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https://www.musical-u.com/learn/jazz-improvisation-ear-training-experts-guide/
The world of jazz can be an intimidating place for many musicians. Improvisation is an integral part of jazz that sets in apart from other genres. To get you started on improvisation we asked 13 of the top professional jazz musicians and educators for their expert advice! https://www.musical-u.com/learn/jazz-improvisation-ear-training-experts-guide/

From jazz music and mind boggling drum solos to rock guitar jams and vocal gymnastics, some of the greatest music of all is created on the spot and in the moment. With technical prowess that blows away the audience, the greatest musicians are masters of improvising memorable solos.

Watch Slipknot’s Joey Jordison concoct a mindbending drum solo on the band’s 2002 release Disasterpieces:

The musicians that live on in the annals of music continue to amaze us with their incredible ability to create unforgettable music in the moment.

But improvisation isn’t just for the musical legends. Anyone from beginner to pro can enjoy the creativity and excitement of improvising a solo.

What is Improvisation?

“Composing will always be a memory of inspiration; improvising is live inspiration, something happening at that very moment. Do not fear mistakes. There are none.” – Miles Davis

In the most general sense, when a musician improvises a solo, they are making up a new melody or drum solo that is not written down and hasn’t been played before that moment. The best improvisers create on-the-spot compositions that are both musical and technically challenging, while also fitting within the context of the entire tune.

Mastering improvisation takes more than a good ear. Musicians that improvise solos will work within the established harmonic framework, borrow rhythmic and melodic snippets, and give these elements their own original twist. They make it look easy, like they are just “winging it” in performance.

Here’s trumpet master Wynton Marsalis playing around with rhythm and melody in an exciting solo:

While nearly every genre of music has some sort of improvisation, many of the best improvised solos can be found in rock and jazz music. The very foundations of jazz were built up on the blues and the oral traditions of the African diaspora. A great jazz musician can improvise everything from sassy slow solos to dizzyingly fast flurries of notes that make your head spin.

Improv in Jazz

In this clip, James Carter of the World Saxophone Quartet rips his sax to shreds with an improvised solo that is both musical and rhythmic:

The solo goes by lightning-quick, with notes so crazily high that the sax ceases to sound like a woodwind and instead sounds like some lunatic mechanical beast, drawing some laughter from Carter’s awestruck fans.

Want to develop the coveted skill of jazz improv? Check out Learning Jazz Improvisation, with Bob Habersat and Paul Levy. In this great resource, you will learn some practical skills to help your overall musicianship as you learn how to improvise.

Improv in Rock

Rock music has its own share of improv legends and is rife with guitar and drum solos that take music to an eleven. In this clip, Slash from Guns ‘n’ Roses shows us how it’s done with an incredible guitar solo:

Want to learn a little bit more about great rock improvisers? Check out They Carved Their Names in Rock: 5 Giants of Rock Improvisation at Musical U.

Vocal Improvisation

It isn’t just instrumentalists that know how to improvise a great solo. Vocalists throughout the globe stretch their vocal chords with improvised solos. You can find singers from opera to pop to blues proving that vocalists are just as awe-inspiring as instrumentalists when they perform solos. Listen to Ella Fitzgerald show off some scat singing as she jams out to “It Don’t Mean a Thing”:

Why Improvise?

What is the value in improvising music, especially if you can read music? There are many reasons why you should learn how to improvise, not just for solos, but for other musical situations.

Improve Your Musicianship

Great musical improvisers have great musicianship.

What does that mean?

It means that they are well-versed in ear training and aural theory, they understand harmony and rhythm, they understand musical form, and they have spent countless hours in the practice rooms perfecting their craft.

While the best musical solos might seem like they are quickly and easily made in that very instant, the reality is that it takes a lot of preparation to be able to create great music at a split second. And that takes real musicianship.

Improve Your Listening Skills

When you improvise a solo, you are forced to really listen.

You have to listen to the music around you and incorporate that into your solo. You need to listen for harmonies and the band playing behind you. Even as you zip through dozens of quick musical riffs, one after the other, you need to listen to everything around you and to yourself, too, to make sure that your solo doesn’t only showcase your talents but the talents of the other musicians around you.

Make Yourself More Marketable

Goes without saying: being a great improviser makes you much more marketable both in live and recorded sessions.

Why?

As an improviser, you can work around any bizarre musical snafus that might happen in the studio, performance hall, or stage. In a recording session you won’t waste time (or money) because your level of musicianship is so high that you will know exactly what to play and when to play it. Playing alongside you will be a good experience for fellow musicians because they know that you can hold your own and are reliable in any pinch.

Improve As A Performer

We’ve already mentioned it, but being a good improviser means that you are not easily frustrated when live performances or a recording situation go awry.

Instead, you can quickly work around it when the drummer misses a beat, someone misses their entrance, the director makes a mistake, or the vocalist forgets their lines. Because you are a trained improviser, you already have at your fingertips (or vocal chords) the key to musical success in a tight situation.

Become More Confident

As you become more adept at improvising solos, your confidence will build. If someone asks you to take the lead or to fill in on the fly, you aren’t stressed because you have done this dozens of times before.

This will manifest as confident playing, no matter the musical situation. You will know exactly what to do and when to do it. And others will notice, especially your fans.

How to Develop Your Improvisation Skills

Is it easy to develop good improvisation talents? What if you have never improvised a solo before or have just begun your musical journey? Can it be too late to learn how to improvise?

These questions, among others, can cause anxiety in aspiring improvisers. Here are five tips to help you put any self-doubt in the back of your mind, and as Nike declares, “Just Do It”…

1. Use Online Resources

There might not be any better time to be a musician. Besides being able to create music quickly with contemporary audio technology and then share it quickly throughout the world via the internet, you also have access to millions and millions of articles, videos, and other resources to help you develop your musicality.

Below is just a small sampling of online resources to help you develop improvisation skills:

• For the jazz musicians out there, check out Improve Your Improv: Listen to the Rhythm Section with Stefan Hall
• Guitarists the world over can learn the basics of improvising a great solo with How to Freestyle a Guitar Solo
• Learn the basics of playing by ear from talented singer and pianist Sara Campbell in Finding the Notes Yourself
• Patterns and Playgrounds by Christopher Sutton gives you four unique ways to develop your improvisation skills

2. Practice, then Practice More

Being great at musical improvisation takes a lot of practice, practice, practice. And this means more than playing along with your favorite jam by yourself in an isolated room.

This means learning scales, drum rudiments, singing in tune, and playing with good harmonies. This means an understanding of musical structure and music theory, developing your overall ear training and musicianship, and spending time developing the skills you will need in performance.

3. Play Live

While you can practice playing along with your favorite artist’s track, you will learn more if you jam with other musicians. This can be in performance or just at a rehearsal, but learn how to play with other musicians in a live setting.

This will build your skills as well as your confidence – your fellow musicians can offer you both encouragement and helpful criticism, and if you improvise a solo live, your fans’ responses will be all you need to know if you have nailed that solo.

4. Play with Recordings

We can’t all grab a live band every day, so take the time to find recordings of some of the legends in your musical niche and play along with them. Learn their instrumental or vocal riffs and play along. What scales are they using? What rhythms? How did they improvise solos that worked within the entire song?

There are plenty of tracks online that have just backing chords, giving you a chance to play along.

For example, if you are a drummer, you can play along with this drumless Heavy Rock backing track and create your own original drum beat.

For guitarists and other instrumentalists, use a simple backing track in A minor and C major to practice simple solos and harmonization.

5. Be Confident

After you have practiced for the gig, feel confident in your improv skills. And don’t worry if what comes out of your instrument isn’t exactly what you expected – the beauty of improvisation is that it is different every time, and fitted exactly to the circumstances.

Sometimes you’ll get a high energy vibe from the audience and will feel like you are on fire, and sometimes a musical solo a bit more nuanced is needed. But in all cases, be confident in your playing. Your audience will love you for it!

How To Improvise a Solo

We’ve talked about how you can develop good improvisation skills in the practice room, about some great online resources, and even listened to some great improv examples. But how do you actually improvise a solo?

1. Practice

Yes, it was already mentioned, but to play on the fly, you need to be prepared. Your fingers need to be able to run up and down scales without a flaw, your singing should be in tune, and your drumming should be on time. You need to be a prepared musician, no matter what your skill level.

2. Know the tune

It helps if you know the tune. This can’t always be the case, and for some musicians like percussionists, it is possible to improvise a decent solo without having any idea where the song is going. But the best bet is to know the tune inside and out.

3. Take cues

You don’t want to be the person that gets so carried away with their solo that they wreck the song for everyone else or just get lost. While fans are forgiving, your bandmates or manager might not be.

The solution? Watch for cues. This could be a musical cue that signals the end of the solo, a simple nod of the head from another musician, or just something as simple as “your fingers are about to fall off and you need to move on”. Bottom line: be mentally present during your solo.

4. Timing is everything

One of the most important things to remember when you are improvising a solo is to keep time. Are you supposed to jam for eight bars? Make sure it is just eight bars. Did you just play the conga solo of the century? Then be sure that when beat 1 hits that you are also on beat 1, ready to go with the rest of the band. Don’t get lost, and if you do, just watch for cues from the band.

If you don’t, you run the risk of becoming the overbearing show-off that nobody wants in their band, à la Animal from the Muppets in his accompaniment during Rita Moreno’s “Fever”:

5. Listen

Improvising is really just taking what you have practiced and playing it in creative ways in a live setting.

Yes, you might have never put these particular notes or rhythms together before, but in some ways they are familiar, and you will find that certain riffs will become your go-to favorites.

While you are improvising, be sure to really listen to what happened before and what is going on. Connecting melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material from the song in your solo will show expertise, even if your audience doesn’t realize it.

6. Experiment

Always be ready to experiment with something new when you improvise. This doesn’t mean practicing that extended technique that you only got right once in the practice room, but it does mean going out on a limb with your material.

An easy way to start is with a riff from the song itself then let it naturally evolve as you play. Add in some notes or new harmonies, and change up the rhythm some. Mix in a string of notes or some new timbres that weren’t there before.

Keep experimenting, moving onward, until you have journeyed far from the starting point. But keep it musical.

Cultivating Musical Spontaneity

Now that we’ve looked at why you should learn to improvise, how to do it, and the skills involved, you are ready to start your journey of improvisation. Musical U has an incredible community of musicians, students, teachers, and professionals to help you develop your improvisation skills. In fact, there’s even a slew of dedicated improvisation modules!

The spontaneity involved in improvisation is not random or “guesswork” – it comes from knowing what to play and when to play it, and being confident in doing so!

The post Musicality Means: Improvising A Solo appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/jazz-improvisation-evolution-history-of-jazz-by-ear/
Jazz emerged about one hundred years ago has never stopped evolving and growing. We’re going to take you on a ride across the most important periods in jazz and what was happening to improvisation during these specific segments of time. Buckle up! https://www.musical-u.com/learn/jazz-improvisation-evolution-history-of-jazz-by-ear/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/sight-reading-music-why-to-do-it-and-how-to-improve/
Imagine living in the modern world and being illiterate. Think of all the great information that you would miss! Yet, that is how many approach the timeless art of sightreading. For a useful work-around to speed up your progress, the Musical U team has put together these tips. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/sight-reading-music-why-to-do-it-and-how-to-improve/1

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/five-notes-will-change-your-life-pentatonic-scales/
What if there was one scale that reined supreme amongst all the other mere mortal scales? Well, it may not reign supreme exactly, but the pentatonic scale is certainly the most useful. By the end of this tutorial from the team at Musical, you’ll understand how to build the pentatonic scale and use it in your musical practice. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/five-notes-will-change-your-life-pentatonic-scales/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/ska-music/
There’s something about the rhythm and feel of ska music that just seems to stick in your ear. There is a reason that ska continues to be enjoyed by a great many people to this day. Read on to discover the history and the style of this Jamaican-born wonder! https://www.musical-u.com/learn/ska-music/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/chord-ear-training-101-2/
Have you ever met a musician who seems to be able to pick the next chord out of thin air. While it may seem like a magical trick, they have more than likely developed their musicality with chord ear training. To unlock this musical superpower, Musical U has these practical tips. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/chord-ear-training-101-2/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/songwriters-secrets-mastering-the-melody/
Think of your favorite song… Got it?

The first part of the music that likely came to mind was the melody. A good melody helps to bring the rest of the song to life, and ensure that your audience finds the tune memorable and enjoyable.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/songwriters-secrets-mastering-the-melody/

This means fresh articles, podcasts, tutorials, modules, and even a masterclass to get you improvising!

Meanwhile, we’ve taken the last bit of February to release some content that reminds us to celebrate music, and especially our own musical journeys: an incredibly positive and insightful interview with songwriter Vincent James, and a spotlight on a Musical U member whose impressive progress is an inspiration to behold.

But first, a moment of celebration…

Best Piano Resource!

Online music tutor platform Tuterful has placed us on their list of Best Piano Resources! We are delighted, and would like to thank them for their kind words:

“Why we love Musical U:

What inspires people to take up piano? It’s that exciting dream of being able to sit down at the keyboard and just play. To play by ear, improvise, arrange on the fly, or simply play learned repertoire with a level of expression that moves the listener.

Musical U specialises in making it fun and easy to quickly train your brain and ear for the skills which empower you as a musician: to play freely and with confidence all the music you hear, remember or imagine. It doesn’t take “talent” or a gift to become an incredible pianist – but you do need musicality training and that’s what the expert team at Musical U are proud and delighted to provide.”

Check out their full list of resources for the beginner pianist!

Improv Month

Musical U is incredibly proud and excited to announce our first-ever themed month.

March will be dedicated to the topic of improvisation, and how you can use this tool to be free and creative in your musicmaking.

From interviews with improvisation pros to a fresh batch of articles and tutorials teaching you to play freely and spontaneously, you won’t want to miss a moment of March. We’re also going to be finishing off the month with a live, online training session on improvisation – open to all!

Can’t wait for the month ahead? Neither can we! Read more about what’s in store over at What’s New in Musical U: February 2018.

Keeping Music Alive

With the day-in, day-out routine of practice, music lessons, learning theory, and training your ear, we sometimes forget how amazing it is that we’re making music in the first place!

Fear not: our interview with musician, songwriter, and author Vincent James is the perfect reminder. Brimming with enthusiasm for music and the will to share it with as many people as possible, Vincent is the man behind nationwide events Teach Music Week and Kids Music Day, and the author of 88+ Ways Music Can Change Your Life, a collection of stories about the transformative power of music.

In Unleashing Inspiration, with Vincent James, he shares inspiring advice for songwriting, musical collaboration, and making music community-based – the way it should be.

Vincent has an amazing story that many of us can relate to. One thing that stuck out was the story he told in which he and his friends started a fictitious rock band while school was closed for weather. This opened up his ears to new music and experiences that would stay with him for years to come. Steve’s Music Room agrees that starting a rock band can be greatly beneficial, and has compiled 5 reasons you should start one at your school!

A common thread throughout the interview was the impact that being a musician has made on Vincent’s life. We can all agree that learning music, and the experience of sharing our musicality with others, is one reason why we are so passionate about it! Read about how learning the Ukulele has changed one musician’s life on Ukulele Music Info.

In between all of Vincent’s other projects, he even finds the time to teach guitar lessons to one student – who happens to be 83 years old! This is a great reminder that it is never too late to begin making music. Nancy on the Home Front further explores this subject on her blog.

The centerpiece of Vincent’s work is to keep music in our schools and inspire the next generation to pick up the arts as well. A world without music is truly difficult to imagine, and it would be terrible to rob future would-be musicians of the art. The Inspired Classroom discusses the other benefits that music education provides to students.

Musical Revelations

Musical U members never cease to amaze us with their dedication, progress, and enthusiasm.

This month, we’re spotlighting Ashley Sherman, a member who had a lightbulb moment when she connected the music theory she’d known for years with her real-life goal of being able to play by ear.

Now, with the help of Musical U, she’s developing this skill further, and has moved onto composing her own music, complete with arrangements!

To read more about her fascinating journey and how she uses Musical U’s resources to help her build her musicality, check out Musical U Member Spotlight: Ashley Sherman.

Ashley’s journey to playing music by ear was inspiring and should give hope to anyone who feels like they will never get it. The myth that playing by ear is a natural talent and cannot be learned is so damaging to many musicians – anyone can develop well-trained ears is if they set their mind to it, as discussed by Treblemakers.

All musicians should find a way to incorporate goal setting into their practice. It really helps to focus your efforts and give yourself little victories to celebrate along the way! The Happy Musician discusses six steps to meeting your musical goals that will have you there in no time.

Using the Musical U Roadmaps, Ashley was able to quickly begin learning to recognize chord progressions and intervals as she practiced her music. Learning intervals can be a tedious exercise, but there are many benefits that can come from your study. Kate from Musical Intervals Tutor talks about how learning intervals will help you further develop your musicality.

Part of being a music student is to have a “big picture”, or your mission statement for wanting to learn music. It’s something that we encourage for all Musical U members! For example, Ashley wanted to better understand melodies and all the little details that go into making them memorable. Greg Howlett offers his insights and opinion on what makes a melody good (or bad).

Intro to Improv

To kick off improvisation month and our improv-themed podcast episodes, we’re releasing an episode giving you an overview of improv: why you should learn to improvise, how it will enhance your musicality, and the steps you can take today to start learning.

This skill is not about “guessing” or trying random note combinations and seeing what sticks – our approach to helping you learn to improvise is all about developing your musical ear to the point where anything you imagine in your head is effortlessly translated to your instrument!

Learn how to get started by tuning into the Musicality Podcast episode About Improvisation!

Improvising is a great skill to have as a musician. You will unlock a door to hours of musical enjoyment and collaboration with other musicians just by getting started – and Trumpetland has some tips to show you how! Non-trumpeters, don’t sleep on this one, as there are some great suggestions for every musician!

Christopher talked about how many musicians approach improvising by learning licks and repeating them. While this isn’t the only way you should be learning improv, there are many iconic licks that can inspire you and expand your vocabulary. Here are 10 dominant licks from Jazz Guitar Licks to get you started.

Developing and using your audiation and listening skills will help you on your way to becoming an improvisation master. Here at Musical U, we often talk about how singing your music can take your listening skills to the next level. And we’re not the only ones – Yankee Collection discusses how singing music can help you play it!

Any musician can learn to improvise. Graham Mann from the Kent Youth Jazz Orchestra teaches improvisation to young learners, as you will see in the this TEDx Talk. No matter your age, you will be both inspired by, and learn from, this fantastic lesson.

Dive Into Improv!

With March underway, look forward to a heaping spoonful of improvisation content that will have you playing freely and expressively in no time.

Tune into podcast episodes to learn improv tricks from the pros, use our modules and articles to get yourself playing, and join us at the end of the month for our online improvisational masterclass!

The post Improv Month, Keeping Music Alive, Musical Revelations, and Intro to Improv appeared first on Musical U.

March is Improvisation Month here at Musical U, and what better way to kick off than with a crash course in the subject? In this episode of the Musicality Podcast, we share how to (and how not to!) improvise, the far-reaching benefits of this skill, and how it ties into the creative essence of being a musician.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• About Transcribing Music
• About Chord Tones
• Improvisational Playgrounds

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the first of a series of episodes on the topic of improvisation. We are celebrating Improvisation Month here at Musical U with the release of new training modules and a full Roadmap to help our members learn to improvise music and here on the podcast we have some terrific interviews lined up with artists and educators who can share deep insights on the topic of improvisation.

I’ve been looking forward to this for a while and the team has been hard at work pulling it all together for a fantastic improv-focused month. We’ve actually been helping members learn to improvise in various ways since the start of Musical U – and that’s because whether or not you intend to improvise in the traditional sense, learning improvisation skills is central to all your musicality.

So don’t tune out if you’re thinking that improvising is just for jazz musicians, or that you never intend to play a solo on stage.

Improvising is fundamentally just about having creative freedom in music. Being able to come up with a musical idea in your head and bring it out into the world. And what musician doesn’t want to have the freedom and confidence to do that?

Today I wanted to kick off our improv-themed podcast episodes by talking about how to think about improvisation – because there are various schools of thought and approaches you’ll find out there, and if you follow the wrong approach then learning to improvise can be pretty frustrating. And it can reinforce a lot of those wrong assumptions about what improvising means, pulling you away from that true essence: that improvising is about bringing your own musical ideas out into the world, simple as that.

How not to learn to improvise

So I’d like to share with you the way we explain improvisation in our “Approaching Improvisation” module inside Musical U. First though, let’s talk briefly about the three most common approaches to improvising and why they typically don’t work well.

The first way is what I’d call “learning vocabulary”. This is particularly popular in the jazz world, and the idea is that you learn to improvise by mimicking the licks, riffs and runs of famous jazz musicians. You learn their phrases and build up your stock of improv vocabulary. You have a set of licks you know work over a dominant chord, ones which follow a ii-V-I progression, ones that work in a bebop style, and so on. When the time comes to improvise you pick a phrase or two from your learned vocabulary and that’s your solo.

Well, from the way I’ve described it and the way I talked about the essence of improvising a moment ago you can probably see the downside here: you’re not really coming up with your own musical ideas. It’s a bit like just memorising a phrasebook when you visit a foreign country versus actually learning to speak the language. Now don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely value in studying the greats, and we’ve talked previously on this podcast about the benefits of transcribing solos by ear. But if this is the only way you approach improvising you will ultimately feel very limited and not really experience any of the true creative freedom which improv should be about.

Okay, so the second common method then is a notch better. This one is particularly popular with blues, rock and jazz guitarists because of the easy connection to fretboard scale patterns. And the method is to learn some rules about what notes work when and then essentially choose your notes at random. With the right scale to match the chord progression and a bit of expressive playing like string bends and good use of dynamics, this can actually sound pretty good. And if you learn to connect with the underlying chords, something we’ll be talking about later in improv month, it can sound quite musical.

The drawback of this method is that it’s “improvisation by numbers”. You are kind of an improvisation robot, pairing a set of rules with a random number generator and hoping the result sounds good. This is the way I improvised back when I was playing guitar, and it was exciting because I was creating something myself – but I always felt a bit fraudulent with it because I never knew how it would sound until I played it. So I didn’t really feel like it was truly my creation. So this method works, and you can go quite far with it. But again, it kind of cheats you of the true essence of improvising, where you imagine what you want to create and then bring it out into the world for others to hear.

The final method worth mentioning is the brute force “do it and do it until it works” approach. Jazz musicians would call this “shedding”, where you go to the woodshed and you just play and play and play until gradually your brain mysteriously learns a deep connection with your instrument and then you can improvise on instinct. This is the romantic story of how great jazz musicians learned to improvise and it sounds a lot cooler than saying they studied the theory, memorised phrases and made careful use of scales and patterns! But clearly there are two big problems here. The first is that it’s a recipe for boredom and frustration. With no structured path to follow you have no idea if you’re making progress or if you’re learning as effectively as you could be. And once you do gain some ability to improvise on instinct it’s an incredibly risky endeavour. If you don’t understand how you do what you do it’s always going to be quite nerve-wracking to improvise because you’re trusting an instinctive ability that could fail at any moment.

So those are the three most common methods for trying to learn to improvise. To memorise vocabulary, to follow strict rules and patterns, or to just play and play and hope you mysteriously gain the instinct for improv. Each of these gets you some way towards true improvisation and each can be useful as part of learning to improvise. But hopefully you’ll agree that none of them sound exactly in line with what improvisation is truly all about.

How to learn to improvise

So how do you learn to improvise freely?

At Musical U we teach that true improvisation is essentially “playing by ear what you imagine in your mind”.

The idea being that you can at any time imagine something you’d like to create in music, and then you have the play-by-ear skills to take that sound you imagine in your mind and play it on your instrument for others to hear. And so the process of learning to improvise is at its core very similar to the process of learning to play by ear.

That’s why we’ve already been able to help our members with improvising, even though it’s only this month we’re launching our full Improv Roadmap – because we’ve had a solid and extensive set of play-by-ear training since day one.

That said, there are definitely some things which make improvising different to playing by ear, hence the need for some new training modules and a Roadmap. And I’d like to share a few of them with you now, so you have a sense of how this approach to learning to improvise can work.

The first core concept is the one I just mentioned: Improvisation is about connecting three things:

1. audiation (meaning imagining music in your mind)
2. listening, and
3. playing.

It’s the combination of those three that create a free improviser, and although in time you won’t need to consciously think through what you want to play before you play it, while you’re learning it’s really helpful to be mindful of these three separate components and work on each of them.

The second big concept is to use constraints and dimensions to create musical playgrounds for practicing improvisation. A constraint might be something like the scale you’re going to use, or a particular rhythmic pattern. The dimensions are then everything else you’re free to vary and experiment with. And the combination of constraints and dimensions creates a little playground where you can freely try things out in the safe knowledge that whatever you play will sound pretty good. We’ve found this provides a really great way for beginners to start improvising in a truly free and ear-guided way without it sounding like a random mess of notes or being so tightly rule-based that there’s no real creativity.

The third big concept is our framework of “Play/Listen” and “Listen/Play”. This is a great way to start building up those brain/ear/instrument connections in a creative way. It’s too much to really go into now – but maybe we’ll invite Andrew from the team on to a future episode to share a bit more about how this works. Or of course you can check out the Approaching Improvisation module inside Musical U for full details on everything I’ve been talking about.

Improvisation is about freedom

So that’s how we recommend thinking about improvisation. It’s not about memorising other people’s phrases, it’s not about strictly and carefully following music theory rules, and it’s not about blindly playing at random and hoping that years later something will click and you’ll have a magical instinct for improv.

Improvisation is about developing your musical ear to the point where you can take anything you imagine or want to create from your mind’s ear out into the world. It’s the heart of creative freedom in music and whether you use it for traditional on-the-spot improvisation like a rock guitar or jazz saxophone solo, or you use it as the basis to start writing songs or composing, or you become a fully-fledged improvisational artist like Steve Lawson, our Resident Pro for bass, whose entire career is based on improv – however you want to make use of improvisation, it is an ability that every musician deserves to enjoy as part of their musical life.

I hope this episode has given you some fresh ideas for what learning improv could look like for you, and stay tuned for our next episodes in Improv Month for plenty more inspiration and guidance for your improvisational journey!

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