Improvisation: The Key to Becoming a True Musician
What is it? 🤷🏻♂️
Have you ever noticed that there are some musicians that are only able to play pieces that they have spent time learning and there are other musicians that are able to just sit down at the piano and make music? Both types of musician may have an equal understanding of music, yet one is more naturally able to access that information in any situation.
Becoming a musician is a journey that requires many different skills and each of these different skills takes time to learn and build confidence in. Let’s take technique for example. At the start of learning an instrument, our physical ability to play the instrument is somewhat limited and over time we train our hands to be able to naturally perform the required movements. Another example might be “chords”. We can learn and understand a chord progression as it relates to a piece of music that we are learning.
However, does this mean that we can only improve our technique once we have come across every technique through a piece of music? Does this mean we fully understand the purpose or full roster of uses one of these chords can have?
The problem with solely relying on preexisting pieces of music for all of our learning is that it doesn’t necessarily become a part of our immediately accessible musical vocabulary - a lot of the information becomes situation dependant and it can take much longer to see the same ideas appear enough times to be able to utilise the concept independent of any given piece of music. So how do you truly get comfortable with the language of music? - The answer is improvisation.
2. Freedom in Fluency 🗣️
So how does improvising help you with this?
Well…much like learning to sight read, improvisation requires quick thinking. You are putting yourself under pressure to navigate through the music in a way that makes sense. However, with improvisation, the only judge of whether you have gotten it right or wrong is whether you played what you intended to play or not. Many people think improvisation is just making something up on the spot, but it isn’t!
Improvisation is making something up on the spot within certain and specific constraints. An acting improvisation has the constraints of trying to make sense given the situation you are acting out. For example, if you were doing an improvisation that was set in a coffee shop, it would be very odd to ask the barista for a train ticket (usually)! The same applies within music!
If you are trying to improvise something that sounds like a pop song, it’s important that you understand the nuances that make up a pop song and what tools you have to work with. If you were trying to play a jazz improvisation, the musical features that you have available to you are vastly different. Practicing improvisation allows you to have a much fuller understanding of the tools that are available to you in order to create a particular sound, and in turn this means that when you are learning other peoples music, you can more easily see and feel their intentions.
3. Trying and Testing 🧪
So how do you practice improvisation? How do you learn what musical features create which effects?
For this, imitation is key and therefore active listening is key! Most musicians that become good at improvisation have the ability to notice patterns.
What exactly about a jazz piece makes it sound jazzy?
What structure do pop songs normally have?
Are there types of chords that are used a lot in classical music?
What about the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack makes it sound “pirate-y”?
What about the Mission Impossible and James Bond soundtracks makes it sound particularly “espionage-y”?
These types of questions help you form a series of patterns that will help you generate idiomatic music when improvising. The key is to sit down and try, but try within certain parameters! Making an attempt at improvising something that sounds like it might fit in a James Bond film will teach you a lot about the features that are associated with that genre of playing. Then the next time you hear a piece of music that is particularly “sneaky” or “smooth” (for example) you will understand exactly why through your inherent understanding of music.
One of the most frequent questions asked of me is “how do you know what a piece of music is trying to convey?”. The answer is through pattern recognition and a lot of playing around with those patterns to create similar effects myself.
So, if you want a much deeper understanding of music, try improvising, copying different styles of music and start building that collection of patterns!
Matthew Cawood
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