Want to understand the mind of someone improvising

[SongwriterFan]

If you don't think it's possible, you should head to Nashville and have a recording studio make a demo for you from *just* a guitar/vocal take that you send them.

I've done that a couple of times now (14 songs), and am simply amazed what they are capable of doing.

The band leader (in my case, it was the bass player on the sessions and one of the studio owners) had a Zoom meeting with me about a week before the scheduled session. He listened to my work tape, we'd talk about any changes we wanted (add a solo section, expand the intro, etc) and what key the demo vocalist wanted to record it in. He would then later write out the chart.

On the day of the recording session, he'd hand out the chart to the musicians (I had a seven-piece band: drums, bass, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, keyboards, pedal steel guitar, and fiddle . . . some were multi-instrumentalists, so we'd add a banjo or dobro or mandolin on some songs). Then they'd listen to my work tape, we'd talk about how I wanted it to sound or any other info I could give them on what I was thinking), and off they'd go. That takes about 5 minutes. In the remaining 25 minutes, they work out the arrangement of the song as I'm sitting there singing scratch vocals. That's it . . . in 30 minutes they are DONE (including any solos they come up with). It's amazing to watch and be a part of.

The demo vocalist as added later, and typically takes an hour (including any harmonies). Then an hour or two of final mixing/etc, and it's done.

Here's an example:

This is the work tape I sent them:


Here's the demo that the studio came up with (with a couple of changes to the lyrics I came up with before the recording session):


And finally the version that's going on the album (my vocals, and a few more changes to the lyrics, and a few "fun" things we added like a whip):


I asked for "whimsical" playing during the demo, and mentioned that (in spite of the name), that this song really belonged to the electric guitar player (a bit "rocked up"). They nailed it! There were no solo parts written out for anybody . . this was all pure improvisation!

[Andyrondack]

An exercise I found helpful was to take a basic 145 progression and begin 'improvising' by only playing the root note of each chord and trying hard to make it sound interesting by varying the rhythm and phrasing but keeping within the constraints of the time signature. So basically using the guitar as a drum.

After a few minutes of this add the 3rd and keep varying the phrasing then add the 5th, by now you should be hearing it as a chord progression. Tap your foot, play to a metronome sing some words in your head whatever it takes to keep the chord changes on strong beats.

Add the 2nd or the 6th to each chord in turn and now you have available the pentatonic scale of each chord. On the 5 chord only you can add the 7b note into the mix, it's not necessary to play every one of the available notes as the chords cycle round, in fact its best to not do that to avoid too much predictability and just too many notes.
By now you should be creating a diatonic melody.

Try the exercise in the same way over different types of chord progressions.

[Robin, Wales]

Originally Posted by Andyrondack

An exercise I found helpful was to take a basic 145 progression and begin 'improvising' by only playing the root note of each chord and trying hard to make it sound interesting by varying the rhythm and phrasing but keeping within the constraints of the time signature. So basically using the guitar as a drum.

After a few minutes of this add the 3rd and keep varying the phrasing then add the 5th, by now you should be hearing it as a chord progression. Tap your foot, play to a metronome sing some words in your head whatever it takes to keep the chord changes on strong beats.

Add the 2nd or the 6th to each chord in turn and now you have available the pentatonic scale of each chord. On the 5 chord only you can add the 7b note into the mix, it's not necessary to play every one of the available notes as the chords cycle round, in fact its best to not do that to avoid too much predictability and just too many notes.
By now you should be creating a diatonic melody.

Try the exercise in the same way over different types of chord progressions.

^^^^^Now that is a great exercise.

My mate Ron, who has now sadly passed, would play a one note lead break on "Orange Blossom Special". Yep, just one note played over and over. It was played for laughs after everyone else had zoomed around the fretboard but he was surprisingly good at making it interesting simply through phrasing.

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by Andyrondack

An exercise I found helpful was to take a basic 145 progression and begin 'improvising' by only playing the root note of each chord and trying hard to make it sound interesting by varying the rhythm and phrasing but keeping within the constraints of the time signature. So basically using the guitar as a drum.

After a few minutes of this add the 3rd and keep varying the phrasing then add the 5th, by now you should be hearing it as a chord progression. Tap your foot, play to a metronome sing some words in your head whatever it takes to keep the chord changes on strong beats.

Add the 2nd or the 6th to each chord in turn and now you have available the pentatonic scale of each chord. On the 5 chord only you can add the 7b note into the mix, it's not necessary to play every one of the available notes as the chords cycle round, in fact its best to not do that to avoid too much predictability and just too many notes.
By now you should be creating a diatonic melody.

Try the exercise in the same way over different types of chord progressions.

Excellent advice!

[KevWind]

Originally Posted by TBman

Exactly. It's not as if they've never played a solo before. Stuff just accumulates in the head and finds its way to the fingers. Solo improvising isn't "cold turkey" playing and I think some people may be thinking that it is. It's rehearsed, but not exactly rehearsed.

Barry I think we as a group may be conflating some terminology which is admittedly ambiguous

This is my interpretation of the terminology

I think Rehearsed = is specific --- and Improvise = nonspecific and I think Practice can be either

I think "rehearsal" means practicing the exact specific notes in a specific order to be played ..
I think "improvise" means deciding on the specific notes and or order played (while) being played

Even the term "solo" is a bit ambiguous. It can certainly mean a very specific and rehearsed lead melody line played over the chord progression and those notes and the order played do not change from performance to performance

OR it can mean (what is often called and I call a lead "riff") which to my mind means an unrehearsed series of notes based on the chord progression. (yes involving extensive practice of things like related scales etc) But the specific notes played and or the order they are played in,, does often change from performance to performance

Any way that is my take on the subject

[Mr. Jelly]

The first thing I learned while trying to do a lead break in a live situation was to stop thinking. I use intuitive feeling.

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by Mr. Jelly

The first thing I learned while trying to do a lead break in a live situation was to stop thinking. I use intuitive feeling.

Exactly right.

Of course, that won't work if you've only just started to learn to play music, but once you have been playing a little while it starts to become subconscious. You recognise the good sounds as you play them (they match sounds in music you've heard before), and they get filed away in your head in the right places. But they only come out in the right way if you allow them to - by stopping thinking.

There's a great story John McLaughlin told about working with Miles Davis. He was nervous recording with the great man for the first time, and kept messing up his solo in In A Silent Way. Eventually Miles came over to him and whispered: "play like you don't how to play the guitar". The next take was the good one.

IOW, Miles spotted that McLaughlin was thinking too much. There was no need, because he was plenty skilled enough already; he just had to let it out. If he imagined "not knowing how to play", that would hold back his conscious control enough to let his imagination flow.

[Mandobart]

These discussions about "intuition" and "feeling" remind me of my favorite quote I heard in college. It was from the only professor I had who had been an actual Professional Engineer, vs the majority who went from high school to college to masters to PhD to teaching in academia with never a foray into industry, design, manufacturing.

This guy said "it takes good judgment to be a competent engineer. And good judgment comes from many hours and years of experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."

Where does this mysterious "intuition" and "feeling" come from?

[mr. beaumont]

Improvisation is something very near and dear to my heart, and something I've spent 1000's of hours on...and I will need to continue to spend 1,000's more on it.

First of all, the idea that improvisation doesn't actually exist, or that it's simply remembered bits that pop up at the right moment is false. Pure improvisation exists...it's also very difficult to get to. It requires a lot of thinking to not think, basically.

Lee Konitz has talked about improvisation "gradients" for years...highly worth looking in to. The basic idea here is that the melody starts as the simplest level of improv, simply interpreting it as a good singer would...and then we move further away from that, more embellishments, enclosures, reduced melody becoming the basis for lines that follow the chord tones, chromatic extensions, key centers, outward and larger and further from the melody.

Over my years of playing, I've thought of it as a 3 stage process...any player can be in any of the three stages at any given time, depending on their comfort level and their familiarity with the idiom/tune/environment they are improvising in. I think of it as kind of a martial arts thing...you start with a white belt, work up to black, but the greatest masters keep working past the black belt until it is worn and faded back to white again.

So, anyway, just my take:

STAGE ONE: You tell your fingers where to go

In stage one, you might still be learning the song you are improvising on. You practice possibilities, patterns, you're running changes, you're getting to know the tune as a vehicle for improvisation inside out. You are consciously aware of where you are in the song, you may have planned bits you want to try out at various points. You might get stuck or lose the form of the tune because it is not ingrained yet. You might have trouble hearing anyone else playing outside of yourself because "getting through" takes all of your concentration. You are actively telling your fingers where to go as you play, intense thinking is involved. This stage is always necessary and you may return to it many, many times as you progress.

STAGE TWO: Your fingers tell you where to go

In stage two, you have spent many hours exhausting possibilities over a song or feel. The hard work put in has created a catalog of ideas--but you cannot readily access this catalog yet. When you play over a familiar tune, "auto-pilot" engages...you may have moments of pure improvisation, but you may also fall back on learned licks, patterns, etc. These patterns aren't necessarily "thought about" though at this stage, they bubble up on their own as you play. You might be more aware of what's going on around you now, and you are able to react to things like shifts in tempo or dynamics from the other players around you. You may be able to take ideas and tweak them on the fly to fit a rhythm or a key. Your fingers and "muscle memory" take over often and your technical ability may be quite impressive.

STAGE THREE: You tell your fingers where to go

In stage three, the internalization from level two has built a very deep well of ideas. And now you can access those ideas on the fly. Ideas can be tweaked on the fly at will and new ideas can be "pre heard" in real time and executed on the instrument. There may be some aspects of "auto pilot" that never go away, but you actively hear melodic "touchstones" that you want to highlight, and your knowledge and practice can bridge the gap between them. You can essentially compose a new melody to the tune in real time. You can listen and react to the other players around you in real time. You are in charge again, and you tell your fingers where to go. At the highest form of this level, you are improvising purely with regards to the tune. The tune can also be abandoned and re-found at this level.

Anyway, that's how I see it. There's songs I've played a 1000 times that I can reach stage three with. Practice time always lives in stage one and two. Nobody ever graduates to a level permanently. It's all cyclical.

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by Mandobart

These discussions about "intuition" and "feeling" remind me of my favorite quote I heard in college. It was from the only professor I had who had been an actual Professional Engineer, vs the majority who went from high school to college to masters to PhD to teaching in academia with never a foray into industry, design, manufacturing.

This guy said "it takes good judgment to be a competent engineer. And good judgment comes from many hours and years of experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."

Where does this mysterious "intuition" and "feeling" come from?

Absolutely! You have to absorb all the technical stuff first - get it into your subconscious, before you can "feel" it. You have to have music in your head first before any can come out!

At the same time, you can "improvise" right from the start, with whatever crude technique you might have.

I.e., there's two aspects to it. Even a non-musician has lots of music in their head. We've all heard music most of our lives. Those sounds (and the rules of those sounds) have gone into our heads in some form.

So as beginners, we know the sounds we want to make. That's how we know how bad we are to begin with! If we didn't have some idea of what the right sounds were, we wouldn't know we were getting them wrong! But we can still find our way to groups of notes that sound good together, just by trial and error.

There is a technical issue with guitar of course (which is not the case with piano), which is being able to actually play any notes at all: being able to fret a string cleanly, so one note comes out properly. But once you can play a few notes, then you can improvise. I.e., you can mess around, using trial and error to find notes that sound good together.

Naturally that's a long way from the experienced improvising musician, but the difference is repertoire as well as technique. That's the "vocabulary" - learned by playing lots of music: existing songs, as well as experimenting with improvising. Getting that all embedded in the subconscious, through constant repetition, is how one gets to be able to "feel" it. This is where a lot of experienced musicians utter that annoying phrase "I just play what I feel" - because they take all of their learning for granted, they've forgotten the process of getting there.

At the same time, a lot of beginners get hung up on that idea - that you have to reach a certain standard of skill and knowledge (and apparently a very high standard) before you even dare start! And that's not true.

Of course, you won't be very good as a beginner. But it's not the case that you know nothing. You know little or nothing about how to play the instrument. But you do know how music is supposed to sound, however vaguely. And the instrument is a toy you can mess around with. Find out what it can do.
I.e., you need to give yourself permission. No need to wait. Start now. Make something up. It won't sound very good; but the more you do it, the more you'll find things that do sound good.

[Italuke]

Originally Posted by mr. beaumont

Improvisation is something very near and dear to my heart, and something I've spent 1000's of hours on...and I will need to continue to spend 1,000's more on it.

First of all, the idea that improvisation doesn't actually exist, or that it's simply remembered bits that pop up at the right moment is false. Pure improvisation exists...it's also very difficult to get to. It requires a lot of thinking to not think, basically.

Lee Konitz has talked about improvisation "gradients" for years...highly worth looking in to. The basic idea here is that the melody starts as the simplest level of improv, simply interpreting it as a good singer would...and then we move further away from that, more embellishments, enclosures, reduced melody becoming the basis for lines that follow the chord tones, chromatic extensions, key centers, outward and larger and further from the melody.

Over my years of playing, I've thought of it as a 3 stage process...any player can be in any of the three stages at any given time, depending on their comfort level and their familiarity with the idiom/tune/environment they are improvising in. I think of it as kind of a martial arts thing...you start with a white belt, work up to black, but the greatest masters keep working past the black belt until it is worn and faded back to white again.

So, anyway, just my take:

STAGE ONE: You tell your fingers where to go

In stage one, you might still be learning the song you are improvising on. You practice possibilities, patterns, you're running changes, you're getting to know the tune as a vehicle for improvisation inside out. You are consciously aware of where you are in the song, you may have planned bits you want to try out at various points. You might get stuck or lose the form of the tune because it is not ingrained yet. You might have trouble hearing anyone else playing outside of yourself because "getting through" takes all of your concentration. You are actively telling your fingers where to go as you play, intense thinking is involved. This stage is always necessary and you may return to it many, many times as you progress.

STAGE TWO: Your fingers tell you where to go

In stage two, you have spent many hours exhausting possibilities over a song or feel. The hard work put in has created a catalog of ideas--but you cannot readily access this catalog yet. When you play over a familiar tune, "auto-pilot" engages...you may have moments of pure improvisation, but you may also fall back on learned licks, patterns, etc. These patterns aren't necessarily "thought about" though at this stage, they bubble up on their own as you play. You might be more aware of what's going on around you now, and you are able to react to things like shifts in tempo or dynamics from the other players around you. You may be able to take ideas and tweak them on the fly to fit a rhythm or a key. Your fingers and "muscle memory" take over often and your technical ability may be quite impressive.

STAGE THREE: You tell your fingers where to go

In stage three, the internalization from level two has built a very deep well of ideas. And now you can access those ideas on the fly. Ideas can be tweaked on the fly at will and new ideas can be "pre heard" in real time and executed on the instrument. There may be some aspects of "auto pilot" that never go away, but you actively hear melodic "touchstones" that you want to highlight, and your knowledge and practice can bridge the gap between them. You can essentially compose a new melody to the tune in real time. You can listen and react to the other players around you in real time. You are in charge again, and you tell your fingers where to go. At the highest form of this level, you are improvising purely with regards to the tune. The tune can also be abandoned and re-found at this level.

Anyway, that's how I see it. There's songs I've played a 1000 times that I can reach stage three with. Practice time always lives in stage one and two. Nobody ever graduates to a level permanently. It's all cyclical.

This right here. Exactly. Unrehearsed improvisation is very much not a myth. The language analogy is also dead on. We usually improvise when we speak. We don't practice saying the same words in the same order.

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by Italuke

This right here. Exactly. Unrehearsed improvisation is very much not a myth. The language analogy is also dead on. We usually improvise when we speak. We don't practice saying the same words in the same order.

Quite right.
But we have to learn to speak in the first place. We have to learn to use our voices to make words, in order to be able to say what we want. We just did it so long ago we've forgotten how we did it.

It's the same with "unrehearsed improvisation". It can only happen when the technical skill and the vocabulary have already been internalized. So it feels completely intuitive, but only because it's been learned so long ago.

This is the bind that beginners often face. The "myth" is created by improvisers who claim to be just "playing what they feel", as if it's somehow magic, as if anyone can do it, just like that. You have to get a lot of music into your head (and fingers) first, before it can come out.

[Andyrondack]

Originally Posted by JonPR

Quite right.
But we have to learn to speak in the first place. We have to learn to use our voices to make words, in order to be able to say what we want. We just did it so long ago we've forgotten how we did it.

It's the same with "unrehearsed improvisation". It can only happen when the technical skill and the vocabulary have already been internalized. So it feels completely intuitive, but only because it's been learned so long ago.

This is the bind that beginners often face. The "myth" is created by improvisers who claim to be just "playing what they feel", as if it's somehow magic, as if anyone can do it, just like that. You have to get a lot of music into your head (and fingers) first, before it can come out.

Some people have a very negative attitude to teaching any process or methodology to help students improvise, they seem to believe that the concious brain should have no place in making music , I learned long ago to despise such attitudes.

[Silly Moustache]

Hi rocky, not convinced that anyone reads comments added after two pages, but I am asked about my solo breaks quite a lot. I mostly play , or play around, the vocal melodies of the piece.

Something like this :

if you would like one-to-one assistance ten please pm me.
Best, Andy

[Rumblefish]

When I solo, I often think of nothing or try to take a conversational approach. Think of a great piece of dialogue from a movie and look at the phrasing, volume range, and character of the voice. You're talking to your listeners, giving a speech, or making a point. I don't think of actual words when I improvise, but I sometimes try to express myself or connect with my audience in phrases.

If you worked at a big call center and had to use a script when talking to a customer, that's like playing from a chart or sheet music. Now think of a car salesperson giving a sales pitch. It's not as scripted but they know what they're doing, have done it hundreds of times, and sold a lot of vehicles. When you finish a solo, you want the audience to drive home in that car. Obviously, I don't recommend thinking about selling cars when you improvise. I'm just saying, think of different conversational approaches. Seduction is another conversational approach and is perfect for some material.

"From the heart to the hands before the mind understands"