PRESENCE - Volume 80

Last weekend I drove four hours round trip to jam with three guys I've been playing music with since high school.

We didn't have a gig. We weren't rehearsing for anything. Nobody was recording an album or filming a video. The four of us drove met in Charlotte, chipped in $200 for a few hours in a professional rehearsal space, and played music together for the sake of playing music together. That's it. That's the whole story.

If you'd asked any of us why we were doing it, I don't think we could have given you a good answer. We just knew we wanted to.

These aren't casual acquaintances. Kevin, Mike and Brian are brothers, and I've been playing music with all three of them since high school. We went to college together specifically to keep the band going, lived as roommates through it. After graduation, two of them moved away, but Kevin and I started another band and spent several years touring the country together. These days we all get together to jam about once a year, and last weekend was this year's version — four guys, a rehearsal room, and no plan beyond showing up.

Here's what I keep coming back to: almost everything I do around guitar these days has a purpose behind it. If I'm playing, I'm prepping for a gig, working up a setlist, running changes I need to have locked in. If I'm not doing that, I'm building a lesson, chasing an idea for a video, thinking about what will help you get better. That's not a complaint. I love the work I do! But between the gigs and the teaching, most of my playing time is in service of something else.

This wasn't that. There was no lesson to extract, no audience to entertain, no recording to be made. Just four guys who've known each other for thirty-plus years, in a room, playing because it feels good to play with people who make you better just by being in the room with you.

I think we lose sight of that reason sometimes, especially the more serious we get about the instrument. We start measuring practice time, tracking progress, chasing the next goal. All of that matters. But somewhere underneath it should be the original reason any of us picked up a guitar in the first place: it just feels good.

If you've got people in your life you used to play music with, old bandmates, a college jam session buddy, whoever, this is your nudge. You don't need a gig. You don't need a reason. Four hours in the car and $50 a person bought us an afternoon we'll be talking about for years.

And if you don't have those people in your life right now, that's worth looking into. There are plenty of players out there who'd love to find someone to play music with and grow alongside, the same way we did. You just have to go looking.

Sometimes the whole point is that there is no point.

-Dustin

P.S. That's part of what Office Hours has become for a lot of folks in the group — a place to go deeper with a like-minded group of players, with live weekly calls and direct guidance from me along the way.