In movies about music, we often see virtuoso improvisation. It both attracts us and frightens us with its complexity.
Improvisation is an impromptu activity based on imagination and creativity. We see it everywhere and are familiar with it ourselves. In music, improvisation is the creation of a musical form or its playing with musical expression. The main means of expressiveness are harmony, rhythm, tempo, dynamics, timbre, articulation, and intonation.
The basic point of musical improvisation is the concept of cerebral hemispheres and two different approaches to improvisation. According to modern psychology, the left hemisphere is responsible for logical, rational activity, and the right hemisphere for emotional and sensual activity. The approach to working on a particular piece and developing yourself as an improvising musician in general will be based on these concepts.
Approach 1 – left-hemispheric
This approach involves the gradual development of various ideas for playing musical material, and the musician draws these ideas from the outside and most often in a rational way. In this approach, ideas such as playing arpeggios of chords or playing arpeggios of some chords while playing other chords are common.
It is most often called “vertical” – playing each chord in a harmony in its own way – fretting, arpeggios, pentatonic, etc. Such opinions are based on music theory and are based on rational assumptions about harmony, background interest, and tartness of sound. To a large extent, this is the result of experiments with different modes and chord progressions. The advantages of this approach are the ability to quickly draw ideas from other musicians, as well as create your own by analyzing harmony, chord structure, modes, etc. The disadvantage of frequent use of the left hemispheric approach can be the creation of “music” from the head, without anticipation, feeling, and individuality.
It is true that video tutorials and books often tell you what kind of fret or arpeggio to play over a particular chord, but leave out the rhythm and phrasing. By rhythm, we mean the rhythmic basis of the entire solo as a whole, and, more importantly, the rhythmic basis of each phrase. Not much attention is paid to the length of each phrase in metric units (how many beats your phrases should last). As a result, a beginner improviser finds himself in a situation where he doesn’t know what to do with a particular harmony.
Let’s start with the length of the phrase. Here, of course, everything is individual, but many textbooks prefer two-beat phrases. A little later, you can try to “construct” four-bar phrases, but for now, let’s focus on two measures in 4/4. Two measures in 4/4 are two whole durations, four halves, 8 quarters, 16 eighth notes, and 32 sixteenths.
To get started, take the traditional form, the twelve-bar blues, and play only two-bar phrases in the pentatonic or blues scale. Since we have fixed two aspects – the length of the phrase and the sound structure – we now need to determine the rhythmic basis of the phrase. Start with long notes – play a whole note on the first beat of each measure and then pause in measures 3 and 4. Repeat the same: 5th and 6th measures – whole notes, 7th and 8th – pause. Do the same in measures 9 through 12. It’s up to you to decide which notes to choose from the sound series. Listen and experiment. It’s best to start with the tonic chord you’re playing at the moment. Do it right now. Congratulations – you’ve just played a conscious, prepared, rhythmic improvisation on a blues square. Next, play half measures and then pause for two beats. Do the same with quarters, eighths, and sixteenths. Take the time to stabilize this aspect of the game and remember the two conditions for successful practice: listen to what is happening and enjoy the experience.
Metronomic accuracy is very important when practicing the left-hemispheric approach: start strictly on the first beat of the first, fifth, and ninth measures and stop on the first beat of the third, seventh, and eleventh measures. At this stage, do not try to play unevenly, swing parts, syncopate, or over-accentuate. To develop yourself as a performer, you can experiment with dynamics – make a crescendo before the end of the phrase, or, conversely, a diminuendo. A good dynamic nuance trainer is to play the first phrase on the forte, the second on the piano, the third on the mezzo forte, and so on.
When playing strictly on the first eighth becomes a simple and well-developed skill for you, you can afford to develop metronomic development. Choose the phrases you like best and start them on the second eighth of the first measure. In theory, you should end on the “one and” in the third measure (well, and the seventh and eleventh, respectively). You can make a weekly plan for yourself – Monday 1, Tuesday 1i, Wednesday 2, and so on (metric fractions from which you start playing phrases). To be sure, play only eight durations all week. I am sure that such a “limited” game (which actually gives you great metrical flexibility) will bring you a lot of pleasure. And, most importantly, now your melodic lines will have a strictly defined rhythm and will occupy a certain place in the “grid” of the entire musical form.
The next step is rhythmic ingenuity. Open the collection of solfege exercises and play the same simple sound patterns – pentatonic or blues scale – with regular and reverse gallop, dotted, eighth and fourth triads, sixteenth quartals with the first, second, third, and fourth notes skipped. Combine rhythmic figures in different combinations, as before, strictly observing the phrase length of two beats. Count pauses in quarters – this will develop your sense of musical time. Professional music performance, like high-quality improvisation, is always rhythmic or rhythmicized. So, by improvising with rhythmic figures and patterns, you develop as a musician in general. All rhythmic figures will come to life under your fingers, becoming part of you to an even greater extent.
Approach 2 – right hemispheric
I think this approach is more musical, sincere, and individual. Since we are discussing the topic of playing a ready-made musical form (say, the jazz standard “Mack the knife”), you first need to break it down into individual chords. Then try to play each chord separately, forgetting what it is called, what its function is in the harmony and structure of the piece, etc. For example, in Kurt Weill’s Mack the Knife, the first chord is the tonic Bb6.
The right-hemispheric approach is that you play a chord on the piano or guitar (even if you are a brass player or violinist, you need a general knowledge of any harmonic instrument – keyboards are the best option) or enter it in the simplest, best choral texture in which or sequencer and listen carefully to yourself. Try to hear the musical ideas that will sound in your head. When working with the right hemisphere approach, you need to be sincere and honest, not allow yourself to think that the same Bb6 chord is now sounding, consisting of the notes B-flat, D, F, and G, and therefore any combination of them will sound good.
The plan of action is as follows:
play the chord;
listen to its sound, feel its color and mood;
sing a phrase that comes to mind in response to this chord;
find the notes you sing on a musical instrument;
play them with different strokes of articulation and using different fingering;
memorize the phrases you have learned, write down the best ones with notes;
use the best of the phrases as blanks;
In the case of the second, intuitive approach, you should consciously abstract yourself from the use of articulation, rhythmic basis, phrase length, etc. Your articulation and dynamics will be those that you have practiced the most – consciously or not, the rhythmic basis of the phrases will come from the subconscious.