Playing cover songs is a great way to learn your instrument and help you grow your

own style of play. While there’s no substitute for writing, playing, and recording your own songs, listening to and choosing what other musicians wrote is rewarding in its own way.

The challenge of finding out what exactly is the musical instrument guitar, bassist, drummer, etc. you’re doing makes you explore ways of playing your instrument that you may never have thought of. Or it allows you to learn a different way to approach rhythm, structure, or phrasing that may never have occurred to you. And then every time you write your own music, that knowledge will enhance your own creativity and

style, without necessarily stealing the other composer’s ideas.

I have a friend who is a very competent composer. He says that he has never played cover

songs-that all he has played is original music. He’s a good musician, but I can’t help it.

he feels that it would be much better if he ever had to stretch his skills and learn songs by

other bands I think it would open his eyes to new ways of approaching his guitar and songwriting that he

i never dreamed

I mean, I prefer to play my own stuff too, but learning covers has helped me with mine.

write and play hugely. And it can be fun and rewarding to learn and play a song.

You love. It can even be enlightening to learn a song you don’t like. For example, I had to

learn “Walk on By” by Burt Bacharach. I never liked the song. It wasn’t until I had

learning it and playing it with a band I really appreciated the structure and brilliance

of Bacharach’s crafts. Now I understand why other composers are in

such admiration for Burt Bacharach’s abilities to create pop songs.

Last weekend I saw “Some Kind of Monster”, the movie about Metallica. He

shows his approach to creating music, which, while similar to most other bands

approaches, it still gave me a new way of thinking about songwriting. All of

his guitar riffs to start and turn the riff into a song, to the technicality of reading the computer’s reading of the drum and discovering that he was out of time at one part of the song.

My current band, Psychotronics, is in the style of a freeform jazz band (think Miles Davis,

coltrane) but it rocks and is essentially a rock band. My writing for psychotronics involves

creating riffs and improvising them. Unstructured songs, with a few exceptions, but

improvised performance in the style of jazz. Not even as structured as most jam bands.

I have heard. But I’m also putting together a cover band to play at weddings and anywhere else we can.

I work. I know my game is improving and my writing is growing because I have to learn

a wide variety of songs that I would have never known.

So listen closely and learn what other musicians are doing to their songs. what approach to do

do they drink to play their instruments? You will find your ability to play and create will.

grow rapidly by exercising learning decks.