Do Ya FEEL it?

[Doug Young]

I'm sure this has been hashed out many times here. But in my experience, language is a pretty decent analogy to improvising, not perfect, but close enough. When you talk to someone in casual conversation, you don't have a pre-memorized "speech", you just talk. In fact you don't even think about the mechanics - you're NOT going "OK, I need a noun, now I need a verb...". You're thinking about the idea you want to express and simultaneously articulating it.

BUT, you aren't making up what you say out of whole cloth. You're not using any word you've never used before. You're using phrases you've probably used a million times before. We've been practicing how those words go together our whole lives. And it's not just the words, but the way you string them together into phrases. You can't learn to speak a new language by reading the dictionary, you have to learn context, and idioms and so on. Same with music. Most good improvisers have memorized, intentionally or by just playing a lot, thousands or millions of licks, and they can call them up so seamlessly they aren't even aware of it, any more than you are aware of phrases you use when you talk. Acquiring "vocabulary" is the most important part of becoming a good improvisor.

As far as the original example, where someone played great the first time, but trying to recreate it later is stiffer, that happens all the time in other situations, like speaking. You may have a conversation or make a short impromptu speech and manage to say exactly the right thing (it can happen... :-) ), but if you were to go back and try to recreate that, instead of focusing on the idea and letting the words flow, now you'll be focused on repeating those same words - 2nd guessing yourself, trying to remember what word came next and so on, and are likely to sound more forced and hesitant. You can overcome that - actors for example, deliver memorized lines all the time with feeling and emotion, but that takes a lot of work to get to a point where it's memorized and you can deliver it fluently. Quite different from trying to remember what you just said (or played), and trying to consciously recreate it without practicing to the point that it's ingrained and you can again deliver it with feeling.

[Brent Hahn]

Originally Posted by Mandobart

Not trying to get personal Brent, but I've been a classically trained musician for almost 50 years.

My post was about that guy, not you. And he could play "the repertoire" with at least a reasonable facsimile of feeling, I heard him do it on the same show.

[Andyrondack]

Originally Posted by DaveKell

Twice in recent days I’ve been told the same thing from two guys who are masters of guitar playing. I asked each of them to improvise a solo break on a new original song. They each nailed a stunning solo on the first run through. Each time I instantly stopped playing and asked them to show me what they had just done. The first one told me he had no idea what he’d done, he was just playing along with me. The next day the second guy tried to recreate his solo but was nowhere near the magic of when we were doing the song. He finally said “sorry, I was going by feel. It’s what you’ll have to do. The worst solos are memorized ones. I just don’t know what I did”. Somewhere in fifty years of playing an intrinsic concept eluded me. Both these old guys said they never studied scales or theory. I need a transplant of brain cells from each of them!

Copied this from another site, very apt I think.
See this interview with Miles Davis, starting at 4:13

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxjGnyUSa14

"But you have to find your own way, too, to learn ... after you go to school. ... There's no shortcut. I'm no accident, you know what I mean. White people give the black musician in America the attitude that they don't have to practice. 'You got it. It's natural.' That's not so. You have to practice. And you have to study. That's the reason a lot of musicians complain ..."

Elsewhere in this video, he talks about what he learned from attending Julliard.

[nightchef]

To Brent’s point, my understanding is that a traditional classical music education doesn’t include training in improvisation (aside from cadenzas—although even there I gather that students are typically encouraged to compose their cadenzas, or use existing composed ones, rather than improvising them in performance). It doesn’t matter how skilled you are in general, you won’t be good at something you’ve never invested time working on.

I think Doug nailed it with his speech analogy. Improvisation is about saying the thing that’s on your mind in the moment, using the expressive language you’ve developed over the course of your whole musical education. I’m not terribly good at it, because I have a bad habit of “looking down” and choking off my thought in midstream. But until that happens, I’m always doing it by feel in the sense that I’m playing whatever my brain tells me is the right thing to play at that moment. I never play a pre-composed solo unless it’s a cover with an iconic solo that’s almost part of the composition (e.g. Sympathy for the Devil).

[geewhiz]

Originally Posted by rmp

That kind of sums up jazz in general for me...

I've tried to love it, after 50 years of playing music I've come to the conclusion it just doesn't do anything for me.

Nothing wrong with that, and your honesty is to be commended. Hey, I don’t like black olives, maybe they’re your favorite food.

Having said that, some of those emotional music I’ve experienced comes from jazz players and the jazz genre.

[Robin, Wales]

Originally Posted by DaveKell

Twice in recent days I’ve been told the same thing from two guys who are masters of guitar playing. I asked each of them to improvise a solo break on a new original song. They each nailed a stunning solo on the first run through. Each time I instantly stopped playing and asked them to show me what they had just done. The first one told me he had no idea what he’d done, he was just playing along with me. The next day the second guy tried to recreate his solo but was nowhere near the magic of when we were doing the song. He finally said “sorry, I was going by feel. It’s what you’ll have to do. The worst solos are memorized ones. I just don’t know what I did”. Somewhere in fifty years of playing an intrinsic concept eluded me. Both these old guys said they never studied scales or theory. I need a transplant of brain cells from each of them!

That is really not uncommon, in all walks of life.

Nor is it uncommon for an expert not being able to explain what they have just done. Particularly when it is a complex motor skill.

I'll try and explain this briefly. Language relating to movement is stored in the brain attached to the associated movement control. So if you say out loud "Stand Up" you can feel your body wanting to move (just try it!). Playing a musical instrument goes through a similar process. The whole purpose (in many ways) of repetitive guitar practice is to drive the sound and the kinesthetics to make that sound together into the non conscious. Hence, using a metronome helps you memorise a tune because it forces you to listen to your guitar's actual output (as well as the metronome). Otherwise, particularly if learning off TAB, playing can be "fire and forget", where the movement becomes related to the visual input, not the sound output. And there is often an element of cognitive processing involved there that is sucking up brain capacity in real time.

Those guys you played with who have learnt "by ear" to solo will have sound and movement chains sitting in their non-conscious. This frees up cognitive capacity to "flow" with the music. But these chains will not have any words (or visuals) attached to them, nor will they be consciously processes. Hence their inability to tell you what they just did.

You can think about it in the way you think about breathing. Breathing can be conscious or non-conscious. I bet you didn't "know" that you were breathing right now until I mentioned it! And you trust your non-conscious to remember how the breath for you when you are not consciously thinking about it.

So you can use your scales and TABs, song sheets or whatever to learn a piece. But then put all the paper away, switch on your metronome, and start to really learn it. Drive it into your non-conscious so you are playing it without thinking and the words of the song are just coming to you. Then you'll free up the cognitive capacity to play around with the sound and things will come to you. Little riffs or snatches you have heard elsewhere will spring out of your fretboard, without you thinking about it. You'll add something here or there or switch up a rhythm or use dynamics in a way that was never written down. And all you have to do is listen - because it is really listening to yourself playing that charges the whole process.

Well, I have gone on a bit there! In my other life I used to run coaching courses for fast jet military aircrew instructors. And they asked the same questions about combat flying as you have posed about guitar playing.