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!
Here is the late Ted Greene showing us how to improvise in the Baroque style:
Using Enounce MySpeed to slow down the videos and literally tens of hours of transcribing and rewinding I was able to finish part 1 which is 9 pages! Subscribe on the right sidebar to get the tab. Ted Greene Baroque Improv Part 1. I added explanation notes as well and while there are many key changes, I did change the key signature on occasion to reflect the main key and to reduce the number of accidentals. Don’t be discouraged by the first part where Ted does a one finger bar across different frets!
Note: With Guitar Pro 5 the tablature is king so there may be issues with the musical notation regarding accidentals. If you play the tab and understand what key you are in you should be fine. You may want to move the fingering around to suit your preference/ability. Please send any corrections to me and I’ll update the file.
Modulating to new keys can provide freshness to our improvisations and will also emulate what the masters like Bach were doing in their compositions.
We can play in the key of C and modulate to the key with root a diatonic sixth above it which is Am. Then we can modulate within Am to the F major key, then to Dm, then to Bb major then to Gm and so on.
For each key we will use a IV V I progression which is also very popular with Bach. We will use 1st inversion (3rd in bass) for both the IV and V chords leading to the root inversion of the I chord. So the bass movement has an ascending scalar sound.
I put the notes together for easier viewing but you want the notes to ring (sometimes 3 notes will be ringing together). There are 2 separate lines are work here so be sure to replicate that. In the first example be sure to bar the C major triad on the high 3 strings so that the notes can ring. Here’s an example (be sure to work this out for all the other keys and make up your own melodies):
I would guess that the vast majority of classical musicians have no idea what they are playing and how each composition works. Some might recognize the key, and see scalar or arpeggiated passages. But it is difficult enough for anyone just to learn many of these pieces! In other words, performers need to focus on developing the technical facility by learning the various etudes, scales, arpeggios and related techniques. Baroque improvisation, which was once prevalent has pretty much disappeared in current times, although a rare few are continuing the artform.
So it was a pleasant surprise to find this harmonic analysis of Bach’s Minuet in G. Even though it’s a fairly simple tune, you can learn a lot by understanding the chord progression and which melody notes were used over each chord. Note the chord names added to this score. Look at the bass notes and the melody notes and how they outline each chord.
Note that the bass notes (in bass clef) are usually chord tones, but not always the root. Other chord tones are used for smooth bass line movement and voice leading concepts. Also note the I IV and I V movement which are very common.
In the second half of the piece (page 2), note how a key change from G to D is achieved (note key changes to the V chord is very common!). This uses the concept of pivot chords. When we play G which is the I chord in key of G we can consider it also to be the IV of D major. Then we play a D major (I of D major), Em (ii chord) then A (V). While the first 3 chords G, D and Em can be from the key of G, it is this ambiguity that allows us to change keys. The real surprise comes with the A major chord which should be Am in key of G (we raise the C to C#). We can see how the 8th measure on page 2 ends on D making the key of D fairly obvious.
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