Variety is the spice of life
One of the best tips I can give you on being a great musician is to vary what you practice to include stuff you wouldn’t normally play. Lets face it, we all have our favourite music style or [tag]band[/tag to listen too and a lot of us tend to drag the same old stuff out each time we practice.
What I have found is that variety is a great teacher. Try putting on the radio and playing along to whatever comes on at random. It doesn’t really matter if you can’t play exactly the same as the original, just fake it. Playing along to something you don’t know well or that is a completely different style to what you normally play forces you to go back to your basics and to think about what you are playing.
I had to fill in last week in a band that were auditioning for a booking agent. I knew the bass player and guitarist but had never met any of the singers and had to play nearly all the songs by ear as there were very few charts to follow. Some people would panic in a situation like this but my past habits of trying to play a variety of music helped greatly. Sure there were a few mistakes and one or two songs that would have benefitted from some rehearsal time, but overall it went very well and there were certainly no “train wrecks” to ruin the day.
Variety is the spice of life folks, get into it!
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