Week 5 - How the 3 Types of Play Apply to Music

There have been countless studies that explore the effect of play on learning. Play is crucial to development in all animals, including humans. If you observe animals you’ll notice that they naturally use games to practice hunting, escaping, fighting, and other necessary survival skills. 

Obviously, children naturally play as they develop life skills such as athletic capability, coordination, spacial awareness, mental facility, social sensitivity, and common activities such as building, cooking, communicating and just about everything we do later on in life. 

Play is how we learn. Play is how we develop and grow. 

The problem is, our culture has for the most part replaced play with hard vigorous study. Of course study is important and will bring your skills to a high level quickly, but if we take away play completely, we will end up with abilities that have no life, no purpose, and no meaning to us. 

The goal is to have both approaches in your learning. There should be structure and consistent study, as well as creative play and exploration. 

Let’s talk about how to practice “Play.”

According to some “play researchers”, there are 3 types of Play:

  1. Object Play

  2. Locomotor Play

  3. Social Play

While these categories are derived from physical practices, we can also apply them to music and the mental side of creating. Let’s explore what that might look like.

Object Play

Typically, this would refer to playing with toys or objects. We play sports with balls and goals, dogs fetch sticks, monkeys throw fruits, we have jump ropes to practice rhythm and exercises, we use natural materials to build things like snowmen and mud pies. The list goes on and on.

Objects and tools are important for our development because they give us biofeedback. That means that we can test and feel our abilities in relation to something, so there’s a reference point from which to grow. 

When it comes to practicing music, the idea is to use an outside influence to help you explore. Our favorite outside influence would be the metronome, since it’s a simple tool that can be used very creatively to get feedback on your skills.

Here are some game ideas you can play with your metronome:

  1. Set your metronome to a medium tempo and play your exercises or improvise using various subdivisions

  2. Play polyrhythms and set the metronome to each side of the rhythm. For example, of you have a 2/3 polyrhythmic phrase, play it while your metronome expresses the 2 side, then mentally adjust the metronome to express the 3 side. It’s challenging to switch your orientation to the metronome from 1 side of the polyrhythm to the other without pausing.

  3. Set your metronome on the 1, 2, or 3 of a triplet, and improvise in 4/4

  4. Set your metronome to 20bpm, expressing the 1 of each bar or every other bar. Improvise while staying in tempo. This requires impeccable time.

These are just a few challenges you can play around with. The idea is that you use your metronome as a feedback tool and explore your abilities playfully. If you think about it, using your metronome is a rhythmic game, and with the right attitude can feel just like trying to juggle or playing hot lava while you jump around challenging terrain. 

Locomotor Play

In life, locomotor play is development on your own. It’s about exploring your body and abilities with no added feedback. It’s moving just to move, or figuring something out just for fun. For animals, this manifests as swinging through trees, mating dances, running around fields, jumping, skipping, splashing in puddles etc. For humans, locomotor play includes dancing, running up stairs, rolling down hills, somersaults, diving, flipping, and any movement that’s just for fun. It can also include artistic or creative skills which require coordination, building things, snow angels, sculpting, and simply constructing things just for fun.

In music, the elements of locomotor play is analogous to coordination focused, visual concepts. Here are some ideas on how to apply locomotor play to your creative practice:

  1. Imagine the strings and frets as a grid. Chose a shape or pattern to work with, like a diamond, a rectangle, or a triangle. Then use that shape to improvise around the fretboard in various positions and string sets to see what kinds of melodies/bass-lines/licks you can create

  2. Put the metronome on at a faster tempo, and run up and down your fretboard through the chromatic sale (half step by half step). Switch directions as desired, and explore how you can move around positions. Then do this with other symmetrical shapes like whole steps, minor 3rds, major 3rds, and tritones.

  3. Take any interval and play it in order up and down the string sets on the same fret. Do this on each fret.

  4. Make up a chord by choosing 3 or 4 notes that you can play at the same time. Try not to focus on what the notes are, but simply the shapes that are created and how it sounds. Then come up with 3 or 4 more chords like this to compose a progression.


There are many ways to practice your locomotor skills on guitar, but the idea is that you are less mentally focused and more visually focused. This helps you develop your coordination and ability see music as movement, rather than information. 

Social Play

For humans and animals, social play is crucial. Playing with others is how we learn to interact and become sensitive to perceiving living signals. It’s how we learn to respond well to unpredictable situations. By playing with others, we develop reflexes and instincts that we couldn’t possible stretch on our own. For both humans and animals, this manifests as chasing, tag, mock fighting, wrestling, tug-o-war, organized game playing, and even nuzzling.

For music, the obvious point here is that playing music with others is absolutely necessary. If we never play with another human, we will never have a chance to stretch our ability to respond and react. Eventually, it’s necessary to our growth to put ourselves in situations that are beyond our comfort zone and control.

Here are some ways you can play and practice with others:

  1. Chose a vamp. Each person takes turns improvising over the vamp while the other holds down the chords/groove. Keep the turns short, like 4 or 8 bars, so you can respond to each others’ ideas and keep the interaction relevant.

  2. One person plays the chords while the other person improvises. The person playing the chords will start on 1 random chord and create a groove. Once the improviser has figured out the key and is confident in the tonality, the chordal player switches to a random chord, and now the improviser must figure our the new tonality. Make sure this is done using accessible choices, so if it’s too hard to switch to totally random keys, try deciding to work with only 3 or 4 different agreed upon chords.

  3. Choose a tonality/key. Have one person play a phrase and the other plays it back. This is a game to help your ear training, and you can also develop it into a game of call and response, where the play back is like a conclusion to the 1st phrase.

  4. Chose a vamp or chord progression and put on the metronome. Nobody will play the chords, but both will imagine them while the metronome is going on. Trade 4 or 8 bars, so each person gets a chance to improvise against complete silence, while keeping the time. This will help you stay in the form and develop your listening skills.

There are really so many games you can play with practice partners, but these are just a few ideas. You’ll find that there is an added edge when practicing with another human that helps you harness all the skills you have to keep up with the game. This sense of urgency is hard to come by on your own. 

Simply jamming with no perimeters is absolutely important and fun as well. Of course if it’s hard to come by other humans to play with (maybe based on your location) backing tracks provide good stimulation as well.

It’s called “playing music” for a reason.

Exploring these various forms of play can be opening and insightful to your relationship with music. Having a creative and inquisitive element to your practice sessions is vital to becoming a well-rounded musician.

We all came into this because there was a part of it that’s fun. So as you’re growing and stretching your capacity, don’t forget that it’s up to you to bring the fun to the work. Doing this teaches you how to make feeling out of tones and rhythms. And that is the creative skill of the musician.