Maybe it would help top say how I arrived at that post. The "how-to" part of the encouragement.

What I was remembering when I posted was this-- we have a piece we have been playing for YEARS, "Little by Little." It's really pretty boring but people like it. One night we were rehearsing in a space we'd never played in before, for an ecumenical service the following night. I stepped away for a break and when I came back, the gang had left their places and were lounging about in the pews. No good place to set down guitars, so they had taken them along in their laps. Someone had started strumming idly, on that song, and someone else, not recognizing it, had started adding some very interesting sevenths and riffs. Then someone else started singing it, in the new mode so to speak, and now it was sounding all jazzy, soft, really cool.

They were just noodling around, and out popped this unique thing. Now we do it that way sometimes.

Doing that, accidentally, led us to the realization that it's easy to let the mind barriers slip sideways a bit and turn the brain cells loose on anything. We do it whenever we get bored with a piece. So now we have that one and several others we can fool around on, and one is a slow, sauntering blues wail of "Down to the Valley to Pray." Who'd expect THAT? We didn't!

They just COME. It's like a stream of music, from deep underground in your head, suddenly breaks loose from underground and runs through your repertoire. Try it! You will at least get some good laughs out of it!

~Susan