Musicality World

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/hearing-harmonies-active-listening/
Learning to hear harmonies has many benefits for all musicians whether interested in singing in a choir, composing an interesting piece of music or just strengthening your ear training skills. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/hearing-harmonies-active-listening/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/twelve-tips-for-learning-to-improvise-music/
Learning to improvise is a long-term mission, one which will push you to your musical limits and then beyond. You’ll need to be armed with some tips, tricks and strategies to help ensure you continually improve. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/twelve-tips-for-learning-to-improvise-music/

This week, it’s time to put it all together and give it some structure.

We introduce our upcoming Instrument Packs for improvising with phrase and form, provide an exercise in structured major scale improv, interview a master guitar educator on his take on improvisation, and release a podcast episode that explains the importance of phrasing – by comparing it to the phrasing naturally present in speech!

Form and Phrasing

This month, we’ve been discussing how to improvise with purpose – that is, not just noodle around with random notes, but use musicality concepts to create riffs and licks that stick.

One of the keys to unlocking this musicality in improv is form and phrasing, or the practice of shaping your musical expression into words, phrases, questions, and answers. In other words, telling a story through your improv.

So this month, we’re incredibly excited to announce our Instrument Packs on the topic of improvising with phrase and form. Our resident pros for piano, bass, and guitar teach you how to create cohesive improvised solos that fit any genre and style, how to expand a single musical idea (or even a single note!) into a full solo, and of course, how to elevate your improv from riffs and licks to full-fledged storytelling.

Improvisation is not just something that musicians do during a song… it can also be the path to writing a song! For generations, musicians have improvised their way to new compositions, allowing their muse to guide them along the way. Guitar.com takes us through Songwriting 101, detailing how the pros compose by improvising.

Of all the instruments, perhaps none is more universally known for improvisation than the saxophone. This month, we’ve been introducing some new words into your musical vocabulary that you may not have used before – to really cement your understanding, check out this guide to improv vocabulary from the Best Saxophone Website Ever.

Steve talked about how backing tracks are a great way to have fun while practicing improvisation. These days, there are so many different options available for backing tracks online – how are you to know which ones are good? Sean from Guitar Ramble compiled a list of 5 jazz guitar backing tracks to inspire your improvisations this month.

Improvisation Ideas

In improvisation, it’s easy to focus too much on your instrument and not enough on the musical ideas inside your head.

David Wallimann, founder of GuitarPlayback.com, music educator, and guitarist extraordinaire has the following counterintuitive-yet-brilliant advice to give: put the instrument down!

David’s fresh approach to improv emphasizes and prioritizes musical ideas, and recognizes music theory and instruments as simply a means to an end to express those ideas.

In Tell Your Own Story, with David Wallimann, David discusses how to break out of the improvise-by-numbers trap that many musicians fall into, shares the importance of music theory in improvisation, and spills the secret of putting self-expression at the center of your improvisation. This interview is an absolute must-hear for anyone seeking freedom through their improv!

David filled us in on how he broke free of the standard fretboard patterns for improvising music. The counterintuitive method that he talked about is certainly inspiring! For more tips to get started on guitar improvisation, check out Stuart Bahn’s ultimate guide.

Perhaps one of the most poisonous myths in the music world is that learning theory will somehow rob you of your creativity. That’s kind of like thinking that learning the difference between a noun and a verb is bad for a creative writer! Music theory has a place for all musicians that want to experience more freedom in their musical expression. The Struggling Guitarist exposes this myth and why it is rubbish.

No matter where you are in your musical journey, there are roadblocks that you will run into, and frustrations that you will experience. One of the things that we loved about talking with David was his positive mindset to his musicality. This can make such a big difference as you work on perfecting your art! To help you get beyond what you think is possible, here’s some serious motivation from Keyboard Improv.

Starting to Improvise

This month’s content has been geared towards introducing you to improvisation tools and how to use them.

Time to put some of these to the test, by diving into some simple exercises in improvising with the major scale!

Whether you don’t know how to play the scale or can blaze through it with your eyes closed, you’ll find something helpful in First Steps to Improvisation. We run through some basic theory for scale-building, introduce the concept of building musical motifs from the major scale, and show you how to combine and manipulate motifs to make complete musical statements and tell a story in your improv.

Scales are a great starting point in your improvisation journey. To learn more about how to apply scales into a chord progression and more, check out the Play Guitar Podcast’s exploration of how to really understand guitar scales.

Moving past just playing around with scales, a good piece of improvisation must tell a story, with the use of melodies and motifs. In the same way that certain words are better when starting a written sentence, there are ways to start a musical sentence that pack a punch. Tim Hansen explores four different ways to start a musical sentence for Soundly.

After completing this lesson, wouldn’t you enjoy some practical ways to apply scales to your improvisation? Nick from Jazz Duets goes through a number of different exercises that you can try out today.

Shaping Your Improv

With the release of our Instrument Packs on improvising with phrase and form just around the corner, you’ll want to put yourself in the mindset to create music that sounds like a conversation.

In About Improvising with Structure and Phrasing, we define a musical phrase by relating it to its cousin: the verbal phrase. Just as a sentence is the first level of structure we give to our speech, the musical phrase is the basic unit of improv, lending it the shape it needs to avoid becoming a formless string of notes.

This opens up a world of possibilities: we can think of how one phrase relates to another, how to use them to create tension and release, and most importantly, how to use these concepts to bring your music to life.

We talked about the importance of phrasing when you are improvising music. Phrasing can really make the difference in your improvisation being memorable and catchy, or just a collection of notes. Mika Tyyskä takes us through a simple melody, with an approach to building phrasing that can be applied in almost every context!

No matter what style of music you prefer, we all want our improvisation to be musical. After all… isn’t that why we started playing in the first place? Harmony Music Center shares some quick tips that will change the way you approach improv!

It’s no secret that the Musical U team are big fans of podcasts. So, when we found an episode from Tune In, Tone Up that explored adding interest to improvisation through phrasing, we couldn’t wait to share it!

A Musical Statement

As you’ve probably realized, chords, scales, and notes themselves are like sentence fragments and singular words – small components of a meaningful whole.

By shaping, expanding on, and combining your licks, riffs, and melodies in the right ways, you can create complete musical statements that are more than the sum of their parts – that will engage the listener and tell a story.

The post Form and Phrasing, Improvisation Ideas, Starting to Improvise, and Shaping Your Improv appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/5-improvisation-insights-jeffrey-agrell/
Improvisation doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, it can be a game! By learning to treat musical improv as a game you free yourself up to experiment and learn the skills in a much more enjoyable way. Learn more with Jeffrey Agrell of Improv Insights. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/5-improvisation-insights-jeffrey-agrell/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/crazy-easy-weird-modal-improv-trick/
Musical U’s Andrew Bishko shares his easy tricks for improvising on the piano… even if you have never touched a piano before in your life! You’re not going to want to miss this fascinating lesson. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/crazy-easy-weird-modal-improv-trick/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/9-ways-learning-an-instrument-strengthens-your-brain/
Playing music isn’t just fun, but scientific research has shown that there are many amazing benefits to learning music at any age. Discover how learning a musical instrument helps to strengthen your brain with Musical U! https://www.musical-u.com/learn/9-ways-learning-an-instrument-strengthens-your-brain/

When speaking, we use phrasing to emphasize ideas, capture our listener’s attention, and tell a story. The same holds true in music, and more specifically, in improvisation! Learn how to use phrasing to add structure, interest, and musicality to your improv.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• About Improvisation
• About Improvising Rhythm
• About Improvising with Scales and Chords
• How to “Just Play”, with Nick Mainella
• How to Improvise for Real, with David Reed

Transcript

On today’s episode I want to talk about something that’s critical to creating an improvisation that’s interesting and satisfying for your listeners – and simply for yourself. And that’s structure and phrasing.

But first I want to talk a bit about what happens without structure and phrasing. On our last episode I finished up by saying something about how compositions and songs have structure whereas improvisation doesn’t. And hopefully you instinctively raised an eyebrow at that, because it sounds wrong, doesn’t it?

Music without structure would be pretty dull, right? Just an endless stream of notes all sounding roughly the same. So we know instinctively that improvised music should have structure to it. Yet many of the traditional ways of learning improvisation miss this.

We started out improv month talking a bit about how you can try to improvise by just sticking to fixed patterns or rules, or you can learn specific riffs and build up a “vocabulary” to reproduce and call that improvising. And even if you go a step better than that and use the kind of scale and chord ideas we talked about in our previous episode, without structure your improv will sound pretty bland. You’ll be filling in the time and choosing notes that sound okay – but it’s not going to capture the audience’s attention. It’s not going to take them on a journey, or move them, or be memorable.

So today I wanted to talk about just two things you can introduce to your improvisation that will transform it from that bland stream of notes into something much more like real music.

As part of Improv Month we’re releasing a whole series of new training modules in Musical U to help with improvising and two of them are dedicated to this topic. One on phrasing, and one on structure and form. There’s a ton packed into those modules to really teach this stuff fully, but for now I’m just going to be pulling out a couple of the simple ideas that you can start applying immediately.

Phrasing

I’m sometimes surprised when I talk to members of Musical U about phrasing because I find the level of familiarity with that idea varies hugely.

For me, I grew up singing and playing wind instruments, so my teachers were talking about phrasing from day one – as part of thinking about where to take a breath. And I think I was lucky to have some teachers who were good at encouraging me to think about how the performance would sound rather than just hitting the right notes, so I was always thinking about shaping phrases, especially in choirs, that was a really big deal.

But sometimes I talk to musicians who are quite accomplished but don’t really know what I mean when I talk about phrases. Or I talk to musicians who understand phrases when playing from sheet music, but it’s never occurred to them that this could be relevant to improvising too.

So a quick definition: A musical phrase is just a short section of a melody that has a beginning and end. We normally think of phrases as things that are a bar or two long, so we’re talking about maybe five seconds of music, that kind of scale. And we use that word because they are analogous to a spoken phrase. A spoken phrase is more than one word and generally belongs with other phrases in a sentence. Similarly, a musical phrase is more than one note, and generally belongs with one or more other phrases to form a section of the piece. You don’t want to labour that analogy too much, it’s not exact, but it is useful to think of a musical phrase as something that has its own identity as a little thing – but probably doesn’t quite stand alone, it’s going to need other phrases to really work.

Often a phrase will have a little pause before the next phrase begins, or there will be some shaping of the phrase with dynamics or expression to indicate that it has come to an end. A common rule of thumb given to singers especially is that the volume should increase and then decrease with each phrase – it should start a bit more quietly, increase in volume at its middle, and end a bit more quietly again. That varies depending on the music but it’s a good default to think about. Try listening out for this next time you’re listening to music, see if you can tell where a phrase starts and ends based on volume or the way the notes are played.

When it comes to improvisation, phrasing is the first level of structure we can give our improv. Instead of just choosing note after note until we’ve filled the time, we can think in terms of starting a phrase, building it up, and bringing it to an end.

And what’s cool is that this naturally leads us to start thinking about what happens from one phrase to another. It combines perfectly with that idea of “constraints and dimensions” that we’ve been talking about in recent episodes. Will your next phrase use the same constraints, or will you adjust them so that it can explore a new dimension? For example you could use a fixed rhythmic pattern for your first two phrases and then relax that constraint and explore a new rhythm with your third and fourth phrase. Or you could stick to a certain set of three notes for your first phrase and then suddenly introduce a fourth note in your second phrase.

One phrasing idea we dive into in our training module on this is “Call and Response”, where you have two phrases and the first one creates a kind of musical question that the second one then answers. It’s a really elegant way to draw your listener in and then provide a satisfying conclusion, and there are a variety of ways you can use it in your improvising.

Our training modules go on to talk about structure and form, some of the bigger-picture things you can introduce to your improvisation to make it musically effective. But for now I want to talk about the second idea you can apply immediately which is related to what I just said about creating a question and then answering it. There are a few ways you can do that in music, but one is to create tension, and then to release it, something you can deploy as call-and-response but actually has a much wider impact too.

Tension and Release

At any given moment in music there are going to be note choices for you as the improviser that sound comfortable and note choices that create tension. If you have a harmony accompaniment, like you’re playing chords in the left hand on keyboard or someone is strumming guitar along with you, then your improvised melody can create tension against the current chord. If there’s no accompaniment then you can still play with this idea because, as we talked about in our previous episode on “improvising with scales and chords”, you can imply harmony with the notes you choose, so that the listener is expecting notes that blend well with a certain chord, and then when you introduce a note that doesn’t blend it can create that tension.

Generally speaking, choosing notes from the current chord will sound comfortable, with the root note being the most relaxed. Choosing notes from outside the chord will create a bit of tension, and as a rule of thumb if they’re a whole step from a chord note – that’s also called a major second or a tone – then there will be some tension and if they’re a half step – also called a minor second or a semitone – away from a chord note then there will be stronger tension.

So for example if the current chord was C Major and you chose to play the note “C”, there’s no tension. That’s the root note of the chord, it’ll blend right in. But if you chose to play the note “B”, which is still in the C major scale, it’s still “in key” – but it’s a half step away from the chord’s root C, and that’s going to sound very dissonant and tense.

That’s a simple case in point, but the important thing to understand is that there is always this dimension to the music you improvise, how it creates tension or doesn’t. And, when we’re thinking about phrasing and structure, we can use that tension. We can choose to play notes that create tension in our phrase, and then move on to a note that releases the tension.

This is happening all the time in the music we listen to, in small ways and in big dramatic ways, and it’s a big part of what makes music sound interesting rather than bland. So it’s an essential tool to have in your toolkit as an improviser.

The way I described it there was quite music theory heavy, thinking about scales and chord notes and half steps and whole steps – and while that is one way to approach this, very popular with jazz players for example, you can also use it in a much more ear-guided way. At any given moment you’ll be able to instinctively imagine a note that would clash and create tension, so with some ear training you can just bring that imagined note out on your instrument, whether or not you’ve thought through the music theory relationships going on.

So those were two simple ideas about phrasing and structure that you can apply to your own improvisation, and there’s plenty more to explore on this topic, as we’ve been covering in our new modules inside Musical U.

The bottom line is that the audience knows what to expect in music. They know that there should be structure and phrasing, there should be a rise and fall, tension and release.

And the thing is, if you’ve been playing music for a while you know this too. If you were to sing something improvised you would probably instinctively sing in phrases and give it some structure. The trouble comes because how most people learn to improvise is so divorced from this musical instinct. They’re following rules, or remembering licks, or just trying hard not to sound bad. And so none of their natural ability to creating meaningful music comes out.

That’s why at Musical U we’re so fixated on helping people go beyond that – or to skip that frustrating approach in the first place. Our improv training focuses on developing your ear so that you can take your natural, creative musical imagination and translate it onto your instrument and out into the world.

So everything I’ve been talking about today. These aren’t really new things for you to learn from scratch. They’re really just reminders. Reminders of how you already know music should work, and reminders to bring that to your improvisation. If you’ve been improvising based on rules, patterns or memorisation then this is going to take some effort to try to introduce. Or you’re approaching improvisation in the way we teach in our new Improv Roadmap this will actually all come really naturally, and with very little extra practice you’ll be able to phrase and structure your improvised music to be interesting, moving and memorable for yourself and for your listeners. More on that Roadmap and how you can take advantage of it in our next episode.

The post About Improvising with Structure and Phrasing appeared first on Musical U.

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How can you master the art of improvisation? Like any musical skill, improvisation is not a magical gift. It takes practice and simply the art of doing. Musical U has 10 improvisational challenges for you to develop your skills. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/start-improvising-today-10-mini-challenges-to-try/