Messing Around - But Not

One of the best ways I've found to learn is to get stuck in and mess around. I often do this, I experiment totally free on all the instruments just to discover new ideas, try out techniques I can't yet do without the stress of needing to get them right. I will often be far more adventurous and it gives me ideas - it's fun too!!

Most importantly though it prepares me a little for when the technique crops up in lessons. Sometimes it will be something I've seen my teachers do that I then secretly go away and play with, sometimes I'm creatively trying to recreate some sound I heard in a song.

On many many occasions the things I'm messing with have then cropped up in lessons and I've been in a much more comfortable place (well than I would have been!) to try it. Sometimes I confess I've been playing with it sometimes I don't (sorry guys!) - depends how bad I still am haha! But my point is that not only does it get me thinking creatively it also helps with my actual learning and it's fun too.

At the moment I'm practicing letting my fingers run rampant over the piano and seeing what comes out and trying to play more rhythmically, I'm being more experimental in my playing. On the drums I'm working out new beat rhythms and trying not to play so straight, I'm being very playful and experimenting with fill rhythms by mixing up my rudiments too, mostly it all sounds bad but it should I'm creatively noodling! On bass I'm playing around with funky rhythms and with syncopation and trying to mix repetition and faster little runs. On guitar I'm trying to experiment with rhythmic and percussive strumming (if my teachers could see what I've been up to they would smile but I'm NOT doing that in a video any time soon) and trying to move my fingers around when I'm on simple chords. I'm experimenting with fingerpicking patterns too.

So you can see I''ve been messing a LOT with rhythm and yes given my posts recently and teacher feedback it may look like I'm not making ANY progress but in actuality I really have.  I was just catastrophically bad now I'm just really bad (haha!), of course my teachers don't know how much effort I've actually been putting in so it's not their fault I feel like a total dope in lessons but I know from experience at some point I will start to make progress and it will move on from there much much quicker because of my practice - timing & soloing both did in the end.

There you go! One thing to put more of into your practice, I'm no expert player (obviously) but I'm pretty confident in holding this up as a solid piece of advice because it's how I've learnt most things that I've done from web design to magazine production.