Improvisation Questions, Part 1

I got emailed some great questions from a Michael a bit ago.  He had questions on two separate topics, so I’m going to answer them in two posts.  Here’s the first.

I really enjoy your “Jazz Improvisation for Beginners.”  And, though I write songs that have been produced and played worldwide, I am really a beginner to playing music.  I usually  just make up tunes and sing them into GarageBand, using the I, IV, V structure.  They come out good, are produced, and many are sung by bands worldwide and some are on their CDs.

No question there, but I wanted to remind everyone that some of the greatest songwriters ever (at least in my opinion) were self taught like Michael.  A lot can be done with your ear alone, as long as you keep working on it and forcing yourself to try new things.  One way to do that, of course, is to learn how different things sound by music theory.

But I want to make more imaginative tunes and I want to be able to create tracks so I can sing them to my arrangers the way I hear them. 

It’s never too late to learn to read music.  If you can write out your own parts, you won’t have to worry about singing the arrangements.  Of course, if your musicians don’t read music that won’t matter much, but learning to read notation will let you look closely at other songwriter’s music and steal, er, borrow ideas.

What exactly is improvisation?  I don’t believe you ever actually say.  Is it just breaking up the chord into notes with one hand while playing them over the chord (or partial chord) in the other hand?  Seems to me when I listen to jazz pianists, they are playing the melody during a lot of their improv, not just playing a bunch of random notes in the key of the song.

If you asked 10 different improvisers what improvisation is you’ll probably get 10 different answers.  Essentially they all have the same feature, though.  Musicians who improvise are composing music on the spot, within the stylistic constraints of the music they’re performing.

To use your solo jazz piano example, a jazz pianist improvising is usually following the harmonic progression of the tune and creating a new melody on top of it.  Often times these new melodies are simply paraphrasing the original tune, while other times the pianist will go in a completely different direction.  Pianists will usually also improvise their own accompaniment with one hand, usually sticking close to the tune’s harmonic progression but sometimes even going so far as to improvise new harmonies.  An unaccompanied pianist can do this more freely than with a band, but good jazz musicians will listen to where the improvisers are going and try to follow them when appropriate.

Playing notes completely randomly isn’t usually used by improvisers, they’re usually using a combination of their understanding of the harmonic progression along with what their ear tells them will make for an interesting melody.  That said, random notes can often make for interesting sounds to explore, so it can make for a good practice exercise, compositional device, or even something to perform (if appropriate for the style of music).  Don’t discount that approach as something useful to explore.

In my second part of the Just For Beginners improvisation series I suggested some exercises using a single chord and just a few note choices based on that chord.  The point of reducing the number of notes to just a couple and then expanding on it is to allow you to put the new music theory understanding (what the notes in the chord are, a scale that suggests other note choices) together with your ear (the specific color of those note choices).  When you can memorize this sound, then improvising is simply a matter or letting your creative mind take over.  Your inner ear suggests a melody and you already know what notes to play.  It seems sort of counter intuitive, but practicing with restriction like that can lead to great freedom later.

Of course, this is always an ongoing effort for everyone.  When you’re first getting started with improvisation it can be easy to get bogged down and frustrated by all the details you need to worry about.  That’s why I suggest only worrying about one or two specific things at a time for most of your practice.  As you make improvements in the details you’ll find the story you’re trying to tell in your improvisation has much more freedom to move in different directions.

Part 2, concerning some of those details, will come (hopefully) on Monday.