I'm a complete beginner of a month as well. I enjoy noodling around. You'd be surprised at all the variations of that cabbage song!

Noodling around - it's my favorite past time. I particularly do it when I'm tuned DAc. Something about aeolian that just leads into improvising.

Messing around? It's the way to learn, compose and relax. Not having a "plan," just letting yourunconscious mind take you where it wants you to go. Sometimes it's a thing of beauty; sometimes it's something else. In either case it's what I need at the moment.

I learned the guitar the same way when I was a kid. Just sat around playing notes seeing where they lead, how they sound and if they can be made to fit together.

Love it!

yep same here ....my guitars gather dust very well

every time I play. I after playing a fewsongs I tend to just noodle around. same thing with my other instrument.

Yep-all the time. Watch TV with it on my lap and mute/play during commercial breaks. Get hours of noodling in this way. Unless I happen to be watching PBS. Also, the captions are very nice; mute, watch, play, repeat. Drives the Mrs. crazy.

Every time I pick up a dulcimer! That's how a person becomes intimately familiar with the instrument and where the sounds are coming from relative to each other.

Oh how I've missed my dulcimer these last few weeks. I've been real busy with other stuff, but last night I probably spent a good 2 hours with it.

So I played a few of my regulars and then I just started messing around. I do most everything on dulcimer just by ear so I don't think about chord names, note names or anything like that. I just sort of let my fingers do the walking and my pick do the talking. It was really fun and I found some neat sounding things happening.

Does anyone else find themselves doing this? I probably do this more on dulcimer than with any other instrument I play. Most times on banjo I'm trying to pick some phrase or song out, same with guitar, and now mando. But with the dulcimer I find myself just sort of wandering around and it's fun.