This used to happen to me before I started any bands. But, for the past three years or so, I've been in the habit of practicing for two hours a day. But, I'm not really interested in learning other peoples compositions anymore. There have been a few really cool licks here and there that really grab me, to the point in which I can't help but learn it (I recently learned to play Mogwai's "Tracy"... A really fun piece to play, and requires the use of a pick... So it's a lot different than the aggressive, slap styled funk I usually play.) I pretty much have a series of warm-ups I go through, before I just start to do one of two things; picking a key and just going off on a wild-tangent, sort of jamming by myself, or picking a riff, and just making up fills as I go along. But, that obviously tends to lead to creating riffs of my own, which I will begin to work into my daily practice. But, I'm now at the point where I have so many riffs that I'd like to use with my band, that we never really get to the bulk of them.

But they're obviously on the list... The way my band works, either Jake (my guitarist) or myself will come in with a riff, and we'll just start jamming to it, improvising it completely, and at the end we'll take the coolest segments of the jam, condense it all down to a song, and then Jake will write lyrics, come back the next time we practice, and figure out how/where to add them. Or, and this is the what usually happens, we'll just start jamming spontaneously off of nothing at all, and bam, we have a song.

So, basically, I have a pile of bass lines that'll probably never see the light of day.