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Hi All,

Firstly, I know that this question has been asked LOTS because I have done a search, and picked up some useful tips.

But I am more asking the question with regards to structure than the actual notes to hit.

For example, when you are improvising (as I am frequently being asked to do in my band) do you use a rule of thumb, such do the block chords with your left and make up a melody with your right, or would you continue to hit a few bass notes in the let hand and continue to do the tune with your right?

Also, do you know what you are likely to play next? (as in, hear where you are going with the improvising?)

Sorry if my question seems a bit unclear, it is just very hard to explain

Thanks in advance.

Yes, you can improvise playing chords with your left hand and melodies or other chords with your right hand, for example.

About what you have to play:

When you speak with your friends, do you know what you will say before?
Do you think what you want to tell your friend before you speak?

Improving music is like to talk: the same thing.

If you know music harmony and you have a good technique on your instrument you can improvise what you want very easily.

Improvising is like talking.

As a pianist - unlike a horn player, you have the ability to do more than one thing at a time (musically speaking). You can, as you describe, play a solo in the RH and comp in the LH, or visa-versa, or solo in both hands, or solo in RH and counterpoint in LH - or whatever. There are many examples af all the above you can listen to. So start with listening to what others do, work through some of your favorites. Then start to develop your own personal "style" or approach. For any given tune, try to come up with some sort of concept of where you want to take it and be flexible enough to sense how the other musicians react to your ideas - then start to play-off each other's ideas and contributions. It may be "your solo" but the music is interactive. Like the conversational concept Piano-pianist speaks of.. what you say next depends on what others have already said. Sure, you have some points you want to make - but leave room for other points and react to them in your playing - that's the real beauty of a collective ensamble and when its working - its an amazing thing to be a part of - enjoy the ride!

It depends on what kind of music your band is playing, and on the instrumentation is.

In jazz improv, it is common for the piano-player to play chords in the left hand, while improvising melodically in the right. If there's a guitar player, the pianist might play fewer chords.

If you're playing rock or funk or some kind of pop, then you might not play chords in your left hand during a keyboard solo. Especially if there's a guitarist playing chords.


An accomplished improviser will likely have some kind of foresight about what's coming, and they will most definitely have "licks" or pieces of vocabulary that they use regularly.

But as a beginner, there's nothing wrong with continually surprising yourself. Pick some notes from the blues scale, play them in rhythm, and see what happens.

What kind of music are you playing? Are you "taking solos" in the context of tunes or songs? Or is it collectivly improvised from scratch?

To me, the very most important thing that developed my improvising in the beginning was to listen to lots and lots and lots of people improvising.

You need to learn to form chords and scales of course, then just constantly try different things you've heard and like. Eventually you will naturally develop your own style without trying.

I really never think about what I'm going to do, I somehow just do it. I often surprise myself with something I either love or hate. If I love it I use it and develop it, if I hate I try to never play it again. My left hand somehow seems to go on auto pilot or something.

I will sometimes look at a piece and think "I wonder how I'm going to play this" and just start.

I LOVE classics but improvising is REALLY fun.

I agree.

In a foriegn language.
It takes a long time to learn - especially the older you are.

I do think it's easier to learn when you're younger. My 8 year daughter and I both tried improvising, from the same book, and she picked it up right away, but I can't do it.

There was an article in newspapers a few days ago about results of brain MRIs taken as jazz musicians improvised on a keyboard compared with playing something by memory. They found that during improvisations, the part of the brain responsible for inhibition and self-monitoring shut down, and that a smaller area linked to self-expression fired up. (In case you want to google this, the researcher was Charles Limb.)

It seems that a lack of inhibition and an abundance of self-expression is what a lot of kids have, until they're "civilized" into adults.

I believe the right age for beginning to study music improvisation is at 10-20 years old.
But Mozart, for example, began to improvise when he was a child, I believe.

"A lack of inhibition and an abundance of self-expression" is important but NOT enough to improvise good music.
(IMHO)

You are learning to improvise in a subconscious way:
your subconscious plays something you like and you develop it.
Yes, it is good strategy but much slower than a conscious process based on music harmony.

I have absolutely no doubt this is true. I'm just too lazy to learn to do it.

I like to try to get a critical balance of both conscious and unconscious processing. It produces a sort of chaotic (in the mathematical sense) feedback loop wherein everything feeds everything else. The delightful sensation is that I am observing my hands producing a constantly surprising and evolving process rather than taking part in it.

There is, I suppose, an enormous amount of learned vocabulary, not only harmonic but also melodic, rhythmic and so on, ingested over the years and constantly expanding. It is absorbed from both playing and listening to every conceivable type of music and one probably tends to underestimate the sheer size of it and its importance to improvisation. There is a natural tendency to imagine it all comes "out of the blue", "inspiration" and the like but if I add up the hours I've spent at it, it would be very disppointing if something special didn't regularly happen at my time of life.

Ted gives a very definitive answer which should provide enough idea about what the art form known as 'improvisation' is all about. You are really trying to give your own feeling of how you wish to hear the melody improvised. This sort of teaching is hard to explain in my view.

In the jazz world many pianists have their own style of course and I would listen more than anything, to all the pianists that do improvise in the styles you like, to form a mindset of what you want to develop.

I realize some of the great improvisation players are very hard to follow but at least they should give you inspirations.

A rather complicated answer I suppose!

Alan (swinagal)

Improvising is like composing music in real time while composing is improvising off time or more slowly.

http://www.wnyc.org/music/articles/16415

This might be interesting if you haven't heard it - Keith Jarret discusses making music, improvising etc

GREAT!
AD,
Thank You veeery much!
I love Jarrett.

I have great difficulties in understanding what he says, but slowly I want to understand his concepts.
(I'm from Italy).