I am writing this, following the nice discussion I had with an old friend - a great improviser

He always tells me that you can play anything as long as you know where the first beat is. While he does that, he taps his foot and plays by himself, no backing no nothing.

He comes up with a riff or melody and plays it till it gets into our brain. Then he starts straying here and there, until he move to a different state of mind and musical direction...In all this time, he knows exactly where the first beat is and he plays with clockwork precision

I was experimenting with this and I was curious to know how much time you guys spend with the guitar jamming WITH YOURSELVES, like in the description above, also managing to sort out a solid rhythmic idea and play around with it?

Well, I can play with a solid rhythmic without metronome, just by tapping my foot on the ground, or by head banging \m/

...But I can't improvise something good after that only playing with chords and arpeggios, I almost never jammed with friends, so I'm jamming with myself kind of really often, mostly at night. I wonder, how does it feels to jam with others ? It must be awesome

It is!
I use to jam with a friend (drummer and plays guitar very well, too) quite frequently. When he's around, I get out my acoustics and then we just start.. it's so much fun!

Now, I just started with "tapping my foot"-technique while playing to hold the beat (thanks to you Cos). It helps a lot to stay in time while playing the Katatonia lesson
I tend to do it all the time now - just yesterday I tried to play the new lesson from Gabriel and it helped me to stay in time without hearing the intro of the backing..

I'm gonna answer/take this in a whole 'nother direction....


What if you can't/there isn't a first beat? Like, with much of afrobeat. Anyway, there can still be some HEAVY grooves with no "one".

Such as:

Probably 95% of the time I'm jamming (not 'practicing'), I'm improvising. I don't really like to learn songs because I get bored - I just spend some time learning riffs that I like to add to my knowledge.

I do something similar to your friend - I tap my foot or bob my head to get a rhythm going and then I play riffs I make up until I get something catchy. I'll play the riff over again and stray from it to make it more interesting and change the flow and will often return to that riff when I can't think of anything new to play. Replaying the riff gives me time to think about what I want to play next and prevents me from stopping because I'm playing something that I already know to be catchy.

Using these sorts of techniques, I'm able to jam by myself with or without backing tracks or with other musicians.

Hehe Great to know it works for ya man! Can't wait to see a take



And aside from this, you can play that riff following a big range of dynamic shifts in interpretation, to make it sound different all the time, even though you are playing the same thing, technically



In this case, I think that tapping your foot to the ground will help, even though the first beat is not accentuated - you still have a solid groove going on, as you said. I tried it and it feels a bit ambiguous

Now, it's almost the same thing with odd metrics, you need to find a landmark of some sort - following the hi hats always worked for me