That's one of the cool things about going to local bars: seeing what people are doing and jamming with them. I'm a huge advocate of jamming with others; you learn a lot. So I love to go and do that - even if people wipe the stage up with you.
I just love the process of working with other actors. It's like jamming with a musician, except it takes a little more effort to get to that place as an actor, because you have the cameras and lights and everything. But I love jamming with these people.
Whenever I go jamming, people are looking to cut me. The young ones learn my stuff and come play it at me, and I have to learn other stuff. I feel a lot of pressure. But it's cool. It's a good pressure.
The way that we imitate each others' riffs is something that other bands don't do as much. If we're jamming with a jazz band, or I am jamming with a jazz band, I have to catch myself, the tendency is always to do that.
For me, practice isn't doing scales but doing things like writing, jamming with other people, or playing gigs.
The first eight songs we were using someone else's monitors and it is hard to follow the changes when you are jamming if you can't hear those who you are jamming with.
There's a wonderful tradition of jazz people getting on stage and jamming and finding some feeling for music with audiences who may be fresh. For others, it might be just like a comfortable shirt they've been wearing.
The conventional asset-allocation method is like sheet music. It is prescribed, it has right answers and wrong answers and it sounds about the same every time. But jamming is different. Jamming is when you make the music. When you improvise and adapt to conditions. When you are creative.
If you're up there [on stage] thinking about what you're doing, you're just not there and it's not going to happen.So trying to learn how to overcome those - which is a normal thing to do. You're in front of a lot of people. People are going to get very self-conscious. So you have to learn to sort of overcome that tendency towards self-consciousness and just blow it wide open. And you jump in and join all those people that are out there enjoying what you're doing together.
We don't do lots of jamming on stage, but I think we have the attitude of exploring things and trying something new.
I used to listen a lot to Rolling Stones records and play along with them when I was first starting. It's a good way to learn, jamming around basic music.
I was the kid jamming out to the songs on the radio, and now there's hopefully kids out there jamming out to my music.
But when it came to jamming and writing songs like we used to, we realized Brandon was a huge spirit in the band. Who knew? It was just something we had to learn.
Jamming with other people will create energy and excitement that you can feed off, and which will help push you to do things you'd never dream of doing by yourself.
I want to literally make people smarter by jamming things in their brains.
I think that one of the things about music is it's supposed to be spontaneous, it's supposed to be real human beings bouncing off of each other whether its from the stage or to the audience, or jamming with friends.
Even going on stage is a service because it brings people up from thinking about their lost job or their lost spouse or something like that, so that even helps people when I'm doing comedy; it's all done to make them laugh.