Wow, Darrell! That’s amazing! I aspire to reach the point where I’m competent to spend most of my time improvising. I think it’s phenomenal that you’ve discovered that this is the way to keep yourself engaged and excited.
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Stacy, you raise a point that I’ve wondered about, too. How sustainable is this feeling? Is it like the cartoon character who runs off the cliff and hovers in the air until he realizes it, then falls? Is it destined to end as soon as we “make a mistake,” or can we be aware of it, respond to it somehow (maybe embellish to make it look intentional?), and continue to hover? In other words, do we need to be “successful” in some way to exist in that space, or can we visit there without expectations?
Having only had the briefest glimpses of it, I honestly have no idea.
Silvia, this is beautiful:
For what it’s worth, I agree with you completely. I think we are absolutely expressing ourselves by playing music, and to do that we have to be fully, intensely present with ourselves. This is very much consistent with how I heard Justin’s message in the Mindful Listening For Guitar Players lesson.
Not to promote my Live Clubs but for me the feel was “being able to express myself musically, even if it isn’t my own original song”. Making songs your own by grabbing CONTROL. takign them apart, buildign them up again and knowing how and why
I “learned” to do it…sorry…I DISCOVERED how to do that by combining working on fundations like rhythms, chord changes, some basic theory and keeping time with a good layer of experimentaton.
The experimental path for me was into a fingerpicking/strum mix with a lot of embellishments and decorations. I added those things after I learned a bit of singing and playing together. For others it is bluesy leads or something else.
Try some different things and be brave; do some wacky stuff with them and see what works. For me that was “finding other chords while strumming a simple chord by moving a finger somewhere else”. This experiment brought me to what is a large chunk of my “style”.
This is where I found my feel.
First you need to be IN CONTROL. If that means a slow, basic version of a song; start there first. Than build upon that in a way YOU have control and keep control. Don’t be a slave of some sheet music or tab you try to copy.
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I’ll let you know if it ever happens! 
I remain very mechanical in my playing, always having to think about what’s next. I suspect it will always be thus for me.
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Lots of interesting replies here 
After giving the question a bit more thought and seeing that others also experiment with their playing, I think I also might have tapped into this “feel” thing already.
My focus is not on deadly strict practice routines but on trying to transcribe existing melodies and chords (which I find more difficult) by ear, memorize them as much as possible, and then playing along with original recordings and add my own improvised part if I’m inspired enough. A sort of vague ambition I’ve had is to approach the guitar like a trumpet or a saxophone as I like a fair bit of jazz. Of course, the guitar never sounds exactly like a trumpet or a saxophone and my technique isn’t good enough for jumping between octaves in the blink of an eye and remain in the key of the song, but it’s an interesting motivation to keep trying things.
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You’ve all given me some new perspectives that I didn’t necessarily see coming.
@markr31, I believe it’s accessible to you; you may just have to find a personalized path that gets you there. If I got anything out of this thread, it’s that we’re all unique, so we’re likely to have slightly (or even radically) different ways of reaching that place of “flow” or whatever it is. Then there’s the likelihood that what “it” is is different for each of us, too.
@Jozsef: Yes! I’m glad to see that you searched and found examples that have worked for you.
@LievenDV, thank you. That is an amazing point of view that I couldn’t possibly have considered since I’m nowhere close to having the tools to experience it. Still, what you described has inspired me to broaden my long-range goals.
A couple of things that I think are common to most of what’s been said is that feeling freedom/control is important to our sense of creativity and enjoyment. Freedom and control can be seen as very similar or quite different - as in: When you’re in control, you have the freedom to do exactly what you want; OR it’s only when you “let go” of trying control can you really feel free. I think proficiency has a lot to do with which way we experience that dichotomy. It’s nearly impossible for beginners to control their playing the way Lieven describes, so stepping outside the practice regimen and just feeling and hearing is the more accessible option.
But I also think expectations play a significant role. If we constrain our playing to “how it’s supposed to sound” at all times, then we limit ourselves to a very small space within which we’re able to enjoy our experience. If we can unlearn what we’ve been conditioned to produce, we might discover something we didn’t know we could do or that we didn’t know we liked. I’ve found this more than once when I’ve put a finger on the wrong string or fret and said, “Oh! That’s not bad!” Then I’ll try a few other “wrong” places, too.
I think often about how, when we were children, we’d find physical objects that made sounds that captivated us - glasses, lids of cans, rubber bands, coins, and so on. We’d hit them, drop them, pluck them repeatedly, observing how the sound would change when we did it one way versus another. Adults around us would become irritated and tell us to stop, but for those few minutes, we were completely immersed in the exploration of sounds we could produce with these “instruments” (or the instrument of our mind, @BurnsRhythm). I can’t help thinking that this openness of a child’s mind to uninhibited hearing, feeling, experimenting is a priceless piece of how to gain a better intuition for playing guitar and enjoying the experience.
Thank you all for contributing to this discussion. You’ve unquestionably expanded my perspective in ways that I’ll try to incorporate into my practice.
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This is such an interesting topic. Reading this thread makes me realize I want to spend more some time just playing guitar outside of my practice routine.
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Yes! Do that. It’s where the real fun happens. If anyone’s not doing that, they really should.
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Very interesting topic, as others have said.
A few weeks ago, I was describing playing the guitar to a friend, and why I was suddenly so in love with it:
‘Seriously, playing guitar is so fucking lovely, like, so much better than I remember piano to be? It feels a lot more down to earth, a lot more comfortably dirty than what I was learning on the piano once upon a time? Granted, it was classical piano I was learning, but still. There is something to be said about feeling the actual strings vibrate under your fingers, touching them, plucking them yourself instead of only pressing buttons. It’s more immediate, more there in the moment, if you catch my drift.’
‘And you can do so much with a guitar, like drumming on it, muting it, hammer your fingers down, stroke softly, use it almost like a percussive instrument. It is a very sensual instrument, much more so than the piano.’
And that’s what I think the feeling you described is for me, the sensuality of making music with your hands, feeling the strings, the vibrations, while hearing the music. Sensuality in the literal sense of engaging your senses of touch and listen so much more than we usually do. That helps my brain relax, and makes getting into flow so much easier.
I cultivate it by playing things I know well, things where I can close my eyes and just feel and listen, and by just mindlessly noodling while watching tv. And by sometimes just plucking random strings with no particular order, just to feel them vibrate and make sound.
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My favourite Bass player put me in the right frame of mind; she’s a living legend - in my opinion one of the best ever Bass players!
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This is great. Thank you. I think there’s a lot of what you describe here that overlaps with my experience. The sensuality is very much a part of what I’ve discovered and want to incorporate into my playing.
I like that you’ve found opportunities to get there that involve both what is familiar to you and also new and random ways. Thank you for sharing all of it.
Excellent. Thank you, Darrell.
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“It’s not about beat per minute, but about FEEL per minute” said by one of the old famous drummers. Sadly forgot the name.
Last few months I have listened a lot to different drummers and percussionists. It’s all about Rhythm.
Also have been searching for and listening to the old masters giving lessons. Those who learned music, at the time before mobile phones and internet was a common thing.
Like Jaco Pastorius, Al Di Meola, Segovia etc etc
Here it is John Scofield giving some advice:
It’s kind of going back to the roots.
Also I listened to some teacher, who had an open debate with his students at a famous university about genres. They quickly came to the conclusion, that genres is not something musicians and composers as such bother to go into. Genres are for the music industry. For musicians and composers it’s art. Something where words no longer really can be used. The Feel, The Groove.
I still recall how record shops in my youth was not defined by genres, but the artist was in alphabetic order instead.
That debate made me actually throw out the whole “genre” thing from my mind.
A combination of all these things above, really have benefitted my way of practice and playing the guitar and approach to music in general.
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“A guitar is a drum you can play chords on”
- Josh Skaja (check out his “Notes On Guitar” Substack)
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