What is improvisation?
Improvisation is the ability to be able to play something in a different way than you initially planned it or thought it would be played. To be able to improvise is really useful because it means, when you’re playing live or something, you can just play melodies or riffs without having to think about it. Being able to improvise really well can also help with your performance anxieties because, if you mess up on a note or if you’re asked to play in a different key, you know what to do and how to fix any mistakes or issues that may arise. Improvisation can be done round a scale, round a note, or just off the bat really, but either way, it looks really impressive and it can help solve issues so much quicker. For example, if you were playing live and the singer couldn’t sing in the songs original key, for what ever reason, you’d have the ability to lower or higher the key so that the performance could still happen.
Fundamentals of improvisation
Knowing your basics is very important! You want to be able to have a wide variety of different techniques, like scales and arpeggios, and be able to know most, if not all, your chords, scales, different voicing’s, and how rhythms/melodies work together. Once you understand how rhythms and melodies work together, you can implement your own twists and add your own stamp on different songs you cover etc. Then, you can add different techniques to make the piece sound more complex.
Improvisation in a live performance
Many musicians said that, when they’re faced with the challenge of improvisation live, they get very anxious and very uncertain. This is because improvisation doesn’t really have any boundaries, as long as you know what you’re doing. For example, when musicians are playing a solo and it’s off the bat, they can really go anywhere they want as long as they know how to resolve it. If you go out of key or play a wrong note, it doesn’t really matter as long as you can bring yourself back in. Actually, sometimes, playing a “wrong” note can work out better for you because it can jilt the audience up into focussing back on you.
Improvisation has been described as “expressive playing” by “Dolan, D., Sloboda, J., Jeldtoft Jensen, H., Crüts, B. and Feygelson”. By expressive playing, they mean that during improvisation, you’re kind of forced to imagine a scenario or feeling and indulge yourself into it to play it. If you don’t, you can sound like you’re playing very robotically. During improvisation you kind of play what you feel, or what you want the audience to play, that’s why the boundaries aren’t so important.
Different techniques of improvisation
Playing “off-notes” can be really useful in keeping the audience focused into your performance, because it’s unpredictable. Playing “off-notes” is actually really complex because it means that you have to keep the tempo, rhythm and key all in mind because you’ll still need to come back into the right note to finish it up. However, once you get a deep enough understanding of music theory so you’re able to playing “in and out of the box”, it can be very freeing because you can play what ever you want really, which also allows you to be more expressive too.