Hey, how you doing?Justin here.
Today I want to talk about
jamming for beginners.
Playing with another musician
is one of the things
that can progress your playing
faster than almost anything else,
so its definitely something I'd recommend
you get into as soon as possible.
It's something that I get asked about
all the time, so I want to give you
as many tips in this video as I can,
to help you make a smooth start
into this exciting part of your journey.
So the first question that usually
comes up is,
how do you find somebody to have
a jam with?
Well, it's a very good question.
of course it depends a lot on your
circumstances.
If you're at school,
it would be, asking around at school,
ask your friends, ask your friends of friends,
ask anyone you know,
ask your teachers,
does anyone know somebody who
plays guitar,
that might be up for having a play.
Once you get a name for them,
you just go and say,
"hey, I play guitar. I heard you do too.
Do you fancy getting together on
Tuesday night and seeing if we can play
a song or something?"
That's it.
Now, if you're an adult,
it's going to be work first, I guess,
like asking around at work,
does anyone know anyone who plays guitar,
see if they can coax their friends of friends,
really expand the circle,
to try and find somebody that's connected there.
Might be your family,
ask your family, ask your cousins,
ask your sisters and brothers,
who do they know,
anyone know anyone that plays guitar
please, help me.
If you can't find that, the next option
along which I've done a few times,
is asking in a music store.
So just putting a little postcard in a
music store, saying,
"Hey, beginner knows basic chords.
Wants to look for another, you know,
wants to find another guitar player to
have a jam with every few weeks and
maybe play some songs and
if things go great then maybe we'll play
an open mic one day or something.
You know, just like,
it doesn't have to be something that you
worry about too much, okay ?
They're going to ring you up and they go,
"hey, hi, how're you doing?
What do you play?
Oh, I do this - I've learnt this way,
these are songs I know,
do you fancy having a play?
What day?"
and then decide on
where you're going to meet up.
Of course, there's kind of,
these days, it's something
that you want to think about,
who you're inviting to your home and
all of that sort of stuff,
so it might be that you meet for a beer
or a coffee or something first,
before you invite, go to each other's houses.
But again, that's up to your circumstances
and how confident you feel,
and where you live,
and all of those,
there's lots of variables here that
I can't help you out with,
you're just going to have to
try and figure out.
The other option is to use
a thing like the forum,
I've got a forum on my site,
where lots of people
do online collaborations
and online jamming.
It is a little bit difficult to jam via,
you know, Google Meet or Zoom or Skype,
or whatever it is that you use,
just because there's a thing called latency,
a slight delay between what I play
and the person hearing it.
So jamming, playing together,
can be a little bit difficult there.
But it can be good for collaboration,
say, for recording a song,
or working together in another way.
But for the direct one-on-one jamming,
it is better to try and find someone.
The forum has made a load of connections,
where people have said,
"Hey, I'm in Toronto and I'm a beginner
and I'm looking for somebody to have a
play with," and,
"Oh, I"m in Toronto too."
And then you can kind of get to
know each other a little bit
through the forum,
so that's definitely somewhere to check out.
If you haven't been,
www.JustinGuitarCommunity.com
amazing community over there of people,
really supportive community,
where lots of people are playing
and sharing their songs,
and sharing their covers,
and giving each other critique,
and meeting up,
really good place if you want to
start your journey.
But of course, there are many
guitar forums around that you
might want to check out as well.
And/or just ask it on Facebook.
You know, go on the Justin Guitar
Facebook group, and go,
Justin keeps raving about playing with
other people, you know,
anyone here from Arkansas?
fancy having a play, or whatever.
You know, just do whatever you can
to see if you can find
somebody to have a play with.
Hello Ziggy, do you fancy having
a jam today?
No, okay.
So, once you've found somebody
that you want to have a play with,
next really important thing,
is deciding what you're going
to play in advance.
A really bad idea is to just meet up
with somebody that you're going to
have a jam with, and have no idea
about what it is that you're
going to do.
That's kind of a recipe for disaster, that.
So, as soon as you found somebody
that you want to have a play with,
you just talk about it.
Say, hey like, these are the ten songs
that I kind of know,
do you know any of those?
and then see if you can
get it down to maybe
three to five songs maximum,
that you're going to pick,
to have a play for that first time.
You don't want to be putting
too much pressure on yourself,
and you want to have time to work on
those tunes, before you meet up.
Make sure that you're confident
with the rhythm,
that you remember the chord changes,
you might want to try some of these
other ideas that I'm going to talk about
in a sec
to do with how you might play the song,
and different ways to play the song.
But deciding that repertoire,
or the songs that you want to work on
in advance is a real game-changer.
If you don't do that, its probably going
to be a bit awkward
and you'll end up playing each other
little bits of songs,
rather than playing together a song.
Okay, it gives them a chance to learn stuff,
it gives you a chance to learn stuff,
it really, I think it's one of the most
important things.
Sure, as you get better,
like if I meet someone for a jam,
I'm not going to talk about
preparing it, really.
I might do, if we're going to
do something specific,
but, much more likely
I'd just play.
And the more you jam,
the more you'll be kind of
comfortable with that sort of situation.
But to start off with,
you definitely want to keep things
nice and safe and secure,
and work on songs that you know.
If it goes really well,
you might end up doing more songs,
stuff that you don't know and
getting into that.
but I wouldn't count on that
on the very first one.
So one of the biggest mistakes
that beginners make when they
first try and jam together,
is that they try and play the
same thing at the same time.
And it's really easy for that
to sound kind of lumpy and weird.
If you're not strumming exactly together
it's just going to sound
a little bit wonky.
If you don't get the chord changes
exactly right.
If somebody's playing a little bit ahead
and somebody's playing a little bit behind,
it just feels lumpy and weird.
So one of the things that you definitely
want to think about
in that early stage is -
what am I going to play,
and have I got an alternative thing
I can play,
if they want to play the thing that
I'm doing.
So let's say you're playing
Knocking on Heaven's door
and you've got G, D and C chords.
And you're like, well I can play that
and this is the strumming pattern
that I usually do.
But if you meet up with them
and you're going to play the same thing
and they play very much like you,
you're soon going to feel like,
oh yeah, this isn't really working.
What can we do?
So you need to kind of figure out
or think about having
two different parts.
If you've been following along my course
and you're familiar with how to use
the Major Scale and the
Minor Pentatonic scale,
that would be the easiest division.
One person's playing the chords,
the other person takes the solo,
you go around a few times through the song,
and then you sort through the
chord progression,
and then you swap over.
That's an obvious and quite a fun way
and a standard way of having a jam,
would be one person's taking the
rhythm part, one's doing the lead.
But if you're not feeling
super confident,
in busting into a lead solo
with somebody you've first met,
you need to think about other ways
of approaching the rhythm part.
The first thing to do would be
to be changing up
the rhythm patterns that you're playing.
So, you could just go simple and
do one strum on each chord change,
while the other person plays a
busy pattern.
That would already sound better than
both of you trying to play
the same pattern at the same time.
So that would be one option.
Another really great option is to
explore using a capo.
So, if somebody's playing a G chord,
an open G chord,
you can also play a G chord,
by say, putting a capo at the
7th fret and playing a C chord.
That still sounds like a G,
okay?
So if you can work out in advance
how to play some of the songs that
you've chosen with a capo,
so in another position,
you're still playing the same chords
a different way,
that sounds absolutely lovely.
Even if you're doing the same
strumming pattern,
it sounds really cool.
If you can arpeggiate one of the chords,
ok, so one person's doing the strumming,
the other person's picking out
random notes from the chord,
that'll sound wicked.
Particularly if you've got acoustic guitar
and electric guitar,
acoustic guitar does the strumming,
electric guitar does,
even the same chords,
and just picks out the notes one at a time
that can sound really lovely.
The thing that you want to avoid
is trying to do the same thing
at the same time.
What variation you choose
doesn't really matter.
One thing that'll have a big impact
on that is the ability of the
person that you're jamming with.
Playing with somebody who's not
as good as you,
somebody the same as you,
or somebody way better or have
great things going for them.
If you're jamming with somebody
who's not as good as you,
it's possible that you'll spend a
little bit more time taking solos,
but you should also be
trying to help them,
as much as you can,
because one of the best ways to learn
stuff is to teach it.
Cause if you're going to explain
something to somebody else,
you have to really understand it first.
So if you're jamming with somebody
who's not as good,
spend some time helping them
with the rhythm,
helping them with the chord changes,
helping them learn to do a solo,
whatever it is that they're not
going so great with,
don't be afraid to help them.
You don't want to come across as a
smarty-pants and like,
oh, I'm so good,
but if they're struggling with something
and they're receptive to it,
then by all means try and help them
out a bit, cause
you'll get better for it,
in the process.
So teaching is a great way
of learning as well.
If you're at about the same level
as somebody else,
and you're having a jam,
you're going to learn a lot too,
because everybody excels at some things
more than others.
So you might find they're really good
at chord changes,
and you're really good at soloing
and you'll be able to share ideas
on an equal platform.
So it's not like somebody's
showing everything and the other person's
receiving everything.
You should be pairing it off.
Like, hey man, that lick that you did in
solo is really cool,
How'd you do that?
You did a great one as well,
what was that one?
This kind of conversation
should be a common thing.
It doesn't have to be formal,
like you start playing the song
and you're all panicked and doing,
you know.
We play music.
It's play, it's fun,
it's something to be enjoyed.
We don't work the guitar.
okay, so try and make sure
that it's a kind of a fluid
nice fun environment
when you're having a jam.
And you can stop and ask for advice
or swap ideas
try out different things,
if something's not working stop and go,
'man, that's not working so good, is it?
What can we do to fix that?'
okay?
That's a great thing about
being roughly on an equal footing.
I think the best one,
and the thing that I always tried to do
when I was growing up was playing
with people that were a
lot better than me.
It does lift your game.
If you're playing with people that are
better than you
and you're used to playing
really solid time with somebody,
somebody who's really locked in,
it'll make your time better.
If they can solo and do stuff,
and you go, wow, what was that?
and they can help you out,
that's great as well.
It can be a bit frustrating,
if you're like super good,
and you're playing with a
complete beginner.
That can be,
that's probably like a,
too big a disparity there.
But even still I enjoy jamming
with beginners all of the time.
Because it gives me a chance
to explore some fun stuff.
While they're enjoying playing
simple chords and getting the
groove on,
I can explore other chord shapes,
or little solos,
or incorporating lead and rhythm
and those kind of ideas.
So,
the point of all this,
is that it doesn't really matter
who you jam with,
as long as you're jamming.
You're going to get benefit whether
you're playing with real beginners,
people equal to you,
people much better than you,
there is so much to learn in this game.
It's a never-ending story,
and the more jamming you can do,
and the more experiencing
real music with real people,
the better you'll be.
I promise, it's going to
be a game-changer.
If you've never done it before,
it's the one thing that really
accelerates your playing
like no other.
One thing to mention that I
kind of wish I didn't have to,
but it's make sure you
share the solos.
Even if you're the guy that's really good
and you're playing with a beginner,
make sure you chill out,
play some chords,
and give them a go at taking a solo.
The standard kind of thing,
if you're jamming the blues with someone,
would be you do between three and four
choruses of a solo,
and then you swap.
If you meet with somebody
and they're playing the chords
and you take a solo for ages and ages,
and then you don't give them a solo,
and go, oh, it's time to go -
you know, that's not cool.
I've had a couple in my,
thirty, whatever years of playing guitar,
that's happened a couple of times.
I've had people over for a jam,
and they've just done loads of soloing,
while I've been playing chords,
and then stopped and gone,
oh, let's get a beer,
It doesn't work like that.
Those people never came back.
You know,
you want it to be a sharing thing.
You want to give and take,
yin and yang.
It's got to be an equal thing here.
No matter, if there's a disparity in the
levels there,
you want to be sharing the fun
soloing stuff.
Now, I must admit,
personally, I enjoy the rhythm
just as much as the soloing,
I find it just as creative and fun
to explore rhythms and really working
on the groove
and trying to play a
simple thing really well.
But, particularly in the late beginner
early intermediate thing,
soloing is definitely the cherry there.
So you want to be sharing that stuff,
it's really important.
One other thing that can be really fun,
I want to mention before I go,
is checking out
set to guitar arrangements.
Now
if it's something that you want to explore,
again google is your friend.
There are lots of two guitar arrangements
around that you'll find
where one guitar will play this,
and another guitar will play that.
Again, you agree in advance,
you learn your parts separately,
and then you practise together.
Ideally you learn both parts,
and then you swap playing
both parts together.
There is plenty of stuff around,
even for very early beginner stages,
mostly single note sort of stuff
more than like,
strumming and solo arrangements,
but lots of Christmas carols
and that kind of stuff come up like that.
But it can be a really great way
to work on your duet playing
and this idea of playing with
another person is having a
set arrangement.
It can take some of the pressure off
if you're not that into improvising.
And it gives both people
something to work on
to study between meetings.
So that's definitely something
you want to check out.
I would absolutely love to see
some videos of you guys jamming
and I'm happy to offer some
feedback if you want it.
There's a few ways to
get my attention,
the best way,
if you're over on the website,
would be to leave
a link to a video of you playing,
in the comments on this webpage.
And I will do my best to go and
check it out and give you
some feedback.
If you happen to be
over on YouTube,
you could let me know using
the hastag #JustinGuitar
or if you're on social media,
you can use my Instagram handle,
@JustinGuitar
Let me know on one of those,
and I'll do my best to go and
check it out.
Of course, if it ends up being
hundreds or thousands of people
doing that, I might not have
time to do it.
But I"ll check out as many
as I can.
I really hope that this video
encourages you,
to go and find somebody
to have a jam with,
and I"ll see you for plenty more
very soon.
You all take care of yourselves,
bye-bye!