noodling

Pluralnoodlings

1. 1
   nouncountable

   Free, improvised playing on an instrument, often casual and without a fixed plan.

   Like a sketch artist's loose pencil scribbles: exploratory and unplanned, just to see what comes out.

   His noodling on the keyboard slowly turned into the chorus of a real song.

   The band's warm-up was mostly aimless noodling before the set began.

   Similarimprovisation, riffing, jamming

   Note

   Unlike most words for a practice, this one counts: a player's noodlings are separate stretches of loose playing. Gunther Schuller's The Swing Era (1991) sets Basie's "increasingly repetitious piano noodlings" against Young's fresh, inventive melodic gestures. That contrast shows the word's usual edge, since it suggests idle meandering rather than inspired invention. A critic who reaches for it is often offering a mild put-down.

2. 2
   verbcolloquial

   Present participle of noodle.

   The musicians spent the soundcheck noodling on their instruments.

   She kept noodling at the keyboard long after rehearsal ended.

   Note

   One spelling carries every sense of the verb noodle. It reaches back to an obsolete use, fooling or tricking someone, and covers the British dialect sense of fooling around and the Shetland habit of humming a tune quietly. Beyond those, it means playing or singing in a loose, improvised way, or, in American use, turning something over in the mind. The musical sense also stands as a noun: the improvisation itself.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The practice and sport of catching catfish by hand, reaching into underwater holes to grab the fish directly.

   Like wrestling a slippery prize out of a hidden burrow: all grip and nerve, no tools.

   Noodling requires reaching into murky holes where catfish like to hide.

   He learned noodling from his grandfather on the river one summer.

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