Music has always been a part of my life, but recently, I've decided it ought to be more of a priority. In many ways, I think I've begun to imporve at in by leaps and bounds in ways I hadn't before.

This advice ceritanly won't help you get into alstate, or achive first chair in your band / orchestra, but if you're like me and hungry to improve at your ability to create a beautiful, ephemeral auditory experience like me, I think some of these expeeriences could be true for you.

Jaming

This is honestly the single most useful thing that helped me being to create great music. If you're an instrumentalist, there is no better way to practice than to play along to jam tracks. There are a ton of videos in every style you can think of with backing tracks. Pick a key that's easy for you to stick with, and get jamming! You don't have to know a single thing about theory, just pick a jam track and play what sounds good. If you do this consistently you will amaze yourself with the incredible melodies you can come up with.

The Promise of tomrrow

Learning any instrument is a monumental physical and mental undertaking. It's easy to get bogged down by how much there is to do, how many techniques there are to learn., and seeing how far the best and brightest can take it can sometimes be disheartening. The cealing is high, and even gazing up at highest cieling of cathedral roofs can be... intemidating. But this should never discourage you. My favorite feeling in the world is the one of struggling and feeling like I'm moving at a milimiter a minute late at, slaming my hands on the keys, and going to bed frustrated, but also excited.. Because the I have come to find that the greatest feeling in the world to me is waking up to discover that in the interum, while I've been rersting, my brain has been cooking, linking neurons that my concious self could never muster. Getting in this habbit is like being a kid going to bed on christmas eve, eager to wake up and dsee what's wrapped for you under the tree. Of course, it can still feel agonizingly slow, and it's not every day that the progress feels substantial, but it's, almost always there, and if it's not today, then it wwill be tomorroww! I think everyone needs the chance to tap into this natural high and elation that comes with the grueling crawl of mastery.

Jazz Cabbage

People love to rag on musicians for their propensity to be in the sauce, but in an odd way, I think this is not always a bad thing. Sobe practice wis always king, and it's probably rare that meaningful practice with alteredd states is sustainable. But sometimes I think you can learn something from the way you performa nd explore your instrument and the music with a different frame of mind. We crave novelty and stimulation, and practing route scales, arpeggios, building your chops can fail to deliver the novelty we're adicted to... and yet it's gotta be done. So can you blame me for incorperating a little blazing into my practice ritual? Truthfuly, I think most people using drugs are ddoing it wrong. People often fail to tell gripping trip reports. They seem to be fixatedd with getting as blasted as possible and losing themselves, rather than reporting trips in ways that qualify the experience, and give me emotional insight to their wavering psyche. But it's not just the way they talk about it, I think we are using them wrong too. One of my favorite things to do on a new substance is play a game I'm very familiar with. It's so neat to be able to feel how my internal monologues, reactions and instincts change, and am activity with more automatic structure can help analyze that. This is extremely true with music too. Truthfuly, I didn't feel like I was starting to make hardly any progress on the piano until I tried jamming on my first mushroom trip. I had this funny realization that... I played like someone who didnd't know how to play well, because... I didn't, obvciously, but challenged myself to try and feel what it might be like if I were someone who did. I honed in on this. Stoppedd focusing so much on notes, chords, any technique I couldd describe and stsarted acting... like a pianist, moved dthe way I saw them move. Predicably, this SOUNDED like trash of course, maybe like a toddler having a little too much fun on their first keyboard. I was painting a slurry of chromatic mush, like mixing all the colors of fingerpaints... But the more I persisted and dpaid attention, the more my subconcious took over. Lurching its judgy mood out of my psyche and wrapping itself around my muscles, slowly transforming random movements into inklings of rhythms. Certain notes and harmonies would sound nice, and so I would learn towards them in my pseudo-random finger waggling, eventually, I discovered, on a primitive level, the idea of counting again,a dn began to try to move in time, andd soon enough, I was jamming out! Maybe better than I've ever heard! Of course drugs can be extremely deceptive and we can all point and laugha t the strung out clown, drunkenly strumming like he's a rockstar in his head, but loud and sloppy to everyone around him. But I think there's something to be said for that powerful feeling of flow, and the progress I was making was real. This experience taught me that like every great kind of art, at its core, music is really just all about making nice patterns. Sequences of things in common with just enough variety to make it interesting, but not so much to make it ailien or incomprehensible. In a wway, jamming is like scupting and painting, but learning / performing pieces is like sketching, outlining musical constructs in ink.