Author: musicalitywrld

Dave wrote a terrific guest post on song writing and arranging for the Musical U website last year and we were keen to pick his brains on songwriting advice – but in this conversation we also go deep into his own journey as a musician, the interplay of theory, instrument skills and your musical ear, and how he discovered the improviser’s mindset.

Dave shares:

• The trick to breaking into improv if it’s always seemed intimidating, and how he discovered this almost by accident.
• His two big tips for songwriters looking to improve.
• What causes many musicians to stall or plateau after learning for a few years, and how you can best tackle that and get moving again.

Dave has had a particularly interesting journey as a musician and it’s left him with true wisdom when it comes to the right mindset for teaching and learning music. We hope you’ll find this conversation as enlightening and inspiring as we did.

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Links and Resources

• Dave’s website
• Dave’s blog
• Arranging for Songwriters, with Dave Isaacs
• Dave Isaacs on JamPlay
• About Active Listening
• Making Music with Ease, with Gerald Klickstein

Transcript

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Dave. Thank you for joining us today.

Dave: Thanks for having me.

Christopher: So I’d love to start at the beginning if you wouldn’t mind. You’ve had an incredible career up to this point and I’d love to know more about how you got started in the first place in music.

Dave: Well, I grew up with a lot of music in the household. My mother played piano, my father played the guitar. Neither one of them had any kind of great level of skill but they loved it and they loved music so it was always music in the household and so I grew up being introduced to all these different things. My father had discovered classical and flamenco when he was actually in medical school in Holland in the 60’s and had brought back all of this music and so we had reams and reams of classical guitar music and Segovia records and John Williams records but my parents were also 60’s folk revivalists and so we had all kinds of folk records and my mother grew up in eastern Kentucky in the heart of Appalachia so I grew up hearing this mountain music and not even bluegrass so much but sort of pre-bluegrass, you know, the old mountain songs and things like that. And so you have the classical music on the one hand and she — my mother also loved a lot of the eastern European composers. She loved Bartok.

So I’m hearing Segovia playing Spanish music. I’m hearing Bartok on the piano. I’m hearing mountain ballads accompanied by dulcimer. I’m hearing Doc Watson flatpicking fiddle tunes and then I guess what started to catch me in terms of pop music was, just, what was on the radio and this is the late 70’s, early 80’s and pretty much my tastes weren’t all that different than your average American suburban kid. The Beatles were, I think, the first group that really sort of caught me as far as now I’m listening to everything. And now my mother maintains that I started playing guitar because she gave me an ultimatum that I had to find something to do with myself one summer instead of just laying around the house so I don’t recall this but I had, I don’t have any reason to doubt her and like I said, the guitar had been in the house and I was familiar with guitar music and, you know, as a 14-year-old you’re looking for your identity and it was the place that I found it quickly, and, you know, in the way that teenagers do so my hair started growing out and my wardrobe started changing and everything that goes with that but I just loved it and after a year or so of playing it started to seem like it was coming pretty naturally. So I was serious about it inside of a year and a half, two years.

Christopher: And what did it look like for you, learning guitar in that first year or two?

Dave: You know, I don’t think I was thinking all that much about it. It was just that there was music. I just found music so exciting and I would get a, I still do get very much a visceral response to it and I think that one of the things that first caught me early on was just the way that it felt. So some of it is listening and the response and I’m very auditory in my response to things which is no mystery for a musician but I experience music very vividly in that way, as sensation. And then you add the tactile element to that, of touching the strings and I goofed around on the piano and liked the piano. I had had a few episodes of piano lessons and the only time I really took to it was when I had a teacher who let me play by ear and it connected, actually, to the folk music because my mother also loved folk dancing. A lot of, actually, New England folk dancing and English contra dancing and things like that and so the music for this is some of these fiddle tunes but some of it was Renaissance music and these ancient melodies and I just really loved those and so the one piano teacher that I really loved was teaching me how to play these tunes and that stuff really stuck with me but the guitar I think also there was that aspect of, “Ooh, this might make me cool.” So, you know, there’s that —

Christopher: (Laughs) That’s great motivation for a 14-year-old.

Dave: Well, yeah, and it’s not the first time anyone’s said that. (Laughs) There’s lots of songs about it.

Christopher: So you were clearly immersed in a very musical household and it sounds like you had that inner drive to learn guitar, like this wasn’t something being forced upon you, but —

Dave: Oh, yeah. Not at all.

Christopher: Was it entirely self-taught, there?

Dave: Oh, no. I started lessons right away and I think my folks saw the importance of that and I think I needed the guidance. I wasn’t a noodler when I started off, and I see this all the time. When I was teaching kids, which I don’t do so much anymore, but before I came to Nashville I had a neighborhood teaching business and was very busy with that and did that for the first few years that I was here, as well. I see some kids, they just pick it up and they just start noodling around with it and I’m sure I did that to a certain extent but at first I did need structure. I like to noodle around on the piano, I think just the physicality of it, and I find this with most students. It takes a little bit of time just because the guitar is a little ungainly, sometimes, to start with. It’s not like piano where you just, basically, you’re pushing a button, just hitting a key.

Christopher: Absolutely. And so, how did things develop, then, for you in your teenage years as a guitar player?

Dave: Well I just started getting interested in all of it. I wanted to know about everything. My mom. I have to give my mom credit for a lot of this. She brought home a copy of Guitar Player Magazine that she had bought and this was, I don’t know, 1980, 1981. And so I’m reading all this stuff and I don’t know what most of it means but it’s interesting to me and then I start reading regularly and so I’m learning about all of these players doing all these different things and it made me curious about what they sounded like and so it became clear not too far in.

My first teacher’s name was Andy Polin. He passed away a couple of years ago I believe up in New York City, but he was a folkie but also a classically trained guitarist and so he was able to teach me the Doc Watson Finger Picking Blues but also started me off fairly early on with the classical guitar and told me, maybe somewhat not entirely accurately that it was the best way to be taken seriously if I wanted to go to music school.

Now, I didn’t know much about jazz or jazz programs. He taught me a little bit about that but I knew that, I guess, at this point I had already started at the, in the prep division where I later went on to go to college at Queens College in the City University of New York. They had a weekend program and so I was taking a couple of classes there.

I was taking guitar lessons and sight singing theory and playing in the jazz band so I was starting to be introduced to that and so I learned about this summer program at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, which is a venerable and very highly regarded music school and at the time was very much still a jazz program. And so I got up there, 16 years old. It was my first time away from home on my own. I walk in the door with my guitar and there’s hundreds of guys with guitars, mostly guys, mind you. This is still 1984 and that was my first real-world, hit-you-upside-the-head music industry lesson. “Oh, okay. There’s hundreds of people here and most of them know more than you do,” but I was so hungry to learn about it.

Christopher: And what was that like for you, going to that Berklee Summer School? That sounds like an amazing opportunity.

Dave: It really, it was very eye-opening because I got exposed to a lot of different kinds of music. I came back with, you know, my record collection something like tripled after I came back from that program because it introduced me to so much but the biggest thing that happened for me was that I discovered improvisation and not necessarily in the jazz context, either, because that was very intimidating. It was learning how to do that. We had classes where we were doing that but it was more in the sense of, like I said before, that I wasn’t really a noodler as far as just sort of finding things on my own.

I was practicing what my teacher taught me and I was playing a lot. I know that. I can’t even tell you I remember very clearly that first year or so of what we were doing although I can remember — well, no, that’s not true, because I can picture what’s in that first notebook and I still have it, but this idea of improvisation as just something that you could just do and that you didn’t need knowledge to do, you could just pick up your guitar and make a sound and that might mean strumming behind the nut and just going, scrape, scrape, scrape. It might mean yelling into the pickups. It might mean whatever you could do to make another sound and this was huge because it was — you know, up to that point everything that I was trying to do was to imitate something that I loved.

So it’s 1984, I’m 16 years old so I’m listening to Van Halen and Rush and Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix and so I get together with some guys who were up the hall in the dorm and oddly enough there were two bass players and a drummer rooming together, which is absolutely bizarre. Just having two bass players in one room in most musical situations is pretty unusual and the four of us got together and just started jamming and, “Well, okay, how do you do this with two bass players?” and I guess maybe it wasn’t four of us all of the time but we’re trying to play this very technical, heavier rock stuff and none of us were really skilled enough to do it well. We were having fun but it wasn’t, you know, I would listen to some of the other guys who were there playing and it just, you know, took the top of your head off. Like, how the heck did they do that? We knew we weren’t at that point but we were taking classes and playing in these jazz ensembles and I don’t even remember who brought in the idea but somebody brought up the word, conversation. “Hey, why don’t we just talk to each other?”

Christopher: Hm.

Dave: I play something, you play something and we go back and forth. And so we started experimenting with this where the drummer would just set up a beat and one of the bass players would sort of lay in and hold down a groove doing it in a more traditional way and the other who also played guitar was treating his bass more like a baritone guitar and he and I just started basically making noise over the top of it. We called ourselves, The Noise Quartet, and it was just free-form, sometimes over a groove, sometimes not and we started recording these sessions and then we’d go back up to the dorm and listen to them and you’d hear yourself doing something and you’d think, “Wow. I just played that?” because you’re really not aware of it, maybe you are but in the moment it goes by, but you’re not thinking so much about what you’re doing.

It was just — we were all in this mindset of, we’re exploring together and it was as much a social interaction as anything else but we weren’t talking to each other, we were playing our instruments and to go from trying to emulate Rush, you know, this highly technical music to just saying, “Whatever I do is okay. The skills that I have at this moment are enough for me to make music with.” That was huge.

And so the fact that the music was weird and dissonant and kind of strange didn’t really bother us. I mean, it was partly this sort of rebellious teenage thing, “We don’t have to sound like that,” you know. I’m sure there was an element of that because I certainly wasn’t listening to dissonant music before that, you know, I was not hip to Sonic Youth or Huskerdu or anything like, you know, I didn’t know from punk or anything like that or noise rock or any of that. It was just, “Wow, we can play if we do this,” and the interesting thing was by the end of that summer we could play the songs we wanted to play much better because we’d really dug into our instruments and spent some time exploring and that was huge and that’s stayed with me ever since.

Christopher: That’s fantastic. I love the way you describe that and I think it’s particularly powerful because you were coming from the perspective that I think probably a lot of our listeners are experiencing, which is to look at, say, jazz improvisation and think it’s very technical and methodical and theory-based and you need to kind of study and master it and then you can improvise, which is obviously–

Dave: And they’re the same.

Christopher: — it’s obviously the exact opposite of what you just said.

Dave: Right. Well, then of course, then at the same time you hear these quotes from Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis and they say, “Oh, just forget everything and play,” and so the student is, “Well, how the heck do I do that?”

Christopher: Mm-hm. And it sounds like it was really, for you, it was about having that playground to explore in, to have that opportunity to see what you could do with your guitar rather than always having to, kind of, figure out in advance and be fully polished up before you tried it.

Dave: Absolutely.

Christopher: And I, yeah, I think that alone is fascinating, but you kind of tacked on something else powerful at the end, there, out of nowhere, which is that it wasn’t just improving your improv skills. You were able to then apply this new mastery of your instrument or understanding of your instrument to what had been challenging before, which was just playing other people’s music, playing by ear. Is that right?

Dave: Yeah, and I think, you know, I didn’t have an understanding of this in the same way that I do now, having been teaching for all these years, but, you know, one of the things I tell my students is you want to play consciously and that doesn’t necessarily mean knowing what you’re going to play next but it means you’re playing with some kind of intention and you’re attempting to control, at least when you’re practicing, you do want to control your hands. You have an idea you are giving the hands an instruction to do something and you want them to do it so you need to play or at least spend a certain amount of your time staying within your technical capabilities because that’s how you reinforce the accuracy. And then of course you want to spend a certain amount of time pushing your technical capabilities and that’s different but what those improvisations did was it tuned me in to that.

It was, “Okay, this is what I can do well right this moment,” and it did a lot to develop my control. Now, of course, I was also practicing for ensembles. I was in private lessons. I was being challenged very, very highly all around so I can’t discount the impact of that. All of those things together had an impact but it really is true that by exploring with what you can do you, I think, you make a stronger connection between the mental and the tactile aspects of playing and that’s just going to make you a stronger player.

Christopher: For sure. You know, it reminds me very much of something a previous guest said, Gerald Klickstein, who wrote The Musician’s Way and he talked about how you can do exercises to improve your technique and that’s very important and you want to push your technique and continue pushing yourself, but when it comes to actually working on a piece and making music and trying to express your musical ideas, you actually want to take it back a few notches. You don’t want to be at the forefront of your technique ability, and it sounds like you’ve expressed the same in your teaching, that, you know, you need to separate out a bit really pushing yourself versus giving yourself a bit of space to explore what’s possible, musically.

Dave: Yeah. I sort of, I guess the way that I break things down in terms of the teaching philosophy is that I see practices falling into three categories and one is pure technique, where you’re not playing music, you’re playing exercises because you’re breaking things down to the absolute mechanics and this is something that I learned from the classical guitar, that you can isolate not just one passage but one measure or two notes and just practice that and when you’re able to dig in with that level of detail, that level of specificity, everything breaks down to what’s mechanical and all mechanical problems have mechanical solutions. So you need to spend some time with that but if you spent your time only with that most people’s brains would bubble.

They can’t, it’s just not something you can concentrate on for that length of time, some people more so than others, but from there the next part of practicing is getting into musical contexts but still not worrying about things that you can do. You’re practicing things that you can’t yet do and so maybe you’re learning something new in your vocabulary. Maybe it’s still technical in the sense of scales and arpeggios. Maybe it’s a chord that you need for a song or a particular chord transition that you need for a song. If you’re studying jazz maybe it’s your 2-5 progressions or whatever it is but it’s putting the technique in a musical context but you’re not trying to do things that are really in your hands and in your mind yet.

And then the third part of practicing is getting into a flow and doing the things that you can technically accomplish but doing them with fluidity and doing them with confidence and doing them naturally and I think that all three of those things are equally important and if you neglect any one of them you don’t really progress, where there’s a hole somewhere in your development as a musician.

Christopher: How important would you say developing your musical ear was in that period where you were learning to improvise and you were, you know, finding that the way to play the songs you liked might be more by ear than by carefully studying tab or sheet music? How important was it for you to have a good ear to begin with and how important was it to develop one on the way?

Dave: It was huge. I think the fact that I had a decent ear to start with, at least enough that I could plink out melodies with one finger on the piano when I was a kid and my first teacher really did encourage me. I remember wanting to learn Jimmy Page’s guitar solo from “Stairway to Heaven,” and he said, “Why don’t you sit down with it and see if you can find some of it?” and so I did and just the fact that he encouraged that maybe this was possible, I think, got me to feel that I probably could do it and I at least got a start on it and in those days you couldn’t find tablets the way you can now. You were just beginning to have tablets being published in the guitar magazines.

In fact, I remember the very first guitar solo that I learned from a tab in a publication was Angus Young’s solo in AC/DC, “You Shook Me All Night Long,” and that was, like, you know, that was great. “All right. I can get into this,” but you didn’t really, obviously, you didn’t have the internet and you were just beginning to see the publications that would publish tabs and so when it came to tablatures mostly my tabbing things out myself and I spent a lot of time when I was in high school trying to work things out.

Now, I made a lot of mistakes in not quite understanding fingerings and there were quite a few revelations when someone showed me the right way to do something and I’d been beating my head against the wall trying to accomplish an impossible fingering. But when I got to music school I struggled with theory at first. It took several times through Theory 1 before I got it. I went to one college — I spent two years at the Hart School of Music at the University of Hartford in Connecticut and then came back home to New York and started at Queens College in New York City and failed my theory placement test and had to go back to Theory 1 again and it was, I guess that was about the point where I realized I had really better knuckle down and start working on this or I’m not gonna get it, because it was a very rigorous program. In fact, Queens College, this was the Aaron Copeland School of Music and they had a theory jury. In order for you to graduate and get your degree, you had to give an hour-long oral presentation on two large-scale pieces that they gave you to analyze and do a large-scale written presentation on the same thing and it was a Schubert quintet and a Stravinsky orchestral, but this was heavy-duty stuff, so they took the theory seriously. But at the same time, I got to school and started ear training classes and my ear was much more developed than a lot of my classmates because I had spent that time working out those tabs.

Christopher: Hm.

Dave: So that was huge.

Christopher: And how did things develop for you from there, after music school? What direction did you go in?

Dave: Well, things took a few turns. As I said, my first teacher had encouraged me to study classical guitar and so I did do that and I will say that I loved it, I will say that I was devoted to it but not exclusively. So I was still playing electric guitar, I was still playing in bands on the weekends all through grad school, well, all through most of college. I discovered the Grateful Dead my first year of college and that took me off on a whole thing right there and of course that connected to the improvisation thing but there was also a connection to the folk music that I knew and it was rock and roll. So all of these things kind of started connecting there.

So I’ve come to believe that to really master something like classical guitar you really need to devote yourself to it exclusively and not only because you’re gonna rip your nails to shreds playing an electric guitar but I worked very seriously at it all through college and grad school and I finished my master’s degree and at this point I had started writing some music and I was putting together concerts. I was booking church halls and things like that. I was getting friends together for little chamber recitals and really was hustling and I spent the winter of 1993, so I graduated 1990, okay, 1993. So ’93, ’94 was a real bad winter in New York City. We had a lot of snow and I didn’t go out much and I practiced something like eight hours a days for that entire winter. I had wanted to enter the GFA competition, the Guitar Foundation of America, in the spring and this was a big deal. If you won this thing, you got a debut recital in New York and it could be a career-making thing to win and certainly just to do well in but I didn’t go out much. I didn’t have much of a social life since I had moved back home and eight hours a day of guitar with not much else in my life to balance it became a problem.

I started getting pain in my hands in early spring and by April its was so bad that I couldn’t play and it turned out that I had developed this pretty serious repetitive strain injury. So I had to stop playing completely for about six months and of course that was not fun. That was hard and when I came back to it I realized that I had to make a choice, that if I was going to have a career as a classical guitarist then I was basically gonna have to rebuild my technique from the beginning but that I could go back to playing popular music and started off really just playing the guitar and strumming and over the course of the next few years I started playing in bands again and rebuilding things and so I guess it’s two or three years after this and I had started a duo with a female singer and so we were playing around town singing two-part harmony and I’m playing acoustic guitar accompanying us and friends of mine are starting to record their first projects. They’re recording, they’re releasing CD’s. This is now 1995 and so I said, “We don’t have any original material. We should write some songs,” and my partner wasn’t all that interested in it but as I started writing I finally said, “You know, I really should start my own group to play these songs,” and so I started putting something together and we start playing and as we’re getting out and playing shows, so this is Long Island, New York outside of New York City, people are saying, “Oh, you guys sound kind of country,” and “We do?” I really didn’t even know what that meant because I wasn’t listening to country music. Like I said, I grew up on listening to deep folk music and there was a big country element to the Dead but I didn’t really know that or recognize that so much. You know, they were covering Merle Haggard but I didn’t know who Merle Haggard was, I mean, other than that he wrote this song. And we started digging into that and I went, “Oh, I like this,” and country music in the mid-90’s was pretty much what a lot of rock was in the mid-70’s. The Eagles obviously were a favorite band of mine and they had a real strong country element and there was steel guitar on Led Zeppelin records and on Elton John records, and, you know, you look at what Elton was doing in the early 70’s that Bernie Taupin is writing these sort of mythical stories of the American south and the American west and he’s writing music which is bringing together country elements and R&B and gospel elements and I’m discovering The Band around this time and so all of this roots music thing really started to come full circle. So I went from — oh yeah, and then we discovered that there were clubs where people played country music and if you played the right songs that people wanted to dance to you could get paid on a Tuesday night. So, now, of course I’m spelling out what a lot of people here in Nashville absolutely hate because you’re playing this music but you’re inauthentic, you know what I mean? Like, “Well, you didn’t grow up like that so you shouldn’t be doing that.”

Christopher: If you didn’t actually own a pickup truck you can’t sing about it.

Dave: Well, kind of. I mean, Alan Jackson has a song called “Gone Country” and there is a line in there, “Well, I’m a simple girl, myself. Grew up on Long Island,” and it’s absolutely about you discover it and you buy a pair of boots and yes, okay, so I live that cliché, too but I genuinely did love the music and there was a connection to the music that I knew and so I had a country rock band and ultimately it was a country rock band because we weren’t singing about pickup trucks. It was, you know, the influences that I was coming to were southern rock, you know, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Tom Petty isn’t necessarily southern rock but some of that kind of element and the Eagles and the Dead so it was definitely a country rock band and it was funny because, you know, when I started coming to Nashville it was a little puzzling to people because it just wasn’t fitting in.

And in New York we were just weird. We were completely uncool because, you know, how is that cool, to be doing that? And finally people did start to connect with it and so it was, you know, it’s a pretty big jump from serious classical guitar to trying to pitch songs in Nashville and playing in a band that’s playing for country line dancers but it was all musicianship, you know? And the ears and the training and the listening really did come in to all of that because pulling the band together took a lot of listening and arranging the songs took a lot of listening and thinking and we really worked it, really tried to put a lot of effort into the arrangements and what was going on there musically and so one of the things people started responding to when we started releasing CD’s and were getting press is people were responding to a level of depth and care that had gone in to the music itself because it is true that when it came to country music around that time you had basically the same ten, twelve musicians playing on virtually every major label record and so they pretty much all sounded the same, that it wasn’t like — and Nashville has always very much been about very, very, very skilled musicians turning out a consistent product very, very efficiently. I don’t think there’s anywhere where people do that better. I mean, I’ve played a lot of recording sessions in my career. I am still intimidated when I get on sessions with the full-time music row session players because I have never seen anybody work faster, just, bang, bang, bang, and I’m not saying that they’re not creative because they absolutely are but there’s definitely a sound. There’s a wheelhouse that everything falls right into and so we were making music that was appealing to that audience but was also relating to maybe if someone did grow up listening to the rock bands and listening to the Eagles and Loggins and Messina and Poco and Buffalo Springfield, and harmonies like Crosby, Stills and Nash and all that stuff was coming together and I mean, I know there are people who are gifted enough that they just are that creative on their own without any kind of training but I know that I wouldn’t have gotten there without it.

Christopher: So I have to interrupt there and pick up on that point, because this is a topic that comes up a lot on this podcast as you might imagine. That question of talent or having a gift and you are just the, you’re immersed in Nashville where, you know, musicians around the world dream of going because it’s where the gifted musicians live. I’d love to hear your perspective and particularly based on what you just said, what’s your feeling about, you know, having innate talent versus working hard versus luck for reaching your full musical potential and having success in music?

Dave: I think having innate talent is fantastic and It’s a gift and it’s something to celebrate but there’s an awful lot of talented people that don’t go anywhere. I think that the innate talent is what often gets people hooked, then I think a lot of people quit before they’ve had a chance to really get anywhere if they don’t have enough natural ability to get to a point where they can really start making music but at the same time pretty much everybody, unless you’re at the absolute, you know, top, top, top of, you know, who’s out there and we can drop whatever names we want, there’s lots of them in whatever genre but everyone’s got a limit and even the most talented musicians are basically going to hit the end of their gift, the end of their ability and there are plenty of people who have sustained fantastic careers just getting to that point, finding a sound and they continue to explore it and there’s no denying that that talent is what got them there but at the same time they all worked hard, regardless of how it actually happened whether it was formal schooling or whether it was, like — I just finished, I mentioned The Band before, one of my favorite bands, The Band and a lot of younger people may not know them at this point, but the song, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” the song, “The Wait,” and one of my favorite groups because of the interaction between them and the sound that they made.

So I just read Robbie Robertson’s book, who was their guitarist and primary songwriter and I’d read Lee Von Helm’s book who was the drummer and one of the main singers and they all went out together as teenagers. They got, they were working behind a rockabilly, singing in Ronnie Hawkins and this is the nineteen — late 50’s, early 60’s playing these rough clubs, southern roadhouses and things like that, touring all over, teenage kids playing in these tough clubs and getting their butts kicked every night. That was school. The Beatles in Hamburg, that was school. So you can’t, you know, the talent is not enough without the work and the formal schooling, I think, just bridges the gap — for me anyway. It helped me put the pieces together but it also was a place for me to find mentors and to get guidance. I mean, sure I learned from doing my counterpoint exercises but the things that really stuck with me were the teachers that I had that, whether it was one thing they said or one moment or a period of time that I was exposed to working with them that just opened these doors that made it possible for me to receive all this information and start to connect things together. So I think talent’s wonderful but it’s — I don’t think any talented person is going to go far without the effort and I think that someone without a natural gift can still accomplish a lot and be able to play confidently and enjoy playing.

Christopher: Wonderful. So one area where I think musicians have particular nervousness or hangups about where they have talent or whether they have a gift is creating your own music, whether that’s through improvisation, like we touched on there, or through writing songs or composing. You have particular expertise and experience in songwriting and I’d love to know more about how you got started, you know. You told a bit of the story, there, and I think you explained how your instrument playing transitioned from the classical world to this country rock kind of band but I’d love for you to fill in the part that explains how you were suddenly writing songs and performing them.

Dave: I think it was just, I mean, I was writing music when I was in school, instrumental music and arranging folk tunes and things like that. I just thought it was cool to be creating something and all the people that I admired the most were creators, were making their own music. So it was something that I wanted to do and so I just started doing it and, you know, the thing is, having now been surrounded by songwriters for the all the years that I’ve been here in Nashville, there are people that that is absolutely the core of what they do. They have been driven to write songs from the beginning and they started playing music because they needed a vehicle for their songs and I am not that person. For me a song is something that comes or something that I sit down to do. One of the things I’ve learned in my time in Nashville is to develop the craft enough that I know how to take an idea and sit down and write a song around it so it. So I can do that on command now. And whether it’s a great song or not, you try to make it the best song you can but there is a particular craft that goes into that and it does make me think of something that my composition teacher said in class one time. He was telling a story about being at a dinner party and a woman asked him, “Do you walk in the woods before you compose?” and he laughed and she said, “Why are you laughing?” He said, “Why would I do that?” and she said “For inspiration,” and he said, “No, I get up, I sit down at my piano every day at 9 o’clock and I go to work.” And there was something similar and I read a wonderful book recently called The War of Art and — Oh my God, what is his name?

Christopher: Steven Pressfield?

Dave: Steven Pressfield. Thank you. Amazing book and he had a quote from somebody who was a writer, I think and it was, “Inspiration strikes promptly at 9 o’clock when I sit down at my desk,” or something like that.

Christopher: (Laughs)

Dave: And he describes his own rituals that he has to sit down and things that to him are inspiring but at the same time you do the work. Now, for me, ultimately I’m a musician and a guitar player and writing songs is a piece of that puzzle so the songs over the years have gone in all kinds of different directions and I think because I always had a lot of enthusiasm for different kinds of music there’s different aesthetics, you know, I mean, learning how to write a song like a Nashville songwriter is one thing. Learning how to write an instrumental piece whether it’s a jazz tune that is a vehicle for improvisation or whether it’s a composed piece of music is something else entirely.

Writing music with a band or arranging a song with a band is something else entirely and so all of those things, I mean, for me, personally, all, I touch on all of them which may have been a detriment to my performing career because I’ve crossed from one place to another so many times but it’s exciting to me. I think in terms of anything I might say to someone that wants to write songs I think that you have to look to the fact that all of us have grown up surrounded by music and we know what music is supposed to sound like. We know when something works and so the first thing is just to really start listening and noticing what’s going on around you and recognizing that you have to assess your own place in the continuum of musical skill and recognize that if you don’t have much, that you are at the beginning of that, but also that it is a journey and a path that you can proceed upon. Now, I see songwriters here in Nashville all the time that say, “I’m not a musician,” or “I don’t write music,” and then you sit down with them and you start — I had this in co-writing situations where they came in with a lyric that was finished or mostly finished and they’re coming to me as the quote, composer, to write the music.

So I’d start throwing out ideas and I’d get, “Well, no. It’s not that,” you know, “It doesn’t go like that.” Well, then you have an idea of what the music is. And so many writers, I find, are just convinced that they don’t have the — coming back to the talent question — they think they don’t have that ability or they don’t play an instrument or they don’t play it well so, “Well, I don’t really write music.” At the same time they’ll finish the lyric and call it a song and say that they can hear it in their heads. So what I’ve finally come to believe in working with people who are trying to be professional writers is that most people that are moved to write songs have an idea in their heads of how the music goes, whether they can articulate it or not and that there is very often, or sometimes, I should say, a disconnect between what they imagine and what they’re able to articulate and sometimes when they try to articulate it they think that what’s coming out is what they hear and it’s not or other times they recognize that and the best advice that I can give to somebody that wants to write songs is that first they should just write and it doesn’t matter what comes out and you should let it be whatever you want it to be but at the same time recognizing that there are songs that are going to be somewhat oblique and obscure and without something strong musically to hang on them they’re just not going to work as well. I mean, it’s a subjective thing, right?

But you can talk about song craft and you can talk about if something’s catchy or if it has a strong hook and if it’s memorable and that ultimately you can study even just by listening, songwriting, by looking at what, that music that people have written and not necessarily copying them but just saying, “Oh, well that works,” and you don’t have to lift somebody’s melody to appreciate the way a good melody moves. You don’t have to completely lift the chords from a song to see how a chord progression works. At the same time, though, I have to go back to another formative experience. I took a class in grad school called “Music About Music,” — you were asking about when I started writing music — and so this class was about how composers stole from each other, basically.

Christopher: (Laughs)

Dave: And in the very early, you’re talking about in the late Middle Ages and getting into the Renaissance, there was a tradition of this, of people would write songs on each other’s themes and, I mean, write pieces on each other’s themes and that went on through the classical, I mean, it still is a tradition in classical music, and I remember one day in class we were listening to an early Mozart piece, and by early, I mean, he was, what, eight, nine, something crazy like that and that he had studied with Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach’s son and then we listened to some of his music and lo and behold, they sound very, very similar and I thought, “Eureka!” There was the moment, right? Now, yes, it was the child genius Mozart but even Mozart sounded like somebody else at some point. I can write music, too without worrying about what it sounds like. I just need to write.

That’s huge.

Christopher: I think you’ve painted such a lovely picture of how to approach songwriting and learning to write songs. Is there any other advice you’d have for someone who has maybe started on this journey and is faltering a little? Maybe they’re writing songs each week but they’re just, there is something they can’t put their finger on that they’re not happy with the quality of them. They’re not managing to bring out what they were inspired to bring out?

Dave: Well, as I said, I think there is the indefinable which is subjective and then there is the concrete which is the craft and that if you don’t understand meter then you need to look at the songs you love and understand why they work rhythmically, because rhythm, you know, is a physical thing and meter in songs is just speech with a rhythm you can feel, which, of course, all speech has to begin with, but, you know, what was exciting about Chuck Barry? Well, everything, basically, but the drive (Sings Johnny B Good) — went down in Louisiana close to New Orleans back up in the ponds by the evergreens — it’s driving and it’s — it catches your attention right away, you know? And so that is one thing that I find a lot of beginning songwriters don’t have a grasp of is meter and it’s not about counting syllables it’s understanding whether a lyric works as an understandable lyric and fits in a musical context and if you’re Peter Gabriel writing for Genesis in 1973 the rules were different. It didn’t have to have the same kind of meter but that was some other music that I completely love but that’s another thing.

And the other is to just start listening. I have rarely found that if I ask someone when I play a student a song whether they think they understand anything about harmony if I start playing a song and say, “When do you hear something change?” they’ll pick up on the chord change. They’ll pick up on a change in texture and they’ll pick up on the idea of a lift in energy. So it’s, so much of it is paying attention and just emulating what you hear and if you’re finding that it’s not coming naturally you can categorize those things and there are songwriting courses you can take and organizations. The Nashville Songwriter’s Association is fantastic. And it’s NSAI, Nashville Songwriters .com or .org. They have chapters all over. Actually it’s Nashville Songwriter’s Association International, so they’re everywhere and I learned a lot early on by going to some of these workshops and I learned something about the ways I didn’t want to write but I learned a lot about what made good writing and so you can look at the craft and just recognize that learning the craft is not going to be a barrier to creativity. It just gives you a way to create a structure to put your ideas into and gives you a set of tools and skills that you can work with to shape your ideas, take a good idea and make it into a good song.

Christopher: Terrific. One thing I was particularly keen to ask you about is your website and blog, the blog being called The Perpetual Beginner. I’d love to hear, why that name? How does that relate to the way you teach your philosophy on teaching music or learning music?

Dave: It started with the fact that I recognized I was working with a lot of people who had been playing the guitar or playing music for five years or ten years or forty years but didn’t feel like they had gotten better in a long time. So they’d say, “I’m still at a beginner level even though I’ve been playing for all this time. What’s wrong?” and there was generally, to me, just, there was something missing in the mindset. Either they didn’t think they were capable of doing more or they just didn’t know what to study. They needed the guidance on how to go about getting better and then there’s also the concept in zen, the beginner’s mind, not just in zen, in all kinds of things, but there’s a wonderful book and I’m not going to say his name right, but the last name is Suzuki. Shunryu Suzuki? I don’t, I can’t pronounce Japanese properly, but it’s called, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and one of my favorite quotes from that is, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s, there are a few,” and it’s cool. It’s, like, it takes me back to being sixteen and going, “I can make any sound on this guitar,” and how much I learned from that and how that how that helps your exploration and how it’s exciting and motivating so the beginner’s mindset keeps you open and keeps you learning. It keeps you from stagnating and it allows you to continue to recognize what you can and can’t do but it gives you the positive feedback that you can accomplish those things that you’re not ready to accomplish yet.

So I just thought that was a great way of looking at things and it’s at the core. I mean, it’s the core of my learning experience and so it’s at the core of my teaching.

Christopher: So let me play devil’s advocate, then, and ask a question that may be on the listener’s mind, which is, if you put yourself in that position of, you know, learning guitar for five years and you’ve kind of stalled and plateaued, do they not just need the right guitar course? Can they not just go into, you know, guitartricks.com or one of these websites and get the intermediate guitar course and just follow it step-by-step?

Dave: Maybe. I mean, what I hear from people often is that they sit down and they do that and they can learn to put their fingers in the right place and if the instructor is offering the kind of guidance that I think I got, then, yeah, that will do it, but I think that the difference is that most people, particularly with guitar, and I don’t really know why that is but I think it’s because it’s such a tactile instrument and, I mean, even the piano, you’re sitting at the piano and touching the keyboard but I think you have more of an awareness of the rest of your body that with the guitar. For some reason, it’s two hands out here and everything else disappears, sometimes including the ears. (Laughs) You know, anyone can show you where to put your fingers but it’s not gonna make that into music and so if you find the right person who is giving you the guidance of where to put your fingers but also telling you how there’s music in there and at the same time keeping you motivated enough, that’s the challenge, I mean, people all the time come to me saying, “Well I’m trying to learn on YouTube. It’s not working,” because they’re missing the big picture and also that they don’t have the structure. They don’t know what to practice first. They don’t know how to get from point A to point B.

Some people really can put it all together from that but I think that mindset is so key to the whole process so ultimately it’s fantastic that these resources are out there. I wish they’d been out there when I was learning. It would have been fantastic. I would have, just, been immersed. I think I would have been on YouTube 24 hours a day just trying to learn more stuff and I do work with one of these companies. I work with jamplay.com and I think they’re fantastic. I’ve done a bunch of video courses for them but it’s one piece of the puzzle. So the nice thing about that, at least, is that the way JamPlay does it is that they are courses and there’s also something like a hundred instructors on there so you can find someone that you resonate with and they sort of curate the, you know, they invited me on. They invite the people that they have up there. So it’s not just someone who started it themselves. There’s lots of resources like that out there but it’s the person and the teacher and the style of teaching that is going to make the difference, whether it’s actual concrete guitar lessons or whether it’s just, “Hey, maybe you ought to think about it like this.”

Christopher: Absolutely. Well, I love the articles you’re publishing on The Perpetual Beginner. I think some of your posts there about mindset and about goal setting and planning are fantastic for any musician, not just guitarists, and I would add to that your YouTube channel where you’re publishing some great videos on similar topics. Those are two things I definitely recommend listeners to check out if what we’ve been talking about today resonates with you and if you’ve felt that urge to maybe bring more musicality to your playing and not just get buried in the advanced instrument technique.

Thank you so much for joining us, today, Dave. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you and learn more about your perspective on improv, on songwriting and on going about learning music in a truly musical way.

Dave: Thanks for having me. This was a lot of fun.

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The post Follow Your Ear, with Dave Isaacs appeared first on Musical U.

• stand out
• seem more exciting
• feel more emotionally charged
• to add motion towards the end of a piece or a climax of a piece…(like if your piece, um, has no other climax?)
• sound like a Christmas carol…

If so, you may be sorely tempted to resort to the notorious truck driver’s gear shift.

What is the Truck Driver’s Gear Shift?

When a truck driver pushes down the accelerator and slowly releases the clutch, he (or she) is changing gears, right?  In general, if you’re out on the highway, you’d be in a higher gear. It’s also help to be in a higher gear to help avoid stalling.

Shifting gears in a big truck also tends to be much noisier and dramatic than in a car.

Songwriters sometimes find their tunes in a slump: maybe the lyric has nowhere else to go, maybe the music is as finished as it’s going to be… except the song’s not quite over yet, length-wise.

What can they do to avoid stalling out on the song?

Get into a higher gear, of course!

While it’s not the kind of musical terminology that’s going to show up in any formal course offered by a four-year university, the truck driver’s gear shift is something for musicians to be aware of – but not necessarily implement.

So what is it, exactly?

As its very most basic, the truck driver’s gear change is a simple key change or modulation. The key change shifts upward (a half step or whole step) and usually happens towards the latter half of the song close to the ending. Oftentimes, this change doesn’t come with any new lyrics – you’ll hear a repeat lyric in a new key instead – and it serves as a prelude to the repeat-and-fade closing and outro of a song. Note that a hallmark of the truck driver’s gear change is that it never shifts gears back to the original key, and it never modulates down. The only place to go is up (by a half step or whole step) – and quickly.

But why stop there?

Most semi-trucks have 10 or more gears to pick from. So how about, let’s say, 14 key changes? Maybe this doesn’t quite fit Beyoncé’s original intentions:

If the tune didn’t display to you quite clearly why you should, indeed, have stopped “there,” here are a few other reasons why you ought to avoid any resorting to the truck driver’s key shift in your songwriting:

•  It sounds too Disney (and not in the best way possible)

Unless you’re trying to emulate a Disney sound (because you might be an elementary music teacher writing music for your school’s play this year or because you are a songwriter aspiring to Disney-level productions), you may want to eschew songs like resemble “A Whole New World”.

• Your own music should contain natural phrase and shape that doesn’t require a sudden key change to make it more exciting.

While this gear change might have been a novel musical concept when it first made its appearance in pop and rock music several decades ago, one taste of it now reeks of rookie songwriting skills since it’s neither difficult nor creative to take a nearly-finished song and take it up a key towards the end.  In fact, its relative ease is what got pop music into such a mess to begin with. If your song is in E and you take it up to F, that’s all you have to do to have a TDGS – and if that’s all you have to do to create interest in your song, be honest with yourself:  how interesting was it to begin with?

To be fair, our ears naturally take interest in key change, but that doesn’t equate with goodness.

• Just because it’s easy to do doesn’t mean you should do it.

Unless your name is Emeril, don’t feel the need to kick it up a notch.

Here are a few musical examples of the Truck Driver’s Gear Shift:

Yet, like it or not, the gear shift has worked for some pretty popular songs:

I Want It That Way (Backstreet Boys)

After the Boys have sung about the way they want it and demand to be told why “it ain’t nothin’ but a heartbreak” several times, they decide to go into a higher gear with less than a minute left of the song at [2:32] repeating the same sentiments they just expressed throughout that final minute. Nothing else is new other than the key change:

I Will Always Love You

At [3:10], Whitney changes gears like a truck driver. Does anything else happen lyrically for the next minute?

Nope, she continues to express her love in few words. Does anything else happen musically?  Nope, just an outro (while it’s sung beautifully by Miss Whitney, it remains, nevertheless, an outro).

For inquiring minds who want to know, the original Dolly Parton version didn’t contain any sort of key change whatsoever:

Stand (REM)

Mr. Stipe and company produced an upbeat little bubblegum tune here as well as—count’em—two gear shifts. R.E.M climbs up the register at [2:31] and [2:48] before it wraps up a few seconds later.

Invisible Touch

Of all the Genesis songs out there, this is the one that’s widely considered the conclusion of Genesis’ journey from prog rock to pop rock, so it comes as no surprise that we find the truck driver’s gear shift present here [3:07] among other elements of 80s pop rock featured throughout the song. After Phil Collins sings about a woman who “seems to have an invisible touch, yeah,” repeatedly again for three minutes, his voice makes a small ascent up the register to a new key for the final repeat-and-fade styled sixty seconds of the song:

A quick note on what it’s not…

Now, please note that the idea of the Truck Driver’s Gear Shift doesn’t pertain to all key changes.  Key changes in and of themselves are not bad, cheesy, tacky, or lazy – they can be purposeful—mindful, even.

The following tunes might be up for debate, but as far as I see and hear it, they are not examples of the truck driver’s gear shift. Do they contain key changes? Yes. Do the key changes add to the song? Absolutely. Most importantly, are the key changes included at the latter half of the song for emotional impact or a climactic moment only? Certainly not. Have a listen and see what you think:

Penny Lane (The Beatles)

The Lennon-McCartney classic contains shifts in modulations, yes, but they don’t follow the TDGS method. Instead, the changes occur throughout the song between the verse and the chorus ([0:38], [0:54], [1:28], [1:44], [2:19], and [2:36]).  In addition, The Beatles aren’t ascribing to the “take it up, take it up” mentality—the keys go up and down the scale:

Total Eclipse of the Heart (Bonnie Tyler)

This song, now a staple of those “best of the 80s, 90s, and today” type of radio stations, also contains a few modulations, but again, they aren’t included only at the end of the song or only because there was “nothing else to do there”:

Hey Jude (The Beatles)

The Fab Four prove their musical genius time and time again. Over their active years they continuously created fresh new sounds, and “Hey Jude” is just another example of this.   It is not, however, an example of a truck driver’s gear change. Ok, ok, the melody does, admittedly, take a turn up at the ending and the song does fade out, but this isn’t without good reason.  Examine the following lyric: “take a sad song/and make it better.” They do just that by taking a lovely ballad and amping it up into an anthem of a singalong:

Your turn: Detecting the Gearshift

Even though I personally haven’t learned to drive a stick shift, I know that you have to use your clutch and stick at the same time in order to change gears. With that in mind, even though you may not have written any songs that contain this musical device, use your newfound knowledge regarding the truck driver’s gearshift to identify where it happens in the songs below:

It Must Have Been Love (Roxette)

Using the timer feature on YouTube, can you detect the moment of the truck driver’s gearshift in this classic Roxette song?

You Raise Me Up (Josh Groban)

Josh Groban is Mr. Smooth, but he can shift gears with the best of them. Can you find the two instances where the truck driver changes gear in this piece?

To Be With You

In this day and age, if you hear the name Mr. Big, your mind might instantly go to that HBO show starring Carrie Bradshaw and The Big Apple. However, back in the early 1990s, Mr. Big was synonymous with the following tune that happens to contain two gearshifts. Can you find them?

Can’t Smile Without You (Barry Manilow)

The MacDaddy of gearshifts in one song, can you find the three moments of shifting gears in this Manilow classic?

Michael Jackson

Many consider the King of Pop equally as royal when it comes to the truck driver’s gear shift.  Listen the following Jackson songs to find out which songs have the truck driver’s gear shifts within – be sure to have a pad of paper nearby to jot your answers down:

• Heal the World
• Remember the Time
• Man in the Mirror
• Will You Be There
• Rock With You

Don’t change gears, train your ears!

Whether you’re a songwriter, a music arranger, or just a guy or gal who jams with friends on the weekends, you need to find ways to make your songs interesting and unique. I hope you know by now that implementing the truck driver’s gear shift is not always the best way to achieve your goals – unless you’re part of an 80s-inspired hair band, a possibility I won’t rule out since leggings have made a comeback and perms are having a strange new moment, too…

The post The Truck Driver’s Gear Shift appeared first on Musical U.

Of Improv Month, that is!

The last month has seen us take you on a virtual journey through learning improv. We started by defining improv, and took a look at some of the musical building blocks you can use to improvise, such as melody, rhythm, and harmony.

We then zoomed out a little bit to look at the bigger picture, discussing the important role that structure, form, and phrasing play in your spontaneous compositions.

Now, in the last week of Improv Month, we’re sending you off with some inspiration and guidance for starting your improv journey. Don’t miss our interview with Brenden Lowe, a music educator who has a unique approach to teaching improv – through “building blocks” rather than rote memorization or random noodling.

To show you just how inspiring and diverse improvisation can be, we’ve asked 15 experts to share their favourite example of improvisation – and the answers range from classic solos to situational examples of improv you may not even have thought of!

We also bridge the gap from theory to practice by giving you a blueprint for starting to improvise, using the tools and knowledge we’ve shared over the course of Improv Month.

But first, let’s take a bird’s eye view of what we’ve covered this month…

Improv Month

This month’s content has been stuffed to the absolute brim with improvisation-related wisdom.

And so, we thought that we’d use What’s New in Musical U: March 2018 to recap this month’s offerings on all things improv: podcasts, training modules, resource packs, a roadmap, and more.

This recap is perfect for those wanting an overview of the content we’ve released this month, and for those craving a sneak peek on our plans for the end of improv month. Check it out!

Tools for Improv

Mastering improv is rarely a point-A-to-point-B journey – there will likely be some sidetracking and trial-and-error in learning to improvise.

Nobody knows this better than Brenden Lowe, who took traditional jazz piano lessons and found that he was no closer to being able to improvise freely and creatively after three years. Several re-evaluations, new teachers, new approaches, and a jazz performance degree later, something finally clicked – Brenden learned how to deconstruct improv into its parts, and use them to build up music.

He now uses this concept of “building blocks” as a framework for teaching jazz piano in a way that encourages self-expression and takes the intimidation factor out of improv.

Listen to his improv journey and how it shaped his teaching style over at Building Blocks of Improv, with Brenden Lowe.

Brenden made a fascinating analogy when he compared learning improvisation to playing with legos. And it was quite interesting to think about how improv is a summation of multiple musical skills that are all combined to perform. Sean Packard interviewed Ralph Bowen about his approach to learning jazz improvisation, which features some lego blocks of his own.

Before Brenden even began playing jazz music, the sound and style was already deeply ingrained into his musical ear. How? For years, he had been exposed to jazz through passive listening as a child! Similarly, the Suzuki method, an ear-based approach to learning music, believes in the importance of listening. Upper Beaches Music discusses how to listen to Suzuki repertoire.

A turning point for Brenden was when he was able to learn jazz tunes and expand his repertoire. Many jazz musicians not only learn the tunes, but also listen to the solos of jazz greats that were recorded with jazz standards. This is called transcribing, and Jamie Holdroy has a 5-step method to become more effective at transcriptions.

Learning jazz requires the musician to go through a cognitive process that is similar to learning a language. A language that is unique to jazz is scat, which is how many jazz singers improvise. Watch Indra explains how to scat vocal jazz improvisation!

Brenden talked about how jazz improvisation theory can be applied to many different musical styles. While we typically think of improvisation as being unique to jazz, many musicians improvise in genres that may surprise you. Jam Along Music Method shows you how to improvise… on the bluegrass fiddle!

The Experts Talk Improv

What better way to round off improv month here at Musical U than to ask the improv experts the question: “what is your favourite example of improv?”

The answers that 15 musicians, composers, producers, arrangers, and educators gave us were as diverse and fascinating as their backgrounds would lead you to expect. In fact, some of these answers weren’t even specific songs or solos, but specific instances or situations in which spontaneity played a key, unforgettable role.

Head over to 15 Improv Experts Share Their Favourite Examples of Improvisation to see just how varied, inspired, personal, and sentimental improv can be!

So many great songs to listen to, so little time! If you are learning a new music genre, immersing yourself in some essential tunes is a fun and rewarding experience. Jazz Ed Net has put together a list of essential tunes for each jazz subgenre.

Ask any jazz musician, and they will tell you that there are certain tunes that you just need to know. With tens of thousands of possibilities, where should you start? Steve Neff has compiled a list of 100 must-know masterpieces for you to prioritize.

Listening to and learning great tunes are only a couple of ways to get excited about learning jazz music. Sometimes you just need a little more! Creative Edge shares 10 ways to fuel your enthusiasm for jazz improvisation.

Approaching Improv

With the ocean of improv content we’ve covered this month, you are now armed with a plethora of tools to begin your spontaneous music-making.

The only question is… where exactly do you begin?

In About Learning to Improvise, we give you a primer on putting yourself in the right mindset to improvise, finding a learning style that works for you, and integrating the concepts of melody, harmony, structure, and form into your playing.

Christopher mentioned that all the skills we have been teaching this month can be a part of your toolkit to begin improvising. For all musicians who are learning new skills, fitting them together is very important. Dan Phelps gives you some ideas on what should go in your improviser’s toolkit.

There are styles of music that lend themselves to improvisation. Even looking within broad musical categories (such as classical), improv techniques will be different depending on the subgenre of classical. Practice Notes gives a humorous and entertaining look at improvising in the style of different classical composers.

So much to improvise, so little time! When you get started in any type of musical learning, the progress can be frustrating. Additionally, different skills are needed depending on the instrument that you are learning improvisation on – Artist Works provides a nice introduction to improvising on the guitar.

It’s no secret that at Musical U we tend to stress learning by ear as much as possible. With improvisation, there is an extra step that some musicians use: connecting their musical ear to their voice and then their instrument. To see this in action, singer-guitarist Az Samad recently hosted a Facebook Live where he improvised his way through an example.

Getting Your Improv Off the Ground

As a closing note, we want to thank you for joining us for Improv Month, and we hope that we’ve inspired you to either start learning to improvise, or continue your improv journey with our content in mind.

As a final hurrah, join us on March 31st with Nick Mainella, where he presents an online masterclass on the topic of improvisation – register here!

The post Improv Month, Tools For Improv, The Experts Talk Improv, and Approaching Improv appeared first on Musical U.

Over the last eight episodes, we’ve covered a lot of ground: we first looked at the right mindset for improv, then dove right into how to use rhythm, scales, chords, harmony, structure, and form to really get your spontaneous playing off the ground. In this episode, we give you an overview of how you can approach the task at hand – learning to improvise!

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Links and Resources

• About Improvising with Scales and Chords
• About Improvising Rhythm
• About Improvisation

Transcript

So we are now at the end of Improv Month here at Musical U, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this series of episodes focusing around the topic of improvisation.

We’ve covered a lot in the last eight episodes and so I thought it would be useful to wrap things up with an overview of how you might approach learning to improvise, given everything we’ve been discussing on the show.

What I’ll be talking about is guided largely by our new Improv Roadmap at Musical U. We’ll actually be talking more about Roadmaps in general in our next episode, but for now I’ll just say that what I’ll be laying out here is the basic outline of how we’ll be teaching members to improvise inside Musical U – and as always it’s totally personalisable and flexible based on your own background, interests, and progress.

One thing I’ll be talking about on the next episode is how vital it is to have the overall understanding of how a musical skill is learned, step by step. Otherwise it’s far too easy to continually put in effort in different directions and using different resources and feel like you’re making progress – only to realise later on that you’re not actually any closer to that skill you dreamed of having. That’s where Roadmaps come in and although this will be just a very brief overview I’m hoping that this episode can serve that purpose for you to. To draw together the various ideas we’ve talked about and give you a sense of how you can go forwards from here and learn to improvise – whether that’s as a member of Musical U or using other resources, like those from the terrific guests we’ve featured in Improv Month.

Approaching Improvisation

So the starting point for learning to improvise is to get your mindset right. As we talked about in episode 51 on “Approaching Improvisation”, there are a couple of traditional approaches to learning to improvise that are actually incredibly frustrating and limiting for musicians. One is to strictly stick to memorised rules and patterns and essentially choose notes at random within that. The other is to learn particular licks, riffs and runs that you know work well and then just reproduce this “vocabulary” when the time comes to improvise.

If you want to improvise in a way that’s truly free, creative, and brings your own musical ideas out into the world, then step one (and in my opinion the most important step) in learning to improvise is to decide not to follow those approaches. Yes, there is value in each of them and they can be part of your improvisation toolkit. But you want to decide from the outset that improvisation means bringing your own imagined musical ideas out from your head into the world through your instrument.

That means that improvisation will be about developing your brain and ear to understand the music you hear, remember or imagine. Improvisation becomes a process of “playing by ear what you imagine in your head”. At first this will take a lot of practice but over time you’ll build up those connections to the point where it becomes easy and instinctive. I hesitate a bit to use the word “instinctive” because that can imply something you do without really thinking or understanding – and that’s not what we’re talking about here. It’s instinctive in the sense of happening automatically and nearly effortlessly – but you have consciously learned how it all works and you thoroughly understand what it is you’re doing when you improvise.

It’s also important to discover at this early stage that you do have a musical imagination! It takes some practice to build up your ability to audiate, meaning to imagine music in your mind. But I assure you, if what I’ve said about imagination and creativity have you worried that you’re not particularly imaginative or creative – don’t worry! You definitely are, because you’ve spent your life listening to music and all that experience is in there waiting to come out. It just takes the right mindset and some simple mental frameworks and exercises to unlock it for you.

So that’s step one. At Musical U have a training module called “Approaching Improvisation” that explores this idea in detail and gives you some exercises to start really connecting with that mindset. We also had our Resident Pros for guitar, bass and piano produce resource packs specifically for those instruments on this topic. That’s how important we think it is to get your mindset right if you’re going to succeed and enjoy improvising.

And I don’t want to labour this point too much because hopefully if you’ve been following along with improv month you’re on board by now. We heard from David Reed from Improvise For Real, whose program lives up to its name and really focuses on that ear-led approach to improvising freely. We heard from Nick Mainella of the 10-Minute Jazz Lesson podcast who emphasised that learning vocabulary or transcribing solos needs to be combined with analysing them and developing your ear to actually understand what it is you’re learning so that you can apply it in your own creative way. We heard from Brenden Lowe of Jazz Piano School who explained you need to learn improvisation like building with legos, and see it as a natural part of everything you learn and hear in music. And we heard from David Wallimann who despite being a leading guitar educator and well versed in all the pattern-based approaches to improvising on guitar had one simple piece of advice: put the guitar down! And connect with your imagination first, then use your ears to bring that out through the guitar.

So we heard the same core message from multiple angles and multiple experienced and admired instructors on the topic of improvisation: Don’t get trapped in patterns and memorisation, or improv becomes just another example of reproducing the music that other people have created. Connecting with your imagination and your ear is the path to truly free, creative and enjoyable improvising.

Play By Ear Skills

Aside from taking that fundamental message to heart, there’s another reason it’s important to focus on this mindset choice early on. And that’s because it really affects the training you’ll do in learning to improvise.

As I said before – this is really about playing by ear what you imagine in your head. And so the brain and ear skills you need are very much the same as for playing by ear. We’re talking about relative pitch and things like interval recognition or solfa, recognising different types of chord and chord progression by ear, honing your sense of rhythm and understanding rhythmic patterns and styles, and so on.

So as we built out our new Improv Roadmap at Musical U it was a lot of fun because we could leverage all the training modules we already have for those areas. And our new Improv modules could just focus on the heart of what makes improvising unique.

You will find courses out there that treat improvisation as an isolated skillset, something you can just follow a straight-line course to learn. And that’s generally because they’re taking one of those other two approaches to learning to improvise. They’re just teaching you rules or patterns or vocabulary.

The truth is that if you want to be truly free as an improviser then you need a good musical ear, and so a lot of “learning to improvise” is about ear training and play-by-ear skills.

So that’s the second step to think about. Once you choose this path towards free, creative improvisation you’ll want to explore ear training and select the resources and training that will develop your musical ear to support your improvisation learning.

At Musical U what we do is we provide guidance on how to incorporate material from our Roadmaps for playing melodies and chords by ear along the way, and we also have a module specifically on Improvising Melody that lets you gently start exploring improvising even before you develop those ear skills, and lets you apply those skills as you develop them. This is also where some of the ideas from episode 53 about improvising rhythm come in, as we really encourage you to explore the different dimensions available to you as you choose what notes to play when, and how.

So improvising is part of your learning process throughout but you’re able to draw on all those other ear training resources to accelerate your understanding of how music works and what you want to create with your improvisation.

Introducing harmony

Once you get going with improvising melody it’s time to start thinking about harmony. As we talked about in episode 55, this is something that’s relevant and powerful whether you play a harmony instrument or not. So pianists for example will start thinking about improvising left and right hands together and how chords and melody interrelate. Guitarists can think about leveraging their chord knowledge to guide their improvisation. And brass and wind players can think about how to choose their melody notes to really match up well with the chord progression they’re soloing over – or even to imply a chord progression when playing without accompaniment.

This is such an important topic we’ve dedicated two of our new improv training modules to it at Musical U – one is about the idea of chord tones and how choosing notes which do and don’t belong to chords is a really effective way to create a musically compelling melody line. And the second is specifically about the tension and release effects you can create by playing around with the interplay of harmony and melody.

This is kind of a superpower in improvisation. The relationship between melody and the underlying harmony is a really important part of what distinguishes a solo that sounds like a stream of randomly-chosen notes from one that really sounds musical.

You can get there purely on your ears and the kind of approach I talked about earlier, translating what you imagine in your head out into the world. But you can really accelerate that learning process by incorporating some understanding of what’s going on with the chords, to help guide what you imagine and what you choose to play.

Structure and Form

So after step three of learning how to factor harmony into your improvisation, the next step follows naturally. Those chords have already given you experience of how important and powerful it is for your improvisation to follow a structure of some kind, and how that lets you more easily take the listener on a journey. That chord-by-chord thinking is just one level of structure available to you though.

So step four is to start thinking in terms of structure and form. If you have four bars with the same chord, are you going to do anything different with your melody in the first two bars than the second two? If you have a 16-bar section to solo over which naturally splits into two 8-bar sections, how are you going to make each one different and interesting? How are you factoring in the music’s own form, maybe a verse/chorus structure, into what you do with your improvisation? Or if you’re improvising entirely freely, what overall structure of sections can you put in place to make it sound like a real piece of music that keeps the listener engaged rather than just bar-after-bar sounding all a bit the same?

There are lots of tools and constructs you can apply here, to structure and shape your improvisation which we cover in the new training module on this topic. And again, this is going to level up your improv to sounding more creative, interesting and compelling for the listener.

Improvisational Styles

The final step in our Roadmap – which of course probably won’t be the last step you ever take in learning to improvise! That’s going to be a long and continually interesting journey for you. But the final step to think about is how to adapt your improvising to different styles of music.

It’s funny, because a lot of improvisation courses will start here. They are essentially trying to teach you a shortcut method to mimic true improvisation, and so will teach you licks or patterns that “work” in blues, or fit the rock style, and so on.

And again, that stuff is valuable – but it’s a bit like putting the cart before the horse.

So if you’re taking this different mindset to improvisation, that it is first and foremost about expressing your own creativity in music, then it’s really more about adapting your improvisation to fit a style – rather than learning a specific skill of improvising in that style.

So our last new module released this month is all about improvising in different styles. Building on the ear-led approach to improvisation you’ve been learning it gives you the guidance and examples needed to feel comfortable fitting in to the traditions and expectations of popular genres like rock, blues and jazz.

And that’s really how I’d encourage you to think about it, whether or not you’re following the Musical U Roadmap. Improvisation is about you and your instrument and the music you want to express. If you bring that ability to rock, great! If you bring it to blues, great! And if you want to go deep into jazz, great! These are all different flavours of the same core skillset – they aren’t just sets of patterns, rules and vocabulary to be learned and reproduced.

The nice thing is that when you approach learning to improvise in this way, led by your imagination and using ear skills to bring that out into the world, these last couple of steps about structure and different styles – there really isn’t a ton you need to study or practice. Because you’ve been listening to music your whole life. With a bit of active listening and a bit of improv practice you’ll find that you can simply leverage the fact that your musical imagination already pretty much knows how music works and how different styles sound. If you’re in a blues context, you’ll imagine something bluesy and play that. If you’re improvising in a different genre then you’ll imagine a different flavour of music and play that. Yes, it takes a bit of practice, but it’s all the same core skill of musical imagination coupled with ear skills to bring it out into the world.

So that’s the Roadmap we’ve been building out at Musical U and it’s a path you can follow yourself.

• Step one: Get your mindset right. Decide that you will pursue truly free, ear-led improvisation.
• Step two: Connect with ear training and start exploring the dimensions of improvising melody.
• Step three: Integrate harmony and explore how melody and harmony work together.
• Step four: Make use of structure and form in your improvisation.
• Step five: Learn to adapt your improvising to a variety of musical styles.

All that remains is to say a few things. The first is: thanks for joining me for improv month! I hope you’ve really enjoyed these episodes and that they’ve helped a few lightbulbs to go on for you.

The second is that if you’d like to follow the path I’ve outlined here then our new Improv Roadmap is waiting for you and we’d love to have you with us as a member of Musical U. As always check out musicalitypodcast.com for a special offer for podcast listeners.

And finally just to wish you luck and happy music-making as you explore this new improvisation journey. There really is nothing as enjoyable and satisfying as creating your own great-sounding music on-the-fly, powered purely by your own imagination. So go out there and have fun learning to improvise!

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The post About Learning to Improvise appeared first on Musical U.

It’s certainly a challenging way of music-making to dive into, but as anyone who has been swimming in the improvisational pools for some time will tell you, it’s immensely rewarding.

So, what better way to wrap up Improv Month than by asking a slew of improv experts the following:

“What is your favourite example of improvisation?”

Of course, improv is not limited to merely jazz or playing a solo – it appears in many contexts, from a performance, to band practice, to an impromptu jam at a festival, to the music classroom.

Read on for 14 experts’ diverse takes on their favourite bits of improv, why it’s stayed with them, and what impact it’s had on their career and the way they think about music.

These answers are as diverse as the musicians giving them – our experts aren’t just musicians, but also university professors, producers, composers, arrangers, podcast hosts, and more, all united by their love of music and improvisation.

Overview

1. Bill Hilton (How To Really Play the Piano)
2. Steve Lawson (SteveLawson.net)
3. Brent Vaartstra (LearnJazzStandards)
4. Brian Kelly (Zombie Guitar)
5. Dave Bainbridge (Iona, Celestial Fire)
6. David Andrew Wiebe (The Music Entrepreneur HQ)
7. Ged Brockie (Guitar & Music Institute)
8. Jeffrey Agrell (The Creative Hornist)
9. Jeremy Burns (Music Student 101)
10. Mark Michell (Low End University)
11. Ruth Power (PianoPicnic.com)
12. Scott Sharp (Fretboard Toolbox)
13. Bob Habersat and Paul Levy (Shed the Music)
14. Steve Nixon (FreeJazzLessons)
15. Tim Topham (TimTopham.com)
16. Improv, in Infinite Ways

Bill Hilton (How To Really Play the Piano)

It’s Jelly Roll Morton (piano and vocals) and his band, the Red Hot Peppers performing “Dr. Jazz” in 1926.

Morton’s “Dr. Jazz” was massively influential on me when I was first starting to improvise in my school jazz band. The thing I love most about it is its infectious joviality and the hard-driving sound often associated with Dixieland jazz. To what extent it’s improvised is an interesting question. As with a great deal of jazz and other improvised music, it sounds like quite a lot of advanced planning has gone in – probably in the form of “head arrangements” worked up by the band in jam sessions, rather than in the form of written score.

Reflecting on that when I was a kid got me thinking seriously about improvisation for the first time. What is it, exactly? Is improvisation really the magic it can seem to non-improvising musicians? Or is it, in a reality, usually a mashup of planning, experience, pre-made sections, and a certain amount of genuine “on the fly” playing?

The great thing about Dr. Jazz, if you listen carefully, is that you can hear all those elements in it. In a way, it’s as precisely constructed as a Bach chorale, yet still has this fantastic sense of spontaneity and joy.

Bio: Bill Hilton is a musician, writer, and composer. He runs a top-rated YouTube channel dedicated to piano learning and is the author of How To Really Play The Piano and other books.

Steve Lawson (SteveLawson.net)

One of the first improvised recordings to make a big impact on me was “Outside In” – the opening track from John Martyn’s Live At Leeds album. It features John on guitar, the great Danny Thompson on upright bass, and John Stevens on drums.

I think what struck me – and still inspires me – is the remarkable blend of approaches to improv. There are elements in the music drawn from folk, jazz, rock and progressive musics. Harmonically, it’s not all that complex, but what they do within the fairly simple song structure that book-ends the piece is astounding. The listening that goes on is remarkable – the ebb and flow of the piece and how the three musicians respond to one another, with John’s delay time keeping everything together:

There are so many elements to the piece (it’s 18 minutes long!) and I love the way each musician gets to bring their personality to it. Danny is one of the greatest upright players the UK has ever produced, and has such an extraordinary combination of groove, tone, harmonic knowledge and dexterity. A hugely inspiring performance.

Brent Vaartstra (LearnJazzStandards)

For me, the spirit of improvisation is self-expression, and while self-expression can be a powerful thing, without an anchor its power can deteriorate.

As a musician raised and trained in the realm of Western music, the many musical styles that come from Africa have fascinated me, mostly because I know so little about them. I can only listen in amazement to the collages of rhythms so beautifully and effortlessly woven in and out of each other.

It wasn’t until I took a class back when I was in college called “African Percussion Ensemble” that I started to listen to this music. My professor Neil Clarke was a trained percussionist in the African idioms, and incredibly knowledgeable. He opened me up to some of the styles and rhythms coming out of the continent.

I’ve heard it said before that in Africa, there are not separate words for “music” and “dance.” They are one and the same.

When you listen to African percussion ensembles, you hear a variety of percussion instruments playing together. If you listen closely you can pick out the roles of the different instruments. Some lay down what is called “the clave” in Latin American styles of music, others provide supporting roles, while others clearly improvise.

In truth, they are all improvising. But they are clued in to the structure that they are improvising within. In other words, they improvise not to only express themselves, but to express the collective music that is being created between all of the musicians.

I don’t pretend to understand it, but I find it fascinating and worth exploration. Take a listen to some of this music from Ghana, and intentionally listen for the different instruments. Listen critically, because not all of them are as obvious as others:

Now ask yourself, what can you take away from this to apply to the style or styles of music you play?

Brian Kelly (Zombie Guitar)

The first example of a really good “improvisation” that came to mind was a particular live version of the song called “Mound” by Phish.

Phish is a “jam band”, so pretty much every song they play live is improvised in one way or another. For those who listen to Phish, they know that they never play a song the same way twice. However, the reason that I picked this particular song from this show is because they never did a guitar solo in this song – I actually went and listened to about 30+ other live versions of this song just to confirm this. The way this song is “written” is that the outro ends with a short, improvised keyboard solo. The improvisation starts at [6:14]:

I was at this show, and I got to see the one and only time that Trey ripped an improvised guitar solo. I was informed about this by my cousin Kristi who is the biggest Phish fan that I have ever met (unfortunately she is no longer with us… Rest In Peace). She explained to me that Trey messed up in the final chorus of the song – that his vocals and guitar were a little “sloppy” compared to his usual perfection, and as a result he decided that he was going to make up for his “mistake” by shredding a guitar solo in a spot where there wasn’t supposed to be one. It was kind of like “Oh no, I messed up… I’ll show them!!”.

There was a certain emotion behind this solo, and the more I listen to this version of this song, and the more I notice the minor mistake that sparked the improvisation, the more I “feel” what he was trying to convey.

For those of you that are avid Phish fans like myself, you probably “get it”. For those of you that don’t know much about Phish, but you want to understand where I’m coming from, you could simply compare this version to any other live version (or studio version) that you find on YouTube, and you will see what I’m talking about. You may even also catch Trey’s little “mistake” which sparked this improvised solo!

Dave Bainbridge (Iona, Celestial Fire)

Whilst in the college music library one day browsing through the albums there, I noticed one by someone called Keith Jarrett, titled “Facing You”. Not having heard him, I listened to the album and was immediately transfixed.

This was piano music like I had never heard, beautiful melodies, played with incredible fluidity and honest emotion. I was hooked. It sounded like the melodies had been composed, but I later learned that that album was completely improvised, recorded in a day. I discovered that Keith performed complete concerts with nothing prepared beforehand, drawing upon a huge range of influences that included the jazz, gospel, and blues traditions, but also the whole Western classical idiom including the avant-garde, atonal composers.

I became an avid listener of his music and discovered other albums on which he’d not only improvise over chord changes in the standard jazz way, but would also spontaneously invent the chord sequences and melodies as he went along! Sometimes there would be complex contrapuntal playing, or the piano would become a huge, monolithic soundscape. At other times there would be incredible grooves and left hand ostinato patterns with free flowing cascades of notes, joyously delivered:

I got to see him play an improvised solo piano concert and it was mesmerizing. The improvisation flowed without restraint, through different emotions and styles, yet retained a cohesiveness that carried the listener along.

Through listening to Keith, I realised that playing a solo over chord changes is only one a small part of what improvisation can be. I realised that improvisation can include spontaneously creating whole chord sequences, developing melodic fragments contrapuntally, creating different moods and stimulating emotions through dynamics, fast and slow playing, high note or low note passages, dense, complex harmonies or the simplest triads or open intervals, including elements from all world music traditions and much, much more.

It was the album Facing You that opened the door for me. Since then I regularly take the time to improvise, especially at the piano. I’ve recorded two albums of spontaneous improvisations – From Silence (with Troy Donockley) and The Remembering (solo piano), and usually include some spontaneous improvisation in my solo concerts and duo concerts with Sally Minnear. I also love structured music of course, but sometimes it is only when I improvise that the true magic and freedom happens, when the spirit soars. To quote William Blake:

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

David Andrew Wiebe (The Music Entrepreneur HQ)

I used to play in an oddly named band called Lightly Toasted Touché. The drummer and I were best friends and we were always collaborating on a lot of projects. So, when we decided to start a band, we were already thinking about what our unique value proposition would be.

We decided that our live set would be made up of both songs we practiced, as well as spontaneous jams, just like our rehearsals were. What this meant was that there would always be a few songs in our set that were unique to the gig. Sometimes we would bust out a reggae jam. At other times, we would play metal, or the blues.

We would occasionally share some of our recordings on the internet, and the first time we did that we quickly exceeded our server’s bandwidth and had to move the site over to new hosting. That was a good problem to have.

When we went to work on our first EP, we also recorded about eight improvised songs in the studio and included the best ones in our first release with the long-winded title, A Tale of the Coming Together and Murder of My Heart in the Golden State:

Of the eight tracks on that release, “Commercial Air Disaster”, “Grad Prix” (my favourite), “Autumn Moonlight” (most people’s favourite), and “Bluer Than Punk” were all improvised.

A couple of my other favourite examples of improvisation:

• Jimmy Page was said to have taken only a couple of runs at the guitar solo to “Stairway to Heaven”, which is beautiful and melodic.
• Likewise, Eddie Van Halen was said to have only taken a couple of tries to the guitar solo to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”. It’s a monster solo, so all I can say is – the man must have been extremely inspired that day.

Ged Brockie (Guitar & Music Institute)

When asked to submit my favourite piece of improvisation, I thought it would be a straightforward task, however, on reflection it was a difficult thing to do. The reality is this: there is so much music that I’ve listened to over the years that would ultimately make the number one spot.

In the end, I’ve chosen to pick a track that made a huge impression on me as a fallow teenager striving to learn my chosen instrument, the guitar. Back then, the idea of my being able to improvise anywhere close to the level heard on this track seemed a distant dream. Now after years of playing in the business and dedicating an entire life to the study of and performance of guitar and specifically jazz guitar, this track still shows me the way!

I’ve chosen the track “Four on Six” by Wes Montgomery from the album “The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery”:

That album has quite a title, however, there is no doubt that the music bound within it lives up to the hyperbole of the title. So why Wes Montgomery and why this track?

For me, Wes was a true one-of-a-kind musician. If you listen to and analyse his solos you will of course find some incredibly complex ideas throughout. However, on many occasions, you will find that he is playing what could be considered by some as an “obvious” choice of notes over a given harmonic progression, and yet, it still sounds amazing. This is the key to Wes Montgomery’s enduring appeal. It’s not just the notes he played, but they way he played them. His unique and magical sound, created by playing with his thumb rather than a plectrum has a rather prosaic beginning; he needed to keep the noise down when practising at home as the neighbours were given to complaining. The rhythmic pulse inherent in his lines that create a cascading waterfall of melodic invention has often been imitated but never bettered. His use of rhythmic diversity within and beyond the bar line meant a continual refreshing of old musical comments as new on the day they were played as they are when listened to today.

“Four on Six” is just one of a myriad of examples of stellar improvisations that could have been picked from Wes’s recordings. This track really stands out in its hypnotic rhythmic spell based on four notes which dance over the opening sequence. Specifically, I chose this track due to its challenging harmonic progression which is itself a harmonic substitution over a simple minor blues twelve bar sequence. As with any person who is highly skilled in a given art form, the listener would not be aware of the immense challenge the progression offers. The intricate weaving through three fast changing key centres which include chromatic movement is achieved with effortless creativity, developed by Wes in a prolonged improvisation.

More than this, Wes shows masterful control in the way he builds the solo through the phrasing of his melodic ideas and how, through the use of octaves he brings the improvisation to it’s ultimate climax.

Listen to a live performance of Four on Six and see the notes Wes plays:

Jeffrey Agrell (The Creative Hornist)

Let’s try this: what’s a good way to start improvising? Like conversation, it’s easiest if you have a partner. A great way to get started, or to warm up for that matter, is to play a slow tune over a drone.

This is Lin Foulk, horn professor at Western Michigan University, and I playing over a drone. The drone is the tonic, and you can play anything you like over it. Since there is no pulse, you don’t even have to worry about fitting a meter. You can be very expressive playing over a drone, and there is no pressure to churn out a lot of notes. It’s very calm, relaxing, and satisfying, and perfect for starting improvising:

After the drone, I would recommend adding a pulse: the “pulsed drone.” This is just playing the drone with any kind of regular pulse or rhythm. Steady quarter notes are fine, and you can also add some rests and dotted rhythms if you like. Here’s an example (Lin and me again):

There is a lot of trouble programmed into the definition of the word “improvisation”. Most people, musicians or not, associate the word with jazz, and that definition keeps 94% of all musicians from experiencing improv.

My final goal is to get everyone making their own music in any way they can. So we need a much broader definition that lets everyone in. We need to find a way to get people playing and discover that:

1. They have a unique voice
2. Our new definition is about choice and imagination, not about perfection
3. You can work on all of the same things (technique, musicianship) in creative music that you can in notated music
4. It’s fun
5. It’s easy

One more crucial item to be discovered along the way is that improv is social – the real reward is making music with others. As you see in the videos with me and Lin, you can focus on practically any aspect of technique or music with a collaborator and have a heck of time as you do so.

With improv, you are deepening your understanding of music itself: how to create a strong idea and develop it. Just as in ordinary conversation, you “converse” in music, listening, responding, creating, following up ideas. Students should be reminded that notation-only music study is an anomaly, a temporary aberration, since the aural and creative aspect of music has been part of Western music tradition since time out of mind. Fortunately, improv is finally making a comeback. It will take time before academia gives it the support and respect it deserves, but anyone can simply add it to their own playing and teaching with or without help from the ivory tower.

Jeremy Burns (Music Student 101)

Some of my favourite types of improv occur within the synergy of the band. One example is recovery.

Suppose the lead singer forgets to come in on the verse at the appointed time. A good band will vamp that on that starting chord and not change until the singer finds their place. If the singer finds their place on an upbeat, then a good band will be able to flip it to the down beat so that everyone is back together again. I used singers as an example, but this can apply to any band member.

Another “synergistic” thing I like to hear and accomplish is when the band begins to feed off of another member’s improv. One example is when two soloists trade off licks but include and create variations of the content of the other’s licks. Sometimes, I (a bassist) will echo cool licks I hear from the soloist, as if to say, “Oh yeah! I’m supporting you and listening to you”. It always makes them smile!

All of the above mentioned scenarios take a certain mastery of your instrument as well as experience playing with other musicians. The best “experience points” can be gained by playing live regularly with other musicians on your level, in both musicianship and personality.

Mark Michell (Low End University)

My all-time favourite example of improvisation occurs when a group of musicians begin a song, but don’t know what they’re playing. Wait… how is that possible?

Sounds confusing, I know!

However, this method has been responsible for producing some of the most interesting music of our time. How does this work, exactly? Well, by musician standards, this happens when a band might decide on a key, style, or tempo, and they just play. Usually one instrument will begin the song and dictate the starting point – perhaps the drummer will begin playing a beat, and then after several bars, the guitar player will improvise a riff and before you know it, a song begins to quickly develop.

Liquid Tension Experiment is a side-project formed in the late 90’s by several members of Dream Theater and Tony Levin, and this project was an all-instrumental take on progressive rock/metal. “Three Minute Warning” is an interesting facet of this project, as it was created spontaneously out of frustration during their album-writing sessions, and they decided just to hit record, and play, resulting in a near half-hour song of pure improvisation and spontaneity:

Musically speaking, the track contains a plethora of twists and turns with many interesting dimensions.

Aside from the artistic reasons for doing this, this undoubtedly serves as an amazing exercise for all musicians looking to sharpen their listening skills, creative skills, and learning how to fly by the seat of their pants – a frequently used skill for any musician. On many occasions, “writer’s block” can result in a musician thinking too hard about a composition, or becoming too analytical about their art form. Improvising as a means to compose music will help to deliver ideas from a more subconscious space, and allow ideas to flow on a reactionary level rather than by means of predisposition and calculation. Art was always meant to flow from the soul – don’t forget to let that happen occasionally!

Ruth Power (PianoPicnic.com)

My favourite example of improvisation on the piano comes from a “piano battle” that commenced between Andrew WK and Chilly Gonzales in a New York pub in 2009. This resulted from a challenge issued by Gonzales to WK to settle their differences in a collaboration/battle royale due to their having both released recent solo piano albums at the time. WK, known for his “party hard” anthem and antics, didn’t back down, and so they came to battle in a piano bloodbath one fateful night.

This video, taken on the phone of a audience member, gives us a glimpse at two very accomplished pianists playing with their reputations at stake, at times blindfolded and just having a ridiculous amount of fun:

For me, when I first saw this video I had never heard the words “piano” and “battle” put together, and I had never seen two blindfolded pianists and a pub full of people have so much fun. It encouraged me to not be so serious about being a pianist, and to pursue playing by ear to such a degree that one day I could play blindfolded in case I was forced to do so!

Scott Sharp (Fretboard Toolbox)

My favourite type of improvisation is the kind that happens at spontaneous campground jam sessions at Bluegrass music festivals. This one was at a campground at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas, and was a random jam session that included some amazing players from several different bands.

It is representative of the type of jam session that happens day and night in countless campsites at this festival, which is going on its 47th year:

I love when musicians from all over the world get together and share the common language of music. Being unrehearsed, this type of music is full of accidents, and full of magical moments. This music is full of beautiful old songs with heartfelt lyrics, and with players taking turns playing improvised solos (or “breaks” as they’re called) interspersed throughout the songs. It’s all “on the fly”, so you never know what’s coming next!  You can’t help but learn a ton, and be moved, by listening to player after player express themselves by playing what they feel “in the moment”.

Bob Habersat and Paul Levy (Shed the Music)

Our improvisation concept is firmly rooted in the jazz tradition at The Shed. While we do listen, enjoy, and are influenced by other improvisatory musical styles, our heart is with this music.

With that being said, we are heavily influenced by the 1960’s Miles Davis Quintet and their concept of collective group improvisation. This group (Miles, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams) laid the groundwork for “modern” jazz improvisatory language. This group would take a jazz standard like “Autumn Leaves” and turn its harmonic progressions on its head:

Soloists had the ability to freely navigate away from the exact written harmony and reinterpret it how they saw fit. Obviously, these musicians had the ability to “play the changes” but were on such a level that they could stray away and still make it hip.

Steve Nixon (FreeJazzLessons)

Miles Davis is a true master of melodic and stylistic improvised lines. Not only did I learn incredible swing articulation, idea development, and great minor lines from this solo, but I also learned how to make one chord sound exciting.

This was a technique that I have used to great advantage in funk, modal jazz, and rock gigs. I’ve created a transcription and lesson on the Miles solo.

Here’s Miles Davis’s “So What”:

Barry Harris a bebop genius. The amount of ideas that he gets out of 12 bars of music was eye-opening for me. Barry pretty much proves that most of the scale and note choices that people say you “should” play on the blues is wrong, from all 12 notes to major 7ths on dominant chords. Here’s an example of Barry’s great improvisation here, and once again, a transcription and lesson on his solo in “Moose the Mooch”:

I came into jazz through the backdoor and never looked back. What do I mean about the backdoor? I mean I first started listening to jazz-influenced rock bands like the Allman Brothers, Steely Dan, Grateful Dead, and Phish. I’ve always gravitated toward the sound of improvisation in rock – I even have a lesson for learning some licks from Greg Allman’s keyboard player!

Tim Topham (TimTopham.com)

My favourite example of improvisation is when teachers are put on the spot by a student who:

• has done no practice
• is in a bad mood, or is upset and not themselves
• has forgotten all their books
• arrives very late

Instead of trying to teach their normal content, the teacher decides to go “off track” and explore some more creative ideas that the student can enjoy without stress, while still keeping the material just as musical as anything else they would have been doing.

These are the kind of lesson ideas that I strive to provide for teachers through my blog and podcast. Unfortunately, situations where teachers have to “improvise” their lesson content are all too common these days, as kids are torn between more and more activities and have less and less time.

The great thing is that many of these improvised lessons actually provide a deeper level of understanding of music, more engaging content, and are great fun for teacher and student alike. This is why I’m so passionate about helping to support teachers to get “off the page” when they teach.

Many of my own teaching resources like No Book Beginners and 4 Chord Composing have been borne out of the teaching “improvising” I did earlier in my career, and now form a major part of my own teaching repertoire.

Here’s an example of me teaching my 4 chord composing approach to a student in a lesson:

I encourage students and teachers alike to realise that you don’t have to be playing the blues to be improvising – just about anything that breaks out of the mould of “traditional” or “classical” teaching is, in fact, improvising!

Improv, in Infinite Ways

We purposely left the question quite open-ended so our experts could think abstractly about improv, and how it can manifest outside being a mere guitar solo or jazz lick.

Aside from the wonderful examples of creative improvisation by the greats (of all genres!) discussed by our experts, there were some definite curveballs in there.

Jeffrey Agrell presented the idea of drone-based improv for beginner improvisers to get comfortable with the art. Mark Michell discussed spontaneous playing that is born out of the frustration of writer’s block. Tim Topham, meanwhile, looked at the idea of musical improv from an entirely different angle: that of a teacher who must make do with an unprepared or unmotivated student.

The best part is, all of these are fantastic manifestations of what improv can be, when you’re equipped with the musical tools and the mindset to go for it.

The post 15 Improv Experts Share Their Favourite Examples of Improvisation appeared first on Musical U.

Jazz Piano School has a unique approach to teaching and we were keen to hear more about how it works and how improvisation factors in.

In this conversation we talk about:

• The astonishing number of jazz tunes Brenden could play after $12,000 of traditional jazz piano lessons and why he was completely unsure how to improvise or be creative.
• The “lego bricks” approach to improvising that makes it easy to learn, step by step.
• The unique 4-step system they use at Jazz Piano School to connect theory, technique, improv and repertoire at every stage of learning.

This was a really fun conversation and Brenden has a great way of explaining things that cuts straight through that intimidation factor. Whether you have any interest in jazz or piano, we think you’re gonna dig this.

Listen to the episode:

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Links and Resources

• JazzPianoSchool.com
• The Jazz Piano School podcast
• “My Jazz Freedom: What’s Helped and Hurt”
• Interview with the creators of Music Student 101 podcast 

Transcript

Christopher: Welcome to the show Brenden. Thank you for joining us today.

Brenden: Thanks for having me.

Christopher: So I’d love to start at the very beginning and understand where you came from as a musician. Where did you first start learning music and what was that like for you?

Brenden: Yeah. So my family’s big into music. My Dad’s a musician so we always had a piano around and I would just go and sit down at the piano and start playing and so they thought, “Well, why don’t we just give him piano lessons?” So I started taking piano lessons when I was a kid and I took classical lessons, obviously, just A Daily Dozen or A Dozen a Day, I can’t remember the name of the exercises but just beginner piano and so then I was about, I think I was, like, ten or so. I took classical lessons all the way up until then and I kept taking classical lessons but when I was ten, you know, I was always trying to change my, change the music, like, change my Bach, change the Bach I was playing, change the Mozart. My teachers would always yell at me, you know and I’d be, like, “Oh, it sounds better when I play it like this, though.” They’re like — (laughs) — like, I thought I could change Bach, you know, and so eventually I heard my first jazz album. That was an album with Oscar Petersen and Itzak Perlman, a classical violinist, like, not the best jazz album to start off with but, I mean, you know, hearing classical people make transitions is funny, but I, just, something changed me, you know, it was like it clicked when I heard that jazz album and I was, like, “This is what I need,” right? I just needed to learn how to get that feeling, to re-create the feeling that I felt and I wanted to self-express myself, you know, through the music of improvisation like Oscar Petersen was doing so at that point I continued to study classical music theory but then I started taking jazz and so that’s really where my, kind of, jazz and improv journey started, at that point and I eventually just kind of made the leap. I stopped taking classical music. I’d taken about 15 years of classical and then I just solely dedicated myself to taking jazz.

Christopher: Very cool. And roughly how old were you when you heard that album, do you think?

Brenden: I think I was about ten so it must have been, like, fifth or sixth grade, because I’d been looking for something —

Christopher: Interesting.

Brenden: — yeah. I’d been looking for something besides classical. Like, I liked classical but it was, just, like I said, I was always sitting down at the piano playing my own stuff , like, I wanted to do my own thing. (Laughs) So I would put new notes in, like, Bach, minuets and things like that. Finally I heard that album and I was like, “This is what I need.”

Christopher: Interesting, because I think to the average ten-year-old jazz, and particularly jazz harmony is not the most accessible sound, you know, I think a lot of people find they need to get a lot more experienced in music before jazz really becomes accessible to them.

Brenden: Right. Yeah, yeah.

Christopher: That wasn’t the case for you?

Brenden: That’s definitely true. Yeah, I don’t think so because we had it playing a lot, like, my parents would play jazz so my ear —

Christopher: Mm-hm.

Brenden: — I think a lot of people subconsciously, as you’re growing up, you know, music is in your ear and you are taking it in whether you understand it or not, you’re still listening to it, you know, some people when they’re in the womb, they put the headphones on the, you know, their wife’s belly and stuff like that to play music which I think is awesome. I’m definitely gonna do that with my first child (laughs) but, yeah, so I think I was taking it in and then when I got to that point where I heard the album everything was just, like, clicked, you know? So I think Oscar’s sound was what I had been looking for and he ended up being my first, like, really true inspiration to the jazz piano.

Christopher: So that’s super interesting. We talk about that sometimes at Musical U as passive ear training where you are developing your musical ear but you’re not, you know, doing exercises, you’re not consciously trying to do it but it sounds like you were really immersed in that jazz tradition even before you ever thought to play it yourself.

Brenden: Yeah. Absolutely, definitely listened to a lot of the stuff.

Christopher: And did you find it came easy to you? You clearly had the instinct to create and to experiment in music…

Brenden: (Laughs) Yeah.

Christopher: …but at the same time, you know, jazz isn’t the most, the simplest genre to dive into. Did you find that was an easy transition for you? Did it all come directly?

Brenden: To everyone listening out there, this is my story, and absolutely not. It did not come easy. (Laughs) So it was one of the hard — jazz piano is freakin’ hard and this is what I tell, this is how I tell my story on my website and our jazz piano school and to all of my followers out there, but it, yeah, it’s one of the hardest things that I’ve ever done and so just to give you guys a little teaser, but when I started taking jazz piano I took three years of jazz piano lessons because I wanted to learn jazz piano after I had heard that Oscar album. I took a lesson a week for three years at 50, or, excuse me, 70 bucks, I think it was about 70 to 75 bucks a week. So if you guys do the math on that, it’s about eleven to twelve thousand dollars I’d spent on jazz piano lessons for three years and if I asked you how many tunes I learned, how many tunes would you have guessed I learned?

Christopher: I guess hundreds.

Brenden: Right. I learned three tunes so I’d spent twelve thousand dollars on jazz piano lessons and I learned three tunes. So it was at that point that, obviously, I felt very disappointed, frustrated, you know, embarrassed because I had spent my parent’s money, like, I had barely learned any tunes and the three tunes I did learn, they were all I could play. Like, I couldn’t play any other jazz tunes besides those three tunes because I had copied what my teacher had showed me so my first experience with jazz piano improvisation was I went in to the lesson, this is, like, this would happen a lot, but obviously the first time it was shocking to me so I sat down at the piano. I was trying to learn, he would play. He was showing me the tune, “If I Were a Bell,” so I learned three tunes. I mean, this is burned into my memory. “If I Were a Bell,” “Yesterdays” and “Beautiful Love,” those were the three tunes I could play. So he was showing me “If I Were a Bell.”

He was playing all these cool licks and things like that and I was just, like, amazed, blown away like we all are when we’re trying to learn improv and then finally he stops and it’s about half an hour in, he’s talking and playing, just, forever and I’m just, like, “Yeah, yeah, awesome, I wanna learn how to do this,” you know, “I’m so pumped. I’m excited.” I’m, like, so he stops, and then I’m like, “All right. So when I go home, what should I practice to learn how to do this? Like, how do I learn this?” and he’s, like, “Weren’t you just watching what I showed you?” and I was like, “Uh, yeah, but –” and he’s, like, “Yeah, I just showed you how to do it,” and it was at that point, I was just, like, “This is a mess,” you know?

So I had, the only way I learned those three tunes, I could only play those three tunes was because I had copied his arrangements of what he had played so I could play those three tunes basically based off of what he had played. I didn’t know how to flip it to any other tunes to create what I wanted to self-express in jazz or how I wanted to recreate the sounds that I felt when I heard Oscar. I could only play those three tunes and nowhere was I even close to jazz piano freedom or improvisational freedom and I’d just spent twelve thousand dollars. So it was at that point that I was, like, “Man, something, something is wrong here.” (Laughs) So.

Christopher: Wow, and for the kid who went into jazz because he, you know, found himself experimenting with Bach that sounds incredibly painful.

Brenden: Yes, it was. It was very painful and so that’s, yeah, that’s the pain point I try, I mean, I’m sure that I’ve found to be true with almost 99% of all jazz learners, jazz people trying to learn jazz and that’s why I started Jazz Piano School.

Christopher: So bridge that gap for us, then. You had this terrible experience…

Brenden: Yeah.

Christopher: …a fairly traditional approach to jazz education…

Brenden: Right.

Christopher: …and now you have a jazz piano school where you teach in a very different way and a much more free and creative way. What were the milestones or epiphanies along the way that lead to you understanding a better way to do this?

Brenden: Yeah. That’s a great question. So basically I was determined. A lot of people would have quit as I’ve seen, you know, in students and I, this was, like, the only thing I wanted in life, so I just kept going. You know, I quit, actually after those first three years, started studying again with a new teacher, took another two lessons, spent a lot of money, quit again, started with a new teacher, just, like, through cycle, you know, and so I actually ended up going to music school just because I loved it. I got my jazz performance degree but even after I graduated from college it was still the same thing. Like, I didn’t feel that I could, I was content about my playing and I could sit down and truly self-express what I was trying to say through the music. I didn’t feel like I had a plan of action. I didn’t feel like I had structure or organization to continually get better and make progress at jazz piano and succeed.

So I started, you know, it was actually one day, like I’d spoken to you about, about language learning blocks because I was in a French class and I was taking French and basically I was thinking about learning languages and so when you’re learning a language, in order, if you are going to France and you want to speak French you want to be able to speak freely, right? You want to be able to just go there and be able to speak and express yourself, like, have a conversation, so I was thinking about how my teacher was teaching me these different sentences and so she was teaching us in a very structured way.

She obviously, when you learn English you’re learning verbs, you’re learning nouns, you’re learning pronouns, you’re learning sentence structure but you’re learning those components so that you can speak freely in a conversation, right? You’re not really copying what she’s saying. So if she said, for example, “I want you to copy this sentence, ‘How do I find the nearest corner store,” right? If you copied that sentence you’re not going to understand all the verbs, the nouns and pronouns that fit into the sentence. If you go to France, the only sentence you’re gonna be able to say is, “How do you get to the nearest corner store?” If you wanted to say, “How do you get to…?” you wouldn’t really understand how to add anything on to the back end because you’ve only copied that one sentence whereas if she’s teaching us the word, “how, to, get, to,” then we can start to replace any nouns on the end of that to make multiple types of sentences leading to freedom in the language.
So, you know, long story short it was from that that I started to create these, what I call, theory sequences where we’re taking a core theory tool and moving it through these building blocks and fitting it into a jazz sentence that basically leads someone to learn a core jazz theory tool like improvisation and things like that to start to create jazz piano freedom and I vowed to teach all my students with this method because it started to help me so much. I actually made more progress with my own developments in, like, the next three to six months after my epiphany than I had had in, like, the past ten years. I just skyrocketed my improvement and it got to the point where I was freely expressing myself due to the work I had put in through the structure and development of these proven language learning blocks, so I vowed to teach all my students with structure, organization and direction, not with generalities, not with the traditional methods of “I’m gonna show you. You copy me. Just listen, go listen to more jazz and you’ll figure it out,” like, these are all the things I would hear when I was a kid, you know, “Just use your ear and you’ll get it,” like, no. That’s, no. (Laughs)

So I just —

Christopher: Fantastic.

Brenden: — just to say some things, a lot of the traditional methods like you brought up before, too, is that those things do obviously come into play. I’m not saying that copying licks and things like that isn’t good for a person’s improvement but when you’re first starting I truly believe nailing down in a structured manner these proven learning language blocks that fit into jazz is going to build your foundation and then lead you to the point where you’re able to use different types of textures and structures that people have in order to fit that into your playing at a later point in your progression.

Christopher: Mm-hm. Well, I think your four-step framework for teaching jazz piano is definitely one of the most distinctive about Jazz Piano School and I’d love to just unpack that a little bit. You mentioned it in passing there. Can you explain what those four steps are, because I think it’s really elegant the way you link up theory and improv and repertoire and…

Brenden: Absolutely.

Christopher: …you know, that’s not something that a lot of people experience in their music learning. It tends to all be a bit disjointed or scattered.

Brenden: Right. Yeah, so basically the best way to describe this is if you are building a house, right, or you want to build something, so in jazz, classical is a different kind of beast because we have the music in front of us, right? In jazz, our goal is to sit down and freely express ourselves through the music with no music (laughs) if that makes sense, right? We want to express ourselves freely through the music with no music but in classical you put the music in front of you, you read it, you study it, everything’s right there, so with jazz, right, when we’re building our house our blueprint is our final product that we want to get to so that’s the house. The blueprints in jazz are jazz fakebooks, right, the charts. Jazz charts are basically our blueprints. They’re the structure, they’re telling us where we need to go, where we need to play, you know, what we can do, you know, here’s the melody.

Most people start with the blueprint but they have no tools to build the house. So can have a blueprint of a million-dollar mansion but if you go to build that million-dollar mansion without tools it’s absolutely impossible, right? So the tools that I teach in Jazz Piano School get you to look at any blueprint, any jazz chart and you will freely be able to build any jazz chart you want or play, right, you can play any jazz chart you want because you have the tools to do that. So if I break down the theory sequence, I call them, in Jazz Piano School, we take the theory tool, so that can be anything and to give some examples, it could be seventh chords, it could be triads, major triads, minor triads, it could be any sort of scale, any sort of theory tool that has, like, a purpose, right, in music, so, and again, relating this back, I use this analogy a lot, the construction analogy, if we have a hammer, right, if you have a tool that is a hammer, like a seventh chord or something like that, just because I have a hammer doesn’t mean, like, I know how to use it, doesn’t mean I know how to freely use it, doesn’t mean I know what its purpose is for. Like, a lot of people — there’s two sides to a hammer so you know you hit stuff on the one end of the hammer. It doesn’t necessary know what someone knows, or it doesn’t mean that someone knows what the back end of the hammer is for, right?

So the first thing in the theory sequence is that you need to understand the total functionality of a theory tool, so, like, what is its purpose? So a seventh chord, right, you need to understand what the purpose of a seventh chord is or a major seventh chord or a triad, right? Once we understand that then we know the functionality of that tool. Then we progress to our second step in the theory sequence which I call technique. So once I have a hammer and I know what I can do with a hammer I need to practice using my hammer, like, hitting nails, like actually hitting it because I could be terrible at doing that, right? I could miss, I could hit my finger, we don’t want to do that, right?

So I take my theory tool and I start playing major triads and I can practice that a number of different ways. Now, just to let you know, there’s no materials out there for these exercises, right? I’ve created all the exercises that link in to theory sequence, you know, so there are materials out there but they’re just, all jumbled up. It’s not in sequence like I’m teaching. So if we take a major triad on my outline of the major triad, I might outline it going through the circle of fourths, I might play it in a block style, I might play it with my left hand, I might play it hands together so these are all different ways I could use and practice the technique portion of my theory tool so I’m actually learning how to use my tool, I’m actually swinging the hammer, I’m learning how to not hit my finger as I’m nailing something in, right?

The third step we have is improv. Now the improv portion of this theory sequence is meant to freely use your tool so if I have a hammer and I’ve learned how to hit the hammer, you know, hit a nail into the wall, that may be the only thing I know how to do with this tool but I want to be able to use this tool to build a house so I need to be able to use a hammer to do many different things not just hit one nail in one location if that makes sense, like, I want to be able to use a hammer to hit a baseboard in, I want to be able to use the hammer to, you know, pull screws out. I want to freely be able to use this hammer however I want, not just for one purpose, right? So for major triads in improv, right, I want to freely be able to use these major triads however I want and so by practicing specific building blocks or specific improv exercises that relate to the major triad I can start to improvise over the major triads I can use the notes within the major triads to solo with, so this improv exercise is teaching us freedom within the theory tool to give us freedom over that tool, over that one specific tool. That way I can use it however I want.

And then finally the last step is repertoire where we integrate all the previous work we’ve just done which isn’t much, I mean, you know, it’s a couple of exercises within each step and we integrate that into repertoire so we start to integrate that into tunes, aka we start to build our house with a hammer, right, however we want. We now have the tool at our disposal. We can use it however we want because we’ve practiced the use of it, we’ve practiced the freedom use of it. I know how to do everything I can with this tool. I can now use it in any tune I want rather than being handcuffed by just copying someone using a hammer, which would only allow me to use that hammer in the exact situation that I had just watched them use it in and so that’s a full theory sequence.

Christopher: Very cool, and it’s so strikingly different from the traditional approach which, you know, is typically, “Here’s the piece we’re gonna work on. Let’s learn the technique required to play the notes on the page and then maybe next week or if you’re a bit more advanced, we can take a little bit of this piece and give you the opportunity to improvise completely separate from everything we’ve just been learning.”

Brenden: Right.

Christopher: I love how you build improv into, you know, really into the core of that so that everything that’s taught is taught with the opportunity to use it in a creative way.

Brenden: Yep. Absolutely.

Christopher: So in practical terms what does this like like for the student? How many tools are there to go through? Are they learning one a day, one a week? Do you do all four steps for one tool before moving on? What’s that like?

Brenden: That’s a good question, yeah. Well, so obviously there is lots of jazz information, right? So and there’s lots of musical information out there and I think structuring a way for the student’s progress to make, to get them to their goal the fastest is the most, is the best thing to do. So if someone’s interested in playing, you know, someone might come to me and say, “I want to play jazz piano.” Okay, that’s great. There’s lots of jazz piano out there. You can play in a group, you can play by yourself, you can play modern tunes, swing tunes, slow tunes, fast tunes, so what catches your ear, right?

Then they might say, “Okay I want to play solo piano because I’m at home most of the time. I have a nine-to-five,” right, “and I love,” you know, they may have had an album trigger their love for music just like I did so maybe they heard Bud Powell. Maybe they heard Erroll Garner play for the first time in jazz or even a classical musician, you know, whoever that may be and so they say, “I want to play like Erroll Garner,” and I say, “Okay. Great.”
So we start to take these different paths for their goal because the different tools are going to lead you to build different houses, right? If I want to build a little shed, I don’t need a hundred tools, right? I just need some two-by-fours. I can build it pretty easily. I’m not going to give a hundred to someone who wants to build a little shed so if you just want to play like Erroll Garner, that’s one specific style, right? He’s got a couple techniques that can make him sound like Erroll Garner. He has a certain texture and if you’re playing solo piano that’s gonna be different than playing with a group.

So we try and give these theory sequences or these theory tools to people to get them to their goal the fastest possible so that they can see results but in a structured and directional manner, so, you know, we just kind of lead them down that path because once you figure out your goal and your objective you really don’t need that many tools besides your foundational learning process. Obviously is you don’t know what a seventh chord is you’re going to need to know that, you know. So there’s a bit of a foundation to build there but then after that you can really go in the direction you want with these theory sequences and get exactly what you’re looking for in a much, much quicker time, not fifteen-plus years like I had to go through spending college tuition money, you know, so.

Christopher: Terrific, and that’s something we’re believers in ourselves at Musical U, that, you know, you can’t do a one-size-fits-all course for music in general, you know, it tends to end up fitting nobody and you’re much better off figuring out the combination of topics and approaches that actually suits their background and their goals and what it is they want to accomplish.

Brenden: Right. Absolutely.

Christopher: So we’ve talked about jazz and a bit about piano but I’m curious to know, a lot of what you’ve described I think is relevant beyond both of those two things. How much do you think this approach would be valuable to someone who wants to learn, say, rock improv on guitar?

Brenden: Mm-hm. Yeah. It’s really all the same in my teaching style, right? So jazz is an amazing thing because it really encompasses and holds types of music. The theory and tools you’ve learned in jazz can be used in all types of music, so rock, pop, funk and it’s amazing because so many people are like, “Brenden I just want to play funk,” or “I just want to play rock,” you know, or “I just want to play pop,” but when you’ve learned these things and you walk through the system that I’ve created it basically, it allows you to do that with freedom so you, by achieving, you know, going through the theory sequences you’re actually creating freedom in all these different styles. Now obviously a rock style is much different than a jazz style but when we start to look at it closer, you know, why is it different and I don’t want to take away anything from other styles but, you know, rock and pop only usually contain just, you know, pure fact, a couple of chords. You’re not gonna see many chords or a harmonic or big theory types tools in rock and pop, you know, you may have four triads. A lot of pop stars that we know in this day and age have gotten rich off of four chords, right, this huge hit single.

So jazz is a very, very in-depth process, right, so if you’re learning your jazz tools you’re gonna be able to play any other style that you want. So if you want to learn rock, I’m not necessarily saying you should learn jazz first, but the jazz tools, the jazz theory components will give you access to everything so why not start there and have access to rock, have access to pop, have access to funk, have access to everything else, you know, R&B, gospel, like, it’s gonna give you everything you need to play all the styles rather than just saying, “Okay, I want to play rock,” then that’s all you learn. Like, you’re not going to be able to play jazz, you won’t really necessarily play in any other styles so I guess I’d recommend going towards more of the jazz theory to start with and then learning that and in that way you can express yourself however you want in any other style because a lot of them are great as well, so.

Christopher: It seems like you’ve struck a really nice balance in the way you teach at Jazz Piano School in that you are providing very clear and step-by-step teaching but as we just touched on, it’s also quite flexible so that, you know, students can pick and choose or adapt the path to best suit what they’re into and this was something that jumped out of me from a great blog post you wrote called, “My Jazz Freedom: What’s Helped and Hurt,” and we’ll put a link in the show notes because I think it’s a really great post, but something you mentioned in there was the interplay between structure and freedom when learning. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Brenden: Yes, absolutely. So, right. A lot of people — so jazz, a lot of people will say jazz is just freedom, right, so basically people are improvising and they’re just playing spontaneously whatever comes to mind, and, I don’t know, this is what I hear out there sometimes. People will say this, but it all starts with freedom, it starts with no structure.

But I believe it’s actually the opposite. I think the more structured you start the more freedom you’re gonna have in the long run so starting with the structure and discipline to learn your tools, like I’ve talked about on the podcast today is the best way to get to that freedom point whereas if you’re starting with complete freedom you have no tools and basically you’re guessing, you’re searching through a haystack to find the needle, right, you’re kind of just wandering, you’re lost, you don’t have a direction. Too much freedom can lead being nowhere, right?
So basically that was my journey, that was my path that I took and so I didn’t have any structure. I didn’t have any direction or organization. People were just throwing me things and I had to take the tools and try and connect them myself whereas in Jazz Piano School starting with the structured approach to go through these core tools will give you the freedom you need to self-express yourself, right, and however you want so you could self-express through jazz, through rock, through pop and by learning those core toods you’re going to achieve that freedom much, much faster than starting with freedom and wandering around trying to explore, right, just being out there in the abyss of information on the internet these days about music because there’s so much out there and to assume that you’re going to be — see, the thing is, it’s like I see people go out there and they have access to all this information but what happens is, and you’ll see this with the — you know, I love all jazz piano sites and I support education in all manners but people always say, like, “We have the biggest library. We have the biggest library of jazz piano videos. We have the biggest library of rock guitar,” and the key word there you have to watch out for is library, because when you enter in a library if I were to tell you to go learn history, for example or, you know, like, London’s background, okay, if you walked into the George Washington Library or a big library in London and you were asked to do that would you be able to learn everything you needed to know if you’re just walking to a library with thousands and thousands of books? Probably not, right, because you were putting yourself — essentially you’re not the student anymore. You’re trying to teach yourself. You’re becoming the teacher to inform yourself about how to learn so when there’s these libraries essentially you’re trying to navigate all the information instead of someone saying, “Okay. Go to floor two, pick out, you know, book two on shelf three, read pages 50 through 60 in that book then go to floor five, go to shelf three, pick out book two and then read that whole book.”

With the direction and structure that you’re creating in the beginning you’re actually moving down the specific path to learn exactly what you want in order to achieve freedom, otherwise, again, you’re just wandering, you’re sifting through this information completely lost and for you to expect yourself to expect that you’re gonna learn something because you’re the one charge of all the information to put it all together is almost madness, you know? It’s, like, there’s no way that that’s going to happen because you’re not the teacher. You’re the student. You need someone to give you a plan to get to freedom or achieve whatever your goals are.

Christopher: Absolutely. I think we’re in a really interesting age for education and in particular music education because there is a tradeoff to be made, right? Like we’ve touched on a single, strict path that a teacher forces you down is not going to work out well, as you experienced in your first three years of learning. If it’s not the right path or it’s not suiting the student it’s a disaster but at the same time I think there’s far too many people kind of wandering lost in the wilderness of the internet and feeling like they’re learning something but then actually discovering far too late that it’s all a jumble and they’ve wasted months or years just kind of dabbling and scattered in their learning.

I remember on a previous episode of the podcast I was talking with Matthew Scott Philips and Jeremy Burns from the Music Student 101 podcast and we were talking about this, how it’s a challenge for us as online music educators to find that balance, to give students the freedom to pick their own path while providing enough support and guidance and structure that they’re actually making good progress and learning rather than, just, you know, wandering around the biggest library in the world.

Brenden: Right. Right. Yeah.

Christopher: So I really applaud the work you’re doing at Jazz Piano School. I think you’re finding a good balance there and in particular in this world of jazz and improvisation where I think we inherit a lot of romantic notions about the gifted musician who just, you know, he just was shuttered (phonetic) for a thousand years and then he just picked up his trumpet and he could play anything. I love that you’re helping people get away from that and understand the step-by-step that can be involved.

Brenden: Mm-hm. Yep. Absolutely. So yeah, I mean, the balance, too, is, just to say one quick thing on that is that it’s definitely a hard thing. I struggled with that so much for so long just due to my path because when you’re an outside student the thing you want to do the most isn’t learn scales and learn triads and, like, learn theory tools like I’m talking about, like people’s ears probably started to glaze over when I was talking a little bit, but you just want to play. You just want to play, you know, it’s like you want to play and be happy. That’s all I wanted. Like, I just wanted to feel that happiness sensation. It’s about feeling, really, not, like, the theory terms, like, your ultimate goal is to play and be happy. That’s honestly, like, what I believe, what I try and help my students do because whether you’re playing to the level of Oscar Peterson or you’re a gigging musician or you’re just playing a simple jazz tune at home by yourself, whatever equates to happiness for you, that’s where I want to help you get to but at the same time, you know, it comes from something from within the student that you as a student have to realize there needs to be some sort of discipline involved because if you’re just kind of wandering around trying to just play then you’re not really going to get to that spot you want. So it definitely is a push-and-pull between what the student wants and what I know is best for you to get what you want, right? So it’s definitely a trusting balance between the teacher and the student, so.

Christopher: So it’s been fantastic to hear more about your approach at Jazz Piano School. I think you’ve got such a great methodology there for teaching a very complex subject in a flexible and step-by-step way. For the listener who’s maybe just getting started in improvising or maybe is just considering getting started and they’re hopefully through this series of podcast episodes feeling a bit more reassured that it’s possible for them do you have any advice or guidance for them as they get started?

Brenden: Absolutely. So, if anyone’s seen the Lego movie out there, I highly recommend you go see it. (Laughs) There’s, like, three of them now the Batman Lego movie, the first one, the second one, anyway, go see the Lego movie because you will learn to improvise from that movie.

So my whole improvisation approach is based off of Legos building blocks, specific improv exercises. Now as I was growing up I would hear a lot of things, like, “Just use your ears. Just watch me and then you do it. Just transcribe. Just copy licks,” right? “Play licks,” and so I heard that a lot. It never, in my opinion, in my case, in my journey, it never helped me get to the point that I wanted to get to so I think a lot of people follow that same path and I love getting my message out there to share with people that I spent 15-plus years doing that, transcribing, copying licks, playing solos. It never really got me to the point I wanted to. So my teaching is based off of Legos.

In the Lego movie, you have people called master builders, right? So these master builders, they can build whatever they want with a pile of Legos. Like, when they see a pile of Legos it’s, like, “Oh, I can build this ship,” or “I can build the White House,” or something like that, so they don’t see a pile of Legos. They see the end result but did they start there? No. Not all Lego people in the world are master builders, right? So when we start, I’m sure, like, most, 99%, did you play with Legos? Have you ever used Legos before?

Christopher: For sure, yes. Absolutely.

Brenden: Everyone’s played with Legos. They know what Legos are. So when you start building with Legos, you’re not starting with, like, the death star. You’re not building a death star Lego thing, you start with, like, a little, tiny boat, right, and then in the instruction manual it shows you three Legos. So you have three Legos. You have three building blocks and you’re putting them together.

Now later down the road when you see those three building blocks are you going to be able to use those to do whatever you want? Yes, absolutely, because you’ve used them before in a step-by-step manner, so you use them all in a step-by-step manner so if you’re learning how to improvise, for example you need to learn the building blocks of improvisation.

So if you want to learn how to improvise, like, whoever, like, a guitar solo, you know, like, AC/DC, Van Halen, it doesn’t even have to be jazz, like, Nora Jones, pop, you know, like, whatever, there’s building blocks that relate to specific exercises in the improv. So if we wanted to take a major triad, right, the building block I would use for improv around a major triad would be just to use those three notes for improv. So I would use, like, for a C major triad, C-E-G, we have three notes. The building block for improv around that would be to improv using three notes, just C, E and G. Now once I’ve learned that I start to learn that building block through all triads so I can improv through an F major triad using F, A and C. So that’s just one Lego. Like, I have one Lego now in my collection, right?

Then I would learn another Lego. So if I get to any major triad I can improvise using those three notes. Now if I put on a seventh on top, right, so maybe I have a dominant seventh on top of the chord, C-E-G-B flat, so now I have four notes. So now I have two Legos, right, and I can put those together so if I see a major triad or I see a seventh chord I’ve learned those Lego improvisation building blocks because I’m practicing small, specific improv exercises related to the theory tool. I’m not just practicing a whole transcription. I’m not just copying a lick. I’m learning improv exercises that are small building blocks that relate to a theory tool and that way it helps me achieve quick, fast freedom within my improvisation and I have Legos at my disposal to use and build like a master builder in the Lego movie.

Christopher: Awesome. I think that’s a terrific analogy for people to keep in mind because, as we’ve talked about, improv can be a huge subject and jazz can be an intimidatingly complex genre but I think that idea of, you know, assembling your tools, assembling your Legos and then bringing those to each improv is a great way to think about it.

Brenden: Mm-hm.

Christopher: Fantastic. Thank you so much again for joining us on the show today, Brenden.

Brenden: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

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The post Building Blocks of Improv, with Brenden Lowe appeared first on Musical U.