To Jam or Not to Jam

Learning guitar is a long and complex process and there are numerous learning techniques associated with it. Jamming is one of them and it is an important one. Underestimated by many guitar players, jamming is what will teach you to communicate with other musicians using solely the language of music. It develops your creativity and music thought, improves your improvisation skills and complements your overall learning efforts. That’s why you should jam whenever you can and with whomever you can.

Jamming at Home

If you are a beginner, you probably won’t know any other musicians to jam with yet. Don’t worry you’ll meet many along your way and to be prepared for this encounter, it is a good idea that you jam at home on a regular basis. There are many ways you can do this. Just grab your guitar, play your favorite album in the background and try to be creative – attempt to build your own guitar solos and guitar riffs. Instead of playing all those boring fifths (or power chords as you may know them) try using sevenths and ninths wherever you think it may sound good. If you’re out of backing tracks, you can just download some free guitar jam tracks from the Internet. There are so many out there, that they’ll surely keep you busy for a long while. And when you feel a certain amount of self confidence, you can try entering some online jam sessions – a great way to compare your guitar skills with other players.

Jamming with Other Musicians

Playing in bands and visiting the local live music venues is a great way to meet some new musicians to jam with. You shouldn’t necessarily limit yourself to jamming with guitarists only, just because you’re a guitarist yourself. Jamming with other musicians (drummers, bass players, bands etc.) is as much educational. The only difference is that jamming with guitarists will emphasize on your guitar technique, while jamming with other musicians will emphasize on your improvisation skills. Now, when jamming with other guitarists, don’t be selective. It’s useless to gather with a bunch of sloppy guitar players, just to show them how good you are. While it may boost your ego, you will learn nothing at all. Instead, try to gather with experienced guitar players. You may sound awful compared to them, but you will learn many new concepts and guitar tricks, thus gradually becoming better and better. This will lead you to a point when you’re swarming with melodic ideas throughout the jam sessions that you participate in.

As a conclusion, jamming is a great tool for improving your guitar skills. Now that you read about it, you probably want to start doing it right away. Well, here’s one final tip and you’re good to go: record your jam sessions always when possible. This will help you hear and hopefully fix all the tiny mistakes that you make while jamming.

Harvey Mosley started developing his passion for music at age of 10. He learned to play guitar songs at age of 13 and pursued his love of music since then. He owns now a music studio and inspires many students to learn guitar songs. Visit http://www.bandjammer.com for more guitar song lessons.