Anyone like to improvise?
Hi. I have always had a desire to be able to sit at the piano and just play - without knowing what I will play. It seems to be a daunting task, but since I found a great teacher who was classically trained before becoming a professional jazz pianist, I have made some progress. When I don’t feel like practicing I sit at the piano and play a simple chord sequence - for example Fm7, Bbm7, Cm7, Fm7 - and find notes and phrases that sound good to me.
Does anyone else improvise or plan to learn how to? It would be good to share ideas.
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Improvising has been my main way of playing the piano for my whole life. I'd love to know what other folks are doing on ToneBase with improvisation, and to trade notes, ideas, comments and performances.
I play mostly standards and pop tunes, but nothing's safe from my giving it a try. Here are a few samples of my playing that I've used in some ToneBase events.
Heart and Soul (Hoagy Carmichael) (with some help from Herman's Hermits):
Bewitched (Rodgers and Hart) from a ToneBase Halloween Community Concert (in which I'm experimenting with trying to incorporate a riff from the F# minor Fugue from Book 2 of the Well Tempered Clavier that I was working on at the time, as well as to quote a riff from a piece that one of the other Tonebase participants was working on) :
Sleigh Ride (Leroy Anderson & Mitchell Parish) - as recorded for a ToneBase Winter holiday concert:
I have hundreds of audio only recordings that I've made over the years. Just starting to experiment with video after joining ToneBase. the App I'm using is LumaFusion - it's very inexpensive and allows you to include fade in and out of up to 6 different video sources if you can find enough devices to film them.