Improvisation
This is
the skill you need for jazz. Blues, rock, and many
Non-Western traditions also use improvisation.
Suggestions
- Know your scales and arpeggios. A good improviser, given the name of a chord, can quickly play not only the notes of the chord but also the scale implied by the chord. Any decent book on playing jazz, or any teacher familiar with jazz, will introduce the student to these chords and scales.
- There are now many book/CD combinations available to help the beginning improviser in many different genres and on many different instruments. A good book of this type will give the student a chance to improvise on many familiar tunes, and some also introduce the music theory involved. At the time of this writing, one source of a large variety of such books was
jazzbooks.com .
- The exercises at the
petersax site mentioned above would also be useful for the beginning improviser.
- Listen to jazz often. Listen to the improvisers you admire, and if a particular solo really appeals to you, listen to it many times, find the notes on your instrument, and then try writing it down as accurately as you can. Many famous improvisors, when interviewed, mention how useful it was to them to learn from other soloists by
transcribing their solos in this way.
- Figure out how to play your favorite jazz (or blues or rock)
licks (short
motives that show up in many pieces in the same genre) on your instrument. Practice stringing them together in ways that make sense to you, but are different from what you've heard. Add your own variations.
- Find a teacher who is familiar with the type of improvisation you want to learn, join a jazz band, and/or get together with other musicians who also want to practise improvisation and take turns playing background/rhythm for each other.
Recognizing intervals and writing music down
This is the skill that allowed Beethoven to continue composing masterpieces even after he became deaf. If you are interested in composing, arranging, music theory, musicology, or just being able to write down a tune quickly and accurately, you'll want to be able to make that quick connection between what you hear and written music.
Suggestions
- Before you can do this, you must know your
major and
minor keys and scales and your
Intervals . You may also want to understand
Transposition , since you may find it easier to work in some keys than in others.
- As of this writing,
Teoria Musical was a free ear training website that worked well, and the commercial site
TrainEar included a free online version.
- Once again, practice is the best way to become good at this. Start with tunes that you know well, but don't know what the (written) notes are. Listen to them in your head (or play a recording) while trying to write them down. Then play what you have written, noticing where you were correct and where you made mistakes. Which intervals are you good at hearing? Which do you have trouble identifying? Do you often mistake one particular interval for another? Do you tend to identify a note by its interval from the previous note or by its place in the chord or in the key? Answering these questions will help you improve more quickly.
- Some people find it easier to learn to recognize intervals if they associate each interval with a familiar tune. (For example, in the familiar song from
The Sound of Music that begins "Do, a deer, a female deer...", all the intervals in the phrase "a female deer" are major thirds, and every interval in the phrase "someday I'll wish upon a star" in the song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" is a minor third.) The tune should be very familiar, so when trying to hear a
tritone , some people will prefer thinking of the beginning of "The Simpsons" theme; others will prefer the beginning of "Maria" from
West Side Story . If you think this method will work for you, try playing the interval you are having trouble hearing, and see what tune it reminds you of. As of this writing,
TrainEar included a long list, with links to recordings, or songs that can be associated with various intervals.
- Try searching at YouTube for "Interval song" or "ear training" to find videos that you might find helpful.
