There's something to be said for it?
 
Building callouses? Building technique? Singing ad-lib?
 
There's something to be said for it! We should all do it more. 

Yes, and if you have one of those Gibson Memory Cables, you can record your noodles and use them as song/riff/melody/chord progression ideas.

I'm trying to add more of that to my life.

 
There are two aspects to music, the content and the production of the content.  Just sitting and playing is all about content and I'd argue that that's where the real music is.  The recent Stay ignorant thread is about getting hung up on production.  It's pretty interesting how both can contribute to great music.
 
I just took a course on World Music which dealt with how traditional musics of the world are westernized by adapting them to our (perhaps quite limited) tastes and passing them through our advanced production techniques.  Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon were forerunners in this enterprise.  You take harmonically and metrically complex music, dumb it down to 4/4 with a regular beat and add punch during production.  You end up with something that's great, a sort of best of both worlds result.  In my mind, anyway.  Another aspect of this story is that (mostly younger) musicians in non-western countries are becoming more popular in their own cultures by adopting western attributes into their music.
 
On a philosophical note, there's a pretty valid argument that we're just mining the traditional cultures for musical ideas to feed our insatiable hunger for new things and stimulate our deadened senses (whilst giving very little in return, as is our wont).  It's true the music you end up with is pretty far from its source and it may end up even further away when it's used completely out of context, in a Walt Disney film for example.  But it's still powerful music to me.

What is this thing called "technique" you speak of?
Never heard that song... "ad-lib"....
 
 
 
Actually ... yeah, that's some good advice. I try to keep the fingers tuned up and the brain engaged.  You might not think so when you hear my tunes, but, yeah, they are mostly written with acoustic guitar and picking.
 
And even back in the days when I was gigging for a living, playing 4 nights a week or more..... I never really developed hard callouses on the fingers. Blame that on the Ernie Ball Super Slinky strings and the sweet, low action on the guitar I played.
 
But yes... absolutely, spend time with the instruments and build your skills and chops.
 

My computer is temporarily without a voice while I wait for a replacement power switch to repair the power strip that all my audio gear plugs into. Consequently, my only musical options are the acoustic guitar and headphones plugged into my ROMpler.
 
Not being able to work on projects means I have to think about chords instead of cords, melodies instead of Melodyne, rhythms over reverbs, composition rather than compression. I may even have a new song to record once I'm back in the DAW game again.