Practice by improvising rather than learning songs

I dig a lot of what everyone’s putting down when it comes to songs versus instruction. My two cents on the matter harkens back to the days in high school and forming our first bands. You always had two types of people in those early years – Those who learned a lot of songs while learning their instruments (generally, just messing around on their own at home), and those who learned a lot of theory (the kids who took band/music). I mean, I’m sure both types did a little of each, but the band geeks always got “the important stuff” right (mostly timing, but also the notes in general, dynamics, improv, etc…)

This is not to say the people who learned mostly via playing along to music were totally awful. Note too, that tabs weren’t as accessible in those days – especially the correct ones – so that was an issue we don’t deal with as much, now.

Still, a few years pass and you listen to those old recordings and it becomes clear that your intentions for really learning a song might have gone no further than nailing the solo and fudging the rest. And I pick on guitarists for the most part here because I’ve been that guitarist. Too, it depends on how practiced your rhythm section is, and how well someone’s gonna keep you in line when you’re off-beat (I’m currently that bassist).

tl;dr: I think both are good. A lot of us don’t get inspired by playing scales all the time, but it’s true that learning nothing but other peoples’ songs doesn’t scratch the itch of personal expression. You shouldn’t feel bad about trying to figure things out on your own, and I personally would prefer someone improvising an in-time vamp or a root-3-5, or whatever – over and over, to someone with no rhythm who can knock out a few cool riffs but otherwise has no ability to jam with me because “they don’t know the actual notes”.

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Interesting thread. For me, I’m 65, I only play for my amusement ( and perhaps my cats amusement as well) I don’t play out with others and can’t maintain focus when learning a new song. I do know many songs on bass, learned with tab, no patience with learning theory ( tempted to try Josh’s course, but have no desire to be a bad ass, lol, just having fun at my leisure) So improvising to whatever floats my boat when I pick up the bass ( or guitar, I play that too) is usually my normal approach.

Right now I’m into Mark Knofler and Dire Straits music, plucking around a half dozen songs till I get bored with that and move on. So, for me, it’s trying to keep focus, I just don’t have that and fully accept where I’m at as a bass and guitar playing hobbyist.

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@HowLowCanYouGet The only issue I’d take with that blanket statement will depend on your experience level. I like a lot of people on this forum am a beginner. We all did Josh’s excellent Beginner to Baddass course. So what next when we’ve finished that?

I’d argue that learning songs, is an effective way of learning the bass. It teaches you:

  1. Timing
  2. Developing an ear for the melody / chord changes
  3. Dynamics
  4. Muting

The list goes on and on. But most importantly for some of us, it’s fun. I don’t have any lofty ambitions for playing bass. So learning songs keeps me motivated and because I’m playing 1-3 hours a day doing that, my playing has to improve.

I also improvise over jam tracks; but learning a song gives me a yardstick to measure my progress.

Playing Bass is a very broad church and there’s room for everyone.

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Oh I don’t agree with that at all. As a matter of fact this is one of the best ways to understand other’s style, pick up little ideas for riffs, etc. I know bass is not as big of an improvised instrument outside of jazz, but studying other’s playing is crucial to developing your own voice, and builds a musical vocabulary to create your own style.

I am not much of an improviser, but I can say with certainty that spending the last few months with Paul McCartney lines I have a really cool understanding of his playing, and noted some tricks of his to try out when I am just fiddling around.

To add to the basics that @Barney cited, building the memory to memorize entire songs is an excellent skill that comes from learning songs. Each song I learn makes the next one that much easier.

FWIW, this is how pretty much every high school wanna be player starts, no?
At least all my friends spend the days learning songs vs. lessons and theory. I think bass and guitar are more suited to this style of learning than ‘classroom’, more than any other instruments.

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Thanks !

No I was just trying to follow the beat really.

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Note tip# 16 in @JoshFossgreen’s video of the “20 Tips I Wish I Knew As A Beginner”……

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What part of improvising includes instruction about whether any part of it is right or wrong or how well it’s written? I think you’re conflating many different factors that don’t inherently go together.

Copying other people’s works teaches you the language of music in the same way that children learn their first language and unless you’re deaf, there are plenty of options for feedback. Do you think it would be useful to tell a young child that they need to learn to speak a language by going off and writing a book? Pretty much every learning method starts off with you studying/copying existing works first. I doubt there’s a single musical instruction method that doesn’t spend a long time playing existing works. How do you think anyone is going to improvise without developing a vocabulary first? At best, that would be like writing a book only knowing spelling/grammar.

Classical music consists pretty much entirely of one just playing other people works and virtually no improvising. For the ~10 years I played classical music I didn’t need much theory and I didn’t want to write anything so that suited me just fine… but when I played in a jazz band, I had a good vocabulary from listening to a lot of jazz and swing and I. could improvise quite well. Many people can improvise just fine in their heads and hum or whistle a tune, their problem is usually not knowing their instrument well enough to get the tune from their head to their fingers and has little to do with lack of theory.

None of the things are mutually exclusive, they’re all important to some degree but if you want to learn music, you need to listen to music and if you want to learn to play, you have to play. If you want to learn to improvise, you usually study chord progressions/melodies from existing songs, write your own melodies over chord progressions and then gradually learn to improvise. There is a good reason that jazz standards like autumn leaves and blue bossa are standard. Much of improvising just consists of you stringing together short musical ideas that you learned previously.

You either don’t know what you do without thinking about it or just don’t think much about what you do; don’t assume that everyone is like you.

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along with #8 :slight_smile:

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I’ve actually found that I can do the course better after playing some songs in Yousician. It gives me more confidence when it comes to switching my fingers on the fretboard. After playing Highway to Hell, I did part of my latest module and found that I could follow along with @JoshFossgreen much better than when I tried it straight into the lesson.

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This was my experience. We played three songs a semester, every year; new semesters were kind of exciting as we wondered songs they would bring. Almost nobody made their own music (that I know of, anyway). We either practiced the music we had, or practiced scales. The band directors would even give us sheet music if we asked for it. We would even figure out how to play metal songs as a small group lol. I’ve read stories of big classical musicians even commissioning music to be written for them to play.

Not many really wrote their own stuff that I know of. Wanting to write songs seems like a very “guitar” thing to do.

…Really? That is the opposite of my experience. We practiced scales all the time and were given all kinds of exercises to play. We had contests that we went to and performed at, as well as concerts each semester. We did sight-reading contests that would have been mostly impossible without knowing theory. You recognized scales, patterns, key signatures, or even hidden key signatures because of accidentals being a thing, etc.

But that was also in a music education program in a school district setting. I imagine after a certain level, you’re just expected to know how to play your instrument and play the given material.

We were kind of a mixed bag. We were taught all that stuff and expected to know and practice it, but the theory did not go much deeper than scales and intervals. In the end our job was to learn our parts and show up.

I never practiced and I was still consistently second or third chair, out of maybe seven, which says a lot about how seriously a lot of kids took it. Still it was a great experience for me.

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Hmm? That makes no sense. Who can attest to that? The bass lines or parts are the instructions. It contains the rules or how they break them. Do,you really need someone else to tell you how well the song is written? Even a non musician can tell you how the song touch them.

You don’t need to know the (name of) theory to be a good bass player you can use you knowledge from playing songs to arrange yourself a delicious composition by piecing together part of the songs you know. Do you think Pino Palladino sit down and say I think I’m going to add this Lydian mode here. No! He just think I like this Stravinsky so I’ll put it in the intro of “wherever I lay my hat’ version of Paul Young.

Playing/learning songs teaches you everything you need to know not only about that song but that bassist and his/her music. When you stop learning songs and just go straight to learning and improvising you’ll land a gig as a teacher or a YouTuber but not much else.

You read a great novel because it’s a great novels even if you are a great writer yourself. Good taste and judgement comes from a lot of consumption of good contents. It takes quite an egomaniac to start writing his own novel when he doesn’t know his ass from his elbows.

This is not a good advice.

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This “randomly” came across my YouTube o.O

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I did all that stuff except contests, i consider that to be pretty basic theory. If you’re playing from sheet music, you really don’t need to know what key something is in when you’re given a key signature… if you’re given 2 flats, you really don’t need to know that it’s in Bb. Realistically you don’t even need to know if it’s major or minor either.

That’s an amazing one, even for Neely. One of his best.

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I fully sympathize with this.
I too get bored if I only play / practice songs.

There’s a bunch of good advice and cool tips here for balancing and the the variety within the ‘learning songs’ world…

But I also think improvising is pretty crucial, and I always have that as part of my practice world.

The trouble with only practicing improv is this: you can only ever play what you know how to play and you’ve practiced.
And the great improvisors/composers/bass players of the world are the ones you need to listen to and copy in order to have an improvisatory language and bass vocabulary that will make you a better more musical player.

So, even in the improv world, there’s a lot of learning songs and bass lines.

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I think that to be effective writing music, you need to be able to critically consume the music of others, to understand what they are doing, and learn how people craft their songs. Learning to play the songs of others is one vehicle to use to get there.

To use the writing analogy again, imagine an author that never read and/or studied the works of others, and just started writing without any real models for what makes effective storytelling. This might work for maybe 0.1% of authors, but even they would be lucky to pull it off. The same seems true of music to me.

So, learning to play the songs is one path to get there. Critical listening is also key, developing “big ears”. There’s also theory study, but without context for that study, it doesn’t seem very worthwhile; the other two things are what give you that context.

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Like anything else in life…. Only YOU know what works best for YOU…. Just keep the balance and…

Keep On Thumpin’!
Lanny

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Improvising is an active process. You’re going to make mistakes along the way but you’re learning what works and what doesn’t. Learning songs, in contrast, is a robotic, passive process where you’re playing what’s there on the page.

It’s very good advice, but from what you’ve said there you haven’t understood anything of what I’ve said. For example, I didn’t even hint that you need to know concepts by name to put them into practice, which isn’t necessarily true but helps to communicate with other musicians.

The fact is that you don’t need to understand anything of what you’re playing to be able to play it.

This is clearly demonstrated on forums like Talkbass and Reddit and various guitar forums. So many self-labelled "intermediate bass player"s or even "advanced player"s saying that they’ve been playing for years, and “can play really difficult songs”. They actually measure their ability to play the bass in terms of the difficulty of the songs that they can play. And there lies my point.

But they ask for advice to be able to jam/improvise with others, yet unsurprisingly find that they can’t because they don’t even know the notes on the fretboard or how they relate to each other, have a poor sense of rhythm and timing because they’ve never practiced effectively and systematically with a metronome or drums, have no pocket whatsoever, they typically have little if any knowledge of theory because they usually think it’s a waste or too hard work, and have seemingly never picked up anything of substance from the hundreds or thousands of songs that they’ve stated to have played.

There are countless weekend warriors on Talkbass who lament that they have never improved over the years because they have no free time outside of learning the various set lists for the gigs. This should further tell you something.

I didn’t say that you shouldn’t ever learn any song because you have to have some context, but learning songs as the primary way to become good at bass is futile, and will only at best result in becoming a mediocre bass player.

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