was just laying out a full map of the territory!
Holy smokes everybody! Thanks so much for the ton of info and ideas.
My co-worker who has suggested this is an excellent guy so I do think that it would be fun.
I am taking lessons as well but a combination of three weeks of business travel with a two week vacation trip shortly has kyboshed practicing for a month or so, so I’ll be back at it in a few weeks.
You folks have given me lots to play with. Many thanks!
Since you mostly play chords right now, has anyone suggested learning 12 bar and 8 bar blues progressions? If you aren’t comfortable playing lead yet that is another good place to go. Learn what the I IV and V chords are in a couple of common keys (E, A, G and C maybe) and look up the progression patters for those styles of blues.
Most rock and roll is built off these patterns. Once you known the order of the chords you can grow from there throwing in 7ths, playing with patterns and different voices of the chords, etc. But just playing, E for 4 bars, A for 2 bars, E for 2 bars, B for one bar, A for one bar, E for 2 bars and then repeat (in 4/4 so a bar is 4 counts) will give you a structure to hang stuff off.
Also, if you are up for playing lead and want to putz around a bit before playing in person, there’s plenty of backing tracks on youtube that you can practice over. Look up something simple like “blues backing track in E” (or A or G or whatever key you’re comfortable in) and you can practice your blues scales/minor pentatonic boxes over it and get an idea of how it works, so you can feel maybe a little more comfortable when you sit down with another player.
If you listen to any blues, you pretty much know what a standard 12-bar progression is. The only parts where it there might be confusion with another player is what to do at the end of the progression (there’s usually some sort of “turnaround” before you come back to the beginning of the progression), and also that the second bar sometimes changes to the IV chord (so like in NAF’s example, instead of playing E-E-E-E-A-A-E-E-B-A-E-E, it’s E-A-E-E-A-A-E-E-B-A-E-E. Otherwise, 12-bars blues is a pretty darned standardized sequence of chords, and, in the musical circles I’ve run in, that’s pretty much the usual “first jam” type of material.
When you play a wrong note, immediately play the whole phrase again–wrong note and all. Play it with a lot of authority and intention and face the other players with glare that says, “Damn right that was a right note. You only hear it as a wrong note because your limited and undeveloped notions of harmony and melody don’t allow you to comprehend modern modal techniques! It’s like you’ve never even heard of negative harmony…”
It sounds like a joke and it is but it really allows the listener to recontextualize the note and they will usually find a way to make it work.
One of the ways my jazz piano teacher explained how to start an improvository solo was “Think of a note. Then play another one instead.” For me, one of the masters of just playing “wrong” notes with authority so they sounded right was Thelonious Monk. I remember having a transcript of his version of “Nice Work If You Can Get It” years before I had ever heard the original and thought to myself, now how in the fuck are these notes supposed to work together? Pretty sure it was this version. Playing it meekly and unassuredly like I did when I tried to learn it, it just sounded like absolute crap, so I went on to another song. Then years later, probably a decade or so, I finally heard that recording and went “oh, so that’s how you make it work!”
Or just turn and give the bass player or keyboardist the stink eye like it was his fault. 
