What exactly is improvisation? I’ve been obsessed with this question for many years, not just what it is but how do we go about learning and teaching it? Many musicians are confused about what improvisation is – one of the biggest misconceptions is that improvising is playing something that has never been played before. While that may be true for the entire improvisation (say during a 5 minute song) as a whole, it is definitely not true for parts of the improvisation. This is especially true for more technical genres such as baroque and jazz which require a certain amount of technical facility. If you don’t believe this try improvising over Giant Steps at 300 bpm, especially if you’ve never seen that chord progression before.
In jazz you often play solos over fixed chord progressions. If you are advanced enough to reharmonize chords on the fly you will be improvising even more so, but often you’re choosing paths to take in your progressions such as cycle of fourths, descending minor thirds, tritone subs and ascending diatonic progressions, to name a few. And when you play you often recall things that you liked, that you know sound good.
So when we improvise both chords and melody such as in baroque improvisation we:
-can choose what key to start in
-choose where to go diatonically from the root (IV, V, cycle of fourths, etc)
-choose which key to modulate to (if any), and this can be done repeatedly
-choose a melody
-choose when to play the melody in the bass or upper voices
-choose how long to play and when to end the improvisation
Sure I could start to record myself, play some chords, get a repeated loop going and then improvise things over the chords. This could entirely be improvised, although bits and pieces of melodies, patterns, arpeggios could’ve been practiced before. But for challenging jazz progressions, or baroque improvisation you often need to have practiced certain things ahead of time – like having a moving bass line while the upper voice is stationary, playing difficult counterpoint lines, working out how to change keys effectively and so on.
It is clear that just playing existing pieces will not make you a good improvisor (just look at all the classical musicians who can’t improvise and probably don’t understand what they are playing other than the initial key of the piece). It is also clear that just grabbing an instrument and making stuff up is not what we are after as it is usually too unstructured, especially for specific, difficult genres.
It is also clear that learning scales, triads and arpeggios all over the neck is not enough to make you a good improvisor either. But you do need a certain amount of knowledge so you are not just ‘cutting and pasting’ a series of phrases together. So a certain amount of improvisation is using our ability to recall previously practiced ideas.
Probably the most effective way to learn to improvise is to learn short phrases and understand how they work, whether they are single note solos, or baroque style chord melodies. Make up variations. So you might learn a phrase that is a I IV V I progression for example. Then you need to understand how to modulate to other keys. So you might go from the I chord and try to modulate to the relative minor (C to Am), or the dominant key (C to G) or the subdominant key (eg. from Dm to Gm). So for any key you can decide when to modulate and where to go. Within each key you can learn I IV V I progressions or use the cycle of fourths for example. This is surely enough to get you going!
I’ve been working on the Baroque Improvisation Course and thought I would share a very powerful idea with you. That is, how to take a simple concept and expand it for your own purposes and creativity. You can use this for any style not just classical.
We have A minor for two beats. The bass moves from a low A up an octave to another A. The upper melody goes from the root A, up to B, then C (the minor 3rd) then down to E (the fifth). We could choose to take this E and go up to the higher E instead of going down. We can also decide to take this through the cycle of fourths which in A minor would be Am, Dm, G, C and so on (F, Bdim, Em…). Here’s the sheet music/tab: Baroque Idea.
Notice the concept: bass goes from lower root to upper root (low A to higher A, low D to higher D, etc). and melody goes root, 2nd, 3rd, fifth. Sometimes I go up to fifth, sometimes down to lower fifth to keep a smooth melody line. You can do this for any style. Take a small idea and expand it, twist it, invert intervals, use over different chords, different keys and so on. Take a few notes from a melody or solo you like, use it over various chord progressions, make a sequence out of it, play it backwards. The possibilities are endless.
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After studying jazz improvisation for a few years, I was recently joyous to discover the concept of improvisation in the classical style, or more specifically baroque improvisation. One example of this on piano is Gabriela Montero from Venezuela.
During an interview on NPR, my joy quickly turned to irritation when she said, when asked how she is able to improvise (~2:01): “Ah, where it comes from even now, it just ah, another place. I can’t describe what it is. It’s definitely not a place where thought is part of it, you know. It has a logic to it but I’m not conscious of it. Something that just happens”. This is irritating for a few reasons. One, this was a great opportunity to take the mystery and intimidation out of improvisation explain to people how improvisation works. For example taking a standard chord progression and adding a melody around it. Two, it propagates the myth that some people are just born being able to improvise and the music comes from some heavenly place and is just played ‘through the musicians fingers’. And it discounts the amount of hard work and knowledge required to pull this off.
When we listen to the first 2 improvisations that she played we can easily see in the first case (~1:29) a melody played over Dm Gm A Dm (played twice) the first time the melody ends on the minor 3rd of Dm (F) leaving it unresolved and then the second time the melody ends on the root over Dm (D). This is a i iv V i progression which is very standard. Here’s the tab (on one staff) – Gabriela Montero Improv (not to be played on a guitar unless arranged properly).
While Gabriela may not being aware of what she is playing, or may have forgotten what she practiced what she played was very explainable.
In the second piece, we see another progression in Dm but after the first Dm Gm A Dm A we go through the cycle of fourths in the key of D minor. Dm Gm C F Bb Em7b5 A Dm Gm A7 Dmajor.
Later on the interviewer says (~8:10) ‘You know, one is tempted upon hearing that to say there’s something, whatever we want to call it, innate, genetic, god given, there’s something, there’s a gift there.’ Argghhhh!
Improvising can be learned. It is not genius, prodigy, or magic. All it takes is a lot of hard work.
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