Doodling is the act of just playing with abandon not really focused on being musical. Most of the time its at best relaxing, it can be exploratory if one is doing it over a changes i.e a chord progression but too much is a waste of time. Practice needs to be structured if one in going to progress so doodling in general is contrary to a serious musician’s objectives.
However, one area where a bit of doodling can be beneficial is in composing. Often , ideas come when one just let’s go and is free from the stress to produce. The key of course then would be to record your “doodling” and go back and try to glean some musical lines.
For a recent doodle which like most of my doodles pretty much crappy run of the mouth line I went back and tried to salvage the underlying musical idea that was lurking in my subconscious at the time. What you see above is the notation of it and below is the audio for the midi playback.
It sounds better on the guitar. The performance includes slides and minor nuances that I can’t be bothered notating i.e. too difficult. Perhaps the transcription is not totally accurate though I think its quite close. You would not turn a lead sheet with all those rests but the cleaner lead sheet would have misleading playback i.e. more legatto than what I intend.
I’ll share a recorded guitar line later.
Updated April 24th, 2013
The above is a more accurate transcription of what I intend the line to be. This is amounting to the start of a solo as opposed to a melody.
Here’s the audio for it:
The audio is just the midi playback for the scored line , the performance includes stylistic innuendo in the form of slide approaches which I will share.
Updated : 4/26/2013
Recorded guitar line: