Musicality World

https://www.musical-u.com/masterclass-registration/
Nick Maniella of the The 10 Minute Jazz Lesson Podcast joins Musical U for a free masterclass! Register today to learn all about improvisation in this special training session. All are welcome, no matter your instrument or experience with improv. https://www.musical-u.com/masterclass-registration/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/jazz-improvisation-techniques/
In our introduction to improvisation, we touched on several world music traditions. Now let’s look closer at some of the most frequently used techniques in jazz improvisation. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/jazz-improvisation-techniques/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/open-your-ears-to-jazz/
Out of the rich pain of the blues, the rhythm of the slaves, and the traditional harmonies of Europe was born a unique style of music that was as much Americana as it was African. What are we talking about? Jazz. We are talking about jazz! https://www.musical-u.com/learn/open-your-ears-to-jazz/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/four-ways-write-better-melodies/
Want your new song to be a classic? Writing a memorable melody is perhaps the single most important thing when it comes to writing music that will connect with the listener. So how do you improve your melody writing skills? Here are 4 techniques from Musical U! https://www.musical-u.com/learn/four-ways-write-better-melodies/

We look at the surprisingly close relationship between improvisation and classical music, interview the creator of popular improv resource Improvise for Real, explore the art of improvising in a musical group setting, and introduce you to a tool that will take your improv beyond the realm of scales.

Classical Improv

Many musicians are under the impression that classical music does not lend itself well to improvisation, and believe that strict, by-the-book renditions are the only way to play this genre.

In reality, classical music has a history tied to improvisation – Mozart himself would sometimes produce compositions on the spot!

5 Ways to Start Classical Improvising Today is your springboard for diving into classical improv. Here, you’ll find tips on approaching classical improv from many different angles and starting points, and how to engage your listeners along the way.

Prior to the 20th century, improvisation was more common in classical music – famous composers were well known for being able to improvise compositions on the spot. So how did improv become more associated with jazz and popular music? The Strad examines this topic and brings recommendations for how to bring improvisation back to the classic cadenza.

While jazz “borrowed” improvisation from classical music, there are plenty of musicians that are trying to bring it back! Meet Gabriela Montero, a classically trained pianist who is on a personal mission to bring the lost art of improv back to our great concert halls.

Improvisation knows no boundaries – it can be practiced in any form of music, on any musical instrument. Christian Howes has recently released a series of 45 improvisations for unaccompanied violin that may change your perception of what makes good improv.

Improvising the Right Way

If improv is meant to be spontaneous, creative, and free-flowing, why do so many approaches to learning improvisation ultimately limit musicians?

This week, we interview David Reed, creator of Improvise for Real, an online resource that integrates ear training, creativity, music theory, and technique to teach musicians to improvise freely.

In this jam-packed interview, David shares his musical beginnings, the moments that changed his mindset about learning music, and how improv entered into his musical world. He discusses how improv is traditionally approached, the limitations of this method, and how the logic behind Improvise for Real fills in those gaps and makes way for musicians to fully immerse themselves in improv – and be rewarded.

David speaks about improvisation with such a passion that we wanted to share more of the great material he is creating at his website, Improvise for Real. Don’t miss his guide for getting started in musical improvisation!

Many musicians struggle during their initial foray into improvisation, especially if they play an instrument that is not commonly charged with melodic lines like the bass guitar. Dawsons has developed four simple steps to learn bass improvisation that will help you find your path to improv freedom.

David spoke fondly about playing from a Real Book during his early gigging days. While phrases like “Real Books” and “Fake Books” are quite common in the jazz lexicon, they are not commonly used outside of their world. To get a glimpse into some of the latest Real Books, Jazz Times has this review of some new offerings from Hal Leonard.

Along the way, David decided that he needed to take some time away from music. Little did he know that by taking a step back, he was able to find a passion that hadn’t existed previously. Bharat from Euphonic Space recently completed his own journey to rediscovering his muse. And did it through a most unconventional way… by writing about music.

Interactive Improv

It’s one thing to think up licks and riffs on your own, but what happens when you need to improvise with others?

Improvisation takes on a new meaning when playing in a group – it goes from a musical monologue to a conversation. And in order for that conversation to flow, players need to take musical and physical cues from one another.

In Interacting With Others While Improvising, we explore some devices and cues you can use during jam sessions to stay on the same page, and what can be done to communicate before you even pick up your instrument.

Being able to communicate is something a musician must be able to do while they are in the midst of performing. Worship Online has written this guide for what a Worship Band Leader should be doing during a performance. No matter what style of music you play, there is something in here for all musicians.

While we talked about how musicians communicate with one another, should a performer also learn ways to communicate with the audience? This is an art unto itself and separates world class performers from the rest. For some insights into this subject, check out Paul the Trombonist’s interview with master orchestrator Duane Benjamin.

We can’t talk about communication between musicians without mentioning the call-and-response, a staple of good blues soloing! To hear two guitarists demonstrate this classic improvisation technique, watch Danny Page’s call-and-response jam on Guitar Jamming Tracks.

Improv with Scales and Chords

Scales are a favourite of many improvisers. They involve simple patterns with seemingly infinite permutations, they’re easy to play, and they usually sound quite good.

The problems start when musicians rely solely on scales for their improvisation.

Upgrade your improvisation toolkit with About Improvising with Scales and Chords, where we connect scales to chord tones and to the broader concept of harmony – the secret behind giving your improvisation some punch and lending it that “storytelling” quality.

For many musicians, just the thought of having to improvise their own musical compositions can cause a bit of anxiety. We all get pretty comfortable staying on the page. But even for the musician that primarily plays written music, learning to improvise can greatly benefit your overall musicality. Connolly Music has tips for building your improvisation skills without ever having to step out on open mic night.

We talked about how learning scales and licks is an important part of improvisation, but you need to take it another step further to become comfortable with this art. Good improv, much like good composition, tells a story. Coming up with a story in your melody will help you to connect with your audience, and DIME gives some playgrounds that you can use to do so.

Have you ever heard a fantastic musician improvise and wonder what was going through their mind? Improvisation requires using both the creative and analytical sides of the brain, and mDecks Music has recorded this wildly entertaining video to show what that looks like. Enjoy this exploration of the improviser’s mindset!

New Ways of Improvising

Improvising certainly involves coming up with melodies on the fly, but as this week’s content shows, it’s so much more than that.

Musicality in improvisation means being able to effectively communicate with fellow musicians well enough to play spontaneously in a group. It means going beyond mere scales to incorporate harmony. And for you classical musicians out there, it means going beyond the sheet music to inject a personal touch into your favourite Bach piece.

The post Classical Improv, Improvising the Right Way, Interactive Improv, and Improv with Scales and Chords appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/solfa-and-the-score-pentatonic-improvisation/
Pentatonic scales have an unparalleled versatility for improvisation. Whether you use them on guitar, piano, another instrument or when singing, they provide you with a universal power to move people musically. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/solfa-and-the-score-pentatonic-improvisation/

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-improvise-on-guitar-3-simple-steps/
Improvisation is an essential guitar skill but one which can seem very intimidating at first. Let’s look at a simple 3 step process you can use to go from “I can’t improvise!” to being able to pick up your guitar and knock out killer riffs from nowhere confidently and reliably.
https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-improvise-on-guitar-3-simple-steps/

Many musicians stick exclusively to improvising with scales, leaving them feeling frustrated and creatively stunted. This episode reveals how to integrate the idea of chord tones and harmony into your improv to really tell a story with your playing!

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Interview with Improvise For Real’s David Reed
• About Improvisation
• Patterns and Playgrounds
• About Chord Tones
• About Finding Chords in Scales

Transcript

In our last couple of episodes we’ve talked about the model of “patterns and playgrounds” we teach at Musical U, where you’re applying certain constraints to your improvising in order to more confidently explore other dimensions. How using patterns for notes or rhythm can help you get more quickly to a musically-effective improvisation while still leaving you lots of creative freedom.

A scale is one example of a pattern – meaning it’s something that is used a lot in music and is useful to know about. You can create a constraint for yourself of sticking just to that scale pattern, meaning you’ll play just the notes from the scale of the key you’re in. That will help ensure that you won’t play any notes that sound obviously wrong or like a mistake.

The problem with scales

For a lot of improvisers this is almost the entirety of their improvisation toolkit. They know which scale to use and they noodle around in that scale and that’s how they improvise.

This was 100% me when I was a teenage guitar player. I knew my pentatonic scale pattern and you’d tell me the key, and I would noodle around in that scale pattern and I’d feel pretty satisfied. But looking back it really didn’t sound all that musical or effective – and I felt completely oblivious to how to make it sound more musical except to have more “talent”.

As we touched on in our first episode for improv month, going that route can leave you feeling very restricted and not very creative. And that’s certainly how I felt.

Part of the problem is that the full major scale is simply too big a playground to start with – there are too many notes to choose from and so you can feel like you’re just wandering up and down the scale or jumping around at random. Without ear training like learning solfa or studying intervals you won’t really understand the role of each note in the scale so you are essentially choosing at random. So one good step forwards is to do that relative pitch ear training so that you know in advance how the notes you’re choosing will sound, and so make a more musically-meaningful choice of notes as you improvise.

Another good step is to learn to improvise with smaller scales first. At Musical U we really focus in on the major pentatonic as the starting point for playing by ear and improvisation because with just five notes it’s much easier to wrap your ear around, while still providing enough notes to be interesting, musically. In fact you can usefully start improvising with just the scale of “do re mi”, the first three notes of the scale, that’s something we do with some of our improv exercises. That constraint really pushes you to explore when and why you’re choosing one note over another and it’s a great basis for expanding to the pentatonic and then full major scale.

Scales are a useful pattern but there’s still a risk of your solo sounding just like a random jumble of notes. They’re notes from the key which is a good starting point, and with some ear training you can learn to choose notes in a way that creates the musical message you want to – but it can be hard to create any bigger-picture impact with your solo. It might not sound like it connects with the music you’re soloing over and you might start to struggle for how to move your solo forwards from one bar to the next.

To start improvising well you’ll want to apply some of the ideas we’ll be covering in our next episode about phrasing and form – and also the second topic of this episode which is improvising using chords.

Connecting with chords

Before you jump to conclusions I’m not talking about playing chords. So if you play a solo instrument like trumpet or you’re a scat singer, don’t tune out!

Harmony is what gives a piece of music its journey. Yes, the melody is the prominent story-teller, but the emotional journey of a piece is often conveyed more by the overall progression of chords than the details of the melody line. Whatever notes you choose for a 12-bar blues improvisation for example, it’ll still have the character of a 12-bar blues. If you’re improvise with the same notes over a I-IV-V rock progression versus a ii-V7-I jazz progression it’ll convey a different kind of musical story.

So if you want your improvisation to tell a good story you’ll want to take advantage of this idea of harmonic progression. We’re not going to go deep into this on this short podcast episode but I do want to share with you the one crucial concept you need to know, and that is: Choosing your improvised notes based on chord tones.

If you remember our episode 21 on “Chord Tones” and episode 27 on “Finding Chords in Scales” then you’ll understand the relationship between the notes of the major scale and the notes of each chord in that key. If not, please check out those episodes for a step-by-step explanation, I’ll put a link in the shownotes. For now the critical thing to understand is that each chord in a key is built from three or four notes from the scale. When that chord is played in the song, those are the notes being played.

That means that if you’re improvising over a chord progression one of the best things you can do is to choose your notes based on the current chord. The obvious thing to do is to simply choose from those notes to create your improvised melody. And although it’s quite restrictive and will sound a bit formulaic, this will sound one notch “more musical” than just choosing notes at random from the scale. For the listener, your solo will fit in nicely with the rest of the music.

The next step is then to be very aware of the chord tones that are active at any time – and to consider choosing those notes in your improvisation but not stick to them strictly. For example just choosing to start or end your phrases with a chord tone, or lingering for a moment on a chord tone – or indeed a non-chord tone – will all give your solo a bit more musical significance to the listener.

And what’s cool is that these ideas can all be used even if you don’t actually have a harmonic accompaniment. For example, a saxophone player busking solo in the street can actually use chord tones in the melody he improvises to imply a harmonic progress and give his solo the same kind of journey that it would have if he had a pianist or guitar player providing chords underneath. In his head he’s thinking about the chord progression he’s soloing through, and by bringing out those chord tones in his solo he’s going to subtley convey that progression to his listener.

We go into this in more detail in our new improv training modules with lots of examples to listen to and hear this all in action, along with exercises and practice tracks for you to get the hang of it. But I just wanted to share that core idea because it’s really simple but really powerful. If you’ve been noodling around based on a scale without really thinking about the underlying chord progression before then this simple insight is going to have a big positive impact on how musically effective your improvisation is.

Next time we’re going to pick up on something I mentioned in passing there – the idea of phrasing and giving structure to your improvisation, and that’s something that works beautifully with this chord tones idea. It’s a big enough topic to get its own training module in Musical U and its own podcast episode coming up after our next improv month interview.

The post About Improvising with Scales and Chords appeared first on Musical U.