One of the jamming sessions that I've had today, I've learnt something so counter intuitive about playing music that it's actually very liberating. I think most music teachers won't have the gall to do something like what has been done today and even more might be rolling in their graves.
In a band of four, we all just played a regular 4 chord progression of an instrumental section of a song and we took turns swapping instruments but we all must have a go at playing a melody freestyle on the keys. No instruction on how to play a melody or even construct one, just freeform and almost random according to your own measure of where the music is taking you. What I thought would be an epic car crash of just horrible melodies clashing with the underlying chords turned out to be not so bad. In fact, it actually sounded good nearly most of the time. Even little ol' me who hasn't touched the keys in years nor have basic motor skills to play the piano was thoroughly surprised what I can spit out. What sorcery is this??
The underlying principle is that we never actually really playing something at random, we already have pre-formulated ideas about what we are going to play based on past music that we have listened to. Not only do we have pre-conceived melodies, we also have pre-determined timings or intervals between notes of the melody. We bring all of this to the keys and we just let it flow. More often than not, it's generally "correct" and it's almost how you would imagined it in your head. Of course, it could be better with more practice and more knowledge but I am still pretty surprised at the base results.
This goes against what I have been forcing myself how to learn new things especially on the bass. There is a way on learning how to make a bass fill or how to make the bass into a more lead instrument, it's just that I couldn't get it or I have found out THE method to get there. What this practice session meant was that, it doesn't matter what you play as long as you let go and you end up in the general direction that you want to be in. This takes a huge step further from the saying "Fake it till you make it" to be "Fake it, you'll make it". What happens after that is just a matter of refinement and not correction like what you have played is "wrong". So counter intuitive, so deep and yet so liberating.
Only now do I finally begin to understand how some of the great musicians become so great. They are so good at being unconscious and unknowing of what they play, that it becomes like second nature to them and just follow where the music takes them. Great music playing/creation and creativity doesn't come from careful specific instruction but learning to let go.
In some ways, it's a lot like life.
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Another thing that I thought was good was the fact that we spent almost as much time praying as we did practicing. It might be good for church, if only we can move practices to another day apart from Sunday itself.
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