Beginners’ Lesson

Welcome back! I hope you’re all staying healthy and positive during the current pandemic-related upheaval. For those of you who practise with a band, or if you’re at the stage of playing live gigs, the requirement to be physically separate from each other for the time being will have brought all of those plans to a grinding halt. My various social media feeds have been full of people trying to find novel strategies for getting creative—either to develop their craft, or to perform and create in new ways—with varying degrees of success.

This month, let’s look at some interesting ways to practise while remaining safely isolated. So much of the solo practice that we do is about getting things prepared so we can then try them out in a setting with other musicians. Once that destination is taken away, we need to think about other possible ways to express the things we’ve learned, and work together with our bandmates.

One of the most common suggestions is to perform live-streaming gigs, and understandably so,