Eli5: How does a group of musicians “jam”?

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How does a group of musicians, who may never have played together before, start to play together and make cohesive music? I don’t mean over time, I mean in that first session, good musicians seem to have an intuition of what the others are about to play.

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9 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

It varies completely from player to player. Some people go into it with a pretense of “we must learn this and learn it perfectly” and some just want to play. Experience levels are gonna be different, and I guess the clincher is just communicating where you’re at. I’m a rhythm guitarist and a lot of the folks I play with play lead, and know scales well enough to hear what I’m playing and be able to improvise a lead over it. Or we might pull up tabs for a song we both like or want to learn and make it our own somehow. Some people go in with sheet music.

Having a dynamic that plays to people’s strengths is good so you can compliment each other or compensate where someone else falls short or vice versa. Have a conversation and find out if you’re on the same page or how to get there if you want to.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Music theory is very organized. Good musicians who have studied how music is put together know a whole bunch of common chord progressions. Especially with blues/rock. If you are sitting in with some peeps and someone says “blues in E” everyone knows what the musical structure is going to be. With rhythm, it’s similar. If it’s a rock song everyone just gets into a rock groove. Music repeats. Once someone lays out a pattern the others listen and fall in pretty quick.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Music follows patterns, and if you know how those patterns work, it’s much like forming a sentence. Often times the drummer will start a rhythm pattern that repeats over and over again, and then the bass and guitar might decide based on the style of music what chord pattern they will use. Everything from that point is just fitting words into the sentence.

To use a sports analogy, it’s like baseball. If you know the rules, you can jump in with any team and each position has it’s job, so you know sort of what to expect.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They play in the same key, respond to different cues from each other, and they know how different styles of music should be structured. Some styles of music are easier to jam with people you don’t know. A blues jam is easy because the structure is common knowledge.

Edit: Adding more context here. A “key” in music is a group of notes that are used as the foundation of a song. The notes in a key sound good together, so knowing the key allows experienced musicians to play cohesively.

Anonymous 0 Comments

In short, experience. Veteran and naturally gifted musicians have gained, mostly via trial and error, an understanding of musical structure and composition that the casual listener lacks.

Basically, after enough practice, you know that in a given format, the next logical step for “Musician A” will likely be “X”; thus allowing you to plan what you will play next in order to compliment it.

There’s probably a much simpler way to describe all of this but hope this helps

Anonymous 0 Comments

How do you have a conversation with a group of people you just met? You find common ground, you explore different subjects, you use humour to lighten the mood, you ask questions to learn more about the others. Depending on the point of view and experiences each person brings, it can be easy and fun, or long and terrible.

Music is just another language. Some people speak it fluently, some have the basics, and some are just tourists. To jam it helps to find people who speak it on your level. Then, everything is easy, like the conversation above but you all have similar jobs, similar hobbies, similar senses of humour, etc. In that case jamming is fun because it’s easy, almost nothing needs to be said, you just play. Other times, nobody is on the same page and it ends up as a disaster. Exactly the same in both cases.

Anonymous 0 Comments

since the question has been answered already, [here’s one of my favorite improv sessions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC8CH0Z3L54)

Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s a beat.

Once you feel it, a group can connect and play with it, around it, away from it, and come back to it.

That’s a jam man.

Anonymous 0 Comments

In bluegrass, blues, etc, the tradition is a circle of musicians with various instruments will play a song and each person gets a turn at lead. Another kind of jam would be someone trying to write a song and others will join in and hopefully different styles/skills can spark something. Then you have those superjams where someone is getting honored and dozens of musicians join in playing the honoree’s signature tunes, or someone will sit in with another band, well you’re familiar with their work and you pass the lead and back them, sure sometimes you get great synergy and you can have two or more soloists chase each other or intuitively harmonize and that’s awesome.