Playing in a Band: Benefits for Adults

Jul 19, 2023

Starting out playing in a band can feel overwhelming. Where do you find people to play with? Will you get along? Assuming you do, how do you deal with the distractions, and without the one-on-one time of private lessons? If you’re comfortable with private lessons, you may be asking yourself, “Why add stress?”

The fact is, even as an adult, playing music with a group – like a band or other ensemble – can offer many benefits you just can’t get alone. Let’s take a look at a few of the biggest.

Benefits of Playing in a Band for Adults

Learning with Confidence

Forming or joining a band or ensemble with peers of a similar age and skill level can be an exciting experience. Playing in a band, or even just with others, can help relieve stage fright, and drown out any minor mistakes. There’s no worrying about missing notes when the band just keeps moving. What’s more, practice becomes a communal effort. If you’re having trouble with one section or a specific song, you have a group of like-minded peers to lean on and help. Practice sessions turn into jam sessions, and before you know it, you’re having so much fun you forgot you were practicing. Playing with a group is a great way to boost confidence and deepen your appreciation for practice and learning.

Social Skill Stretching

When it comes to the social aspect of playing in a band, we often think of the benefits for children. And while it’s true music can help kids develop their social skills, community is just as important for adults. Being a part of a group that shares an interest, especially as interactive an interest as music, helps to build and strengthen your connections with others. Joining a band, just like joining any social community, will lead to unexpected friendships. Friendships for adults are, after all, typically formed when people work together in groups built on mutual support and fellowship. And the fact is, people who feel supported by their friends and families are most capable of handling any kind of hardship.

Teamwork & Collaboration

A major challenge for students, regardless of age, is transitioning from playing and practicing solo to working with a team. If you’re used to being all alone and going at your own pace, it can be difficult to sync up with others’ skills. Playing in a band, however, can help you develop synchronization. In order to not only create but maintain the beautiful sound of music, every member of the band must work to play on time and in tune. Just like playing a specific position with a specific role on a sports team, bandmates soon realize they can make something more interesting together. Each member of the band learns not only what their part of the whole is, but how to work through mistakes and differences.

Competition

The flip side of collaboration is, of course, competition; but not in the head-to-head way of sports. Instead, playing in a band acts as wonderful motivation for musicians to learn quickly and practice regularly. No one wants to be the weak link. Everyone wants to sound their best every time they get together to play for an audience, even if it’s just friends. A little healthy competition between bandmates not only inspires better and better performances but also creates confidence and a competitive spirit. Too much competition can indeed ruin strong teamwork, a healthy amount pushes the entire band towards excellence.

Lifelong Benefits of Playing in a Band

More than simply learning new skills or finding a healthy way to socialize, playing in a band offers big-picture, lifelong benefits as well. In the long run, you’re creating fond memories of time spent with friends. What’s more, skills like teamwork and competition are easily applied to areas outside of music, like work or learning a completely different skill.

Ready to Start Playing in a Band?

Making music with a group creates an experience of shared emotion that you can’t really find in too many places. Meeting someone new and finding out they share musical tastes with you is a connection you just can’t make through your social media feeds and often turns into a more permanent “friend request” than you could ever get on Facebook. We even tend to view those with similar musical tastes to our own in a more positive light than those who prefer different music. Sometimes we don’t think about it this way, but it becomes obvious when the idea is put forth. How many times have you become excited when you learned that someone else likes the same bands as you?

Many lifelong friendships have begun on this very simple premise. Studies have even shown that when people are placed in two groups and told that the other group has similar musical tastes, they tend to think more highly of them. Even if they don’t know any other details about them.

Music has united people throughout history, defining groups, passing beliefs, and sharing emotions. Even as our world gets smaller as we make connections with people on the other side of the planet through technology, and many of our relationships become less tangible and more digital, music will still play its role.

Looking to join a band or ensemble, but not sure where to start? Check out The Music Studio’s adult band programs and sign up today!