Improvising music

     🪕🪗🎺 IMPROVISING MUSIC 🎼✍🏻

                                    🖊️🪘Season 2. CONCLUSION ✏️✏️🎤

One of the utmost joys of being capable of playing a musical instrument is the ability to spontaneously create music on the spot. Improvising is essentially a form of composing and many musicians would say it’s the ultimate display of composition skill.

Whether you are an amateur, an experienced musician or a music guru, you can’t argue against the fact that improvising music skillfully is a powerful thing. It calls for creativity, commitment, willingness and readiness to always learn something new. It is a perfect way to create new music and improve existing pieces. Above all, remember that it is a skill that everyone can learn and perfect with practice.

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Keep improving

                                       🪕🪗🎺 IMPROVISING MUSIC 🎼✍🏻

                          🖊️🪘Season 2. Episode. 12. KEEP IMPROVING ✏️✏️🎤

To keep improving means never being satisfied with using the same old patterns in your improvising, not simply “improvising by numbers” according to music theory rules alone, it means pushing your boundaries and going beyond your comfort zone each and every time you pick up your instrument to play a solo, and continually challenging yourself to be better this time than the last.

Improvisation is not an advanced skill or a magical “gift”, it is a _learnable skill_ – and if you learn it in the right way it’s the most fun musical skill you can spend time practising!. 

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Be bold

   🪕🪗🎺 IMPROVISING MUSIC 🎼✍🏻

                          🖊️🪘Season 2. Episode. 11. BE BOLD ✏️✏️🎤

Being bold means having the guts to start improvising in the first place, to keep pushing your boundaries, to risk mistakes, to be brave enough to record yourself and listen back, and to go out there and improvise with other people and for an audience.

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Share it

   🪕🪗🎺 IMPROVISING MUSIC 🎼✍🏻

                          🖊️🪘Season 2. Episode. 10. SHARE IT ✏️✏️🎤

There’s a lot to be said for “woodshedding”, the tradition of practising improvisation alone for hours on end. But music is fundamentally a social art form and all that practice should be working towards the goal of sharing your new musical creativity with other people.

You can share with other musicians by collaborating in a band or choir session. That can sound scary if you’ve never done it before, so make it easy on yourself to start out: just get together with a friend and trade licks back and forth. Try some call-and-response improvisation games. Play duets and give each other the chance to improvise a solo in the middle.

When you get braver, step out and improvise for an audience. If you’ve been recording yourself and learning to risk and recover from mistakes, this shouldn’t be too scary! At this point you know you can improvise well, so step out there and show what you’ve got.

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Record yourself

    🪕🪗🎺 IMPROVISING MUSIC 🎼✍🏻

                          🖊️🪘Season 2. Episode. 9. RECORD YOURSELF AND LISTEN ✏️✏️🎤

This has been covered several times in previous series but it’s so important that it’s worth repeating.

If you really want to improve fast in improvisation, don’t just play one-off improvised solos and forget about them. Instead, record them and take the time to listen back.

Force yourself to really listen objectively and carefully to what you played. Evaluate it and see which parts worked well and which didn’t, and ask yourself why. Better yet, ask a friend or a teacher. Then take note of what you can learn from that to bring into your next improvisation.

This simple habit of recording and reviewing each improvisation can transform your practice sessions from small, slow steps forward into intensely transformative masterclasses that dramatically accelerate the progress you make as an improviser. It may sound like I’m overstating it here, but I’m not. It takes guts and patience to actually do it but it really does make a world of difference to the results you get.

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Mind or Voice

    🪕🪗🎺 IMPROVISING MUSIC 🎼✍🏻

                          🖊️🪘Season 2. Episode. 8. MIND OR VOICE BEFORE INSTRUMENT✏️✏️🎤 

Using frameworks like a scale or fingering pattern can be great, but improvisational constraints need to be applied thoughtfully. Otherwise you wind up improvising robotically, just moving your fingers to produce notes according to rules, without really having a clue before the notes are played what they will sound like.

The ideal is to play the notes you mean to play because you’ve heard them in your head already, even if only a split-second before playing them on your instrument.

The way to reach this ideal is to practice audiation and learn to sing to express your musical ideas. 

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Strong knowledge

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     🪕🪗🎺 IMPROVISING MUSIC 🎼✍🏻

                                 🖊️🪘Season 2. Episode. 7. STRONG KNOWLEDGE✏️✏️🎤 

Strong knowledge of theory and the possibilities available to you can make it easier to make those recoveries, but really this is a skill you learn by doing. When you’re practising improvisation, push yourself every time. Suspend your natural judgement and high expectations of yourself. Take risks and go beyond your comfort zone. When you make a mistake don’t stop playing! And don’t berate yourself. See it as an opportunity to practice a more important skill than perfectionism: recovering from mistakes.

The more times you’ve made a mistake and recovered from it in practice the less scary the idea of making a mistake in a real improvised performance will be. Your improvisation will improve far faster and become far more interesting if you learn to embrace your mistakes.

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Your mistakes

🪕🪗🎺 IMPROVISING MUSIC 🎼✍🏻

                                 🖊️🪘Season 2. Episode 6 . EMBRACE YOUR MISTAKES✏️✏️🎤 

Many people get discouraged when learning the art of improvisation because they try for perfection – when that is perhaps the exact opposite of the true spirit of improvisation!

_Improvising music isn’t about avoiding mistakes – it’s about risking them and recovering from them._

If you always stay perfectly within the audience’s expectations and the “rules” of music then your improvisations will be dull and predictable. You need to push the boundaries and be willing to risk trying things that might not work out.

What saves this from producing a mess of “wrong” notes is that you should also learn to recover from mistakes.

Play a whole string of bad-sounding notes and your improvisation is, by all accounts, a failure.

But play a single bad-sounding note, and you have a whole range of possible ways to recover from that “mistake” and make it musical. Those momentary clashes of discord that shake the audience out of their slumber can actually become your solo’s greatest power, if you learn to skilfully turn your phrase in a direction that makes that “wrong” note “right”.

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