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.

20 replies

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    • Mom, fitness instructor, lover of music
    • Michelle_Russell
    • 7 days ago
    • Reported - view

    My son,  improvises often and as a result many of his compositions have an improvisitory feel to them. In fact, one reason we ended up with his current teacher was because he wanted to learn historical improvisation and we found his teacher through that search. I don't improvise... yet.

      • Unfrozen Barroom Piano Player
      • Peter_G
      • 3 days ago
      • Reported - view

       Hi Michelle, I'd love to hear samples of Thurmond's improvs some day.  As you probably well-know already, there are some excellent ToneBase sessions on historical improvisation.  I'm still trying to crack the code of partimento & baroque thoroughbase-based improvisation, in the hope that it will open up new windows to my own improvs.

      • Mom, fitness instructor, lover of music
      • Michelle_Russell
      • 23 hrs ago
      • Reported - view

       If he records one, I'll send it to you. When he plays at church, he often improvises for several minutes on whatever I've sung for the meditation --- and makes sure to find a way to transition to whatever the next song will be (sometimes incorporating that melody into the end of his improvisation). He also does fun things like "pick notes out of a hat" and creates an improvisation based on the notes he's given. 

    • Andrew_Smith
    • 7 days ago
    • Reported - view

    HI Ken -- I started improvising after I had learned enough theory and had tried to learn some pieces by ear (in my case they happened to be in F or E-flat major, so I got familiar with progressions in those keys) and actually the theory cemented when I learned a few Beatles songs on both guitar and piano. Anyway, I began improvising more when I didn't have the time to practice or the mental energy to learn pieces. As far as I can tell, most improvising is some manner of playing through chord progressions, but getting advanced stylistically and rhythmically, so I don't just sound like an emo teenager, is harder. Sounds like you are on the right track with your teacher.
    As an extra note, I was stealthily put on a program to play at a family wedding while people gathered in the church -- it wasn't clear if they wanted me to play for sure, but when I showed up my name was on the program! So I went to the front of the church and improvised and it was fine. If I can do it, most others surely can! Have fun. 

    • www.narrowkeys.com
    • Linda_Gould
    • 7 days ago
    • Reported - view

    Love to improvise!  It's great you have a teacher that is both classical and jazz as they will be able to help you transition from note reading to the freedom of improvising.  It's a lovely feeling to be comfortable harmonizing a melody over a chord progression.  Jeremy Siskind has some nice videos on Tonebase on improvising.  Have you checked them out?

      • Ken_Radford
      • 7 days ago
      • Reported - view

       I will check out Jeremy’s videos. Thanks for mentioning them.

    • Carol_Chua
    • 7 days ago
    • Reported - view

    Hi Ken.   I have learnt a lot of jazz theories.  Totally would love to sit down and play any chord progressions.  There are much to learn and not as easy as I thought.   Still prodding on and loving the jazzy tones.  Glad you asked. 

    • Ken_Radford
    • 7 days ago
    • Reported - view

    Great to hear that I am not alone in my journey to learn how to improvise well. My teacher tells me to “play fewer notes, leave space, do not have a fixed left-hand rhythm - rather have the left hand support what the right hand is doing.” Sounds easy enough right :|

    I will record a couple of my favourite chord progressions and post them.

      • Carol_Chua
      • 3 days ago
      • Reported - view

        Agree.  Play less notes.  And thanks for the LH tip.   Looking forward to your video.

    • Mark_Cooper
    • 7 days ago
    • Reported - view

    Hi Ken

    I’ve been dabbling in jazz and improv for some years and had teachers over the years , it was a struggle at the beginning, particularly as with most classically trained pianists , I had never learned to play by ear which I think is essential in order to progress in this area 

    but I think I’ve made some progress 

    below is my arrangement /improv of fats Waller’s jitterbug waltz, I originally posted for the community concert last January 

     

    Jitterbug waltz

     

    https://youtu.be/gJLgT-rEotw?si=fzV34FWhCkExulrJk

     

    It would be great to continue this stream where people could post their work in this area 

      • Ken_Radford
      • 7 days ago
      • Reported - view

       Nice work Mark. Your left and right hands work very well together, which is what I am aiming for.

      • Vicki_R
      • 6 days ago
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       Wow impressive.  I've been plodding through jazz theory for the last 6 months with a couple of online sites, and hope to someday get to what you did with that arrangement.  bravo!

    • Ken_Radford
    • 3 days ago
    • Reported - view

    Hello fellow improvisers. I thought I would share part of my journey from “I wish I could just sit at the piano and play” to “I used to wish I could just sit at the piano and play” by showing one of the first routines I was given by my teacher. It is a simple repeated I-IV in Eb Major (that’ll be Eb Major 7 - Ab Major 7) in the left hand with notes from the Eb Major scale in the right hand. There may be bits of the Eb Major Pentatonic and C Blues scales in there as well, as they are derivatives of Eb Major. 

    As you will know, the point of improvising is making it up as you go along, and this means that some of the improv sounds good (note to self: add this to my vocabulary) while other bits don’t sound so good (note to self: … :)

    I still play this routine every day along with more advanced sequences using multiple scale changes, for example, II-V-I-VI-ii-v-i. 

    What improv exercises do you use?

      • Unfrozen Barroom Piano Player
      • Peter_G
      • 3 days ago
      • Reported - view

       Hi Ken, to answer your question, as an exercise, I like to improvise ON SOMETHING, by which I mean use a tune of some kind with its own native chord structure as a starting point. So I'll take a tune and play around with it.  Maybe just picking the tune out by ear or variations in the voicings of the chords, is a good start, and then little variations on the tune, and then get into freer things. As I play the tune, the things I play around with are based on the chords for the particular spot I'm in.  The chords are a general guide to what notes to play, basically notes that work with those chords in the context of whatever key the piece is in at that moment.  i don't focus on scales per se , although the notes that "work" best with a given chords will eventually lead you to a scale.

      Other times I'll take a 3 -6 note figure and play it up and down a scale, or up and down an arpeggio of a chord.  So for example your Eb Maj7 chord: a very simple but useful exercise is an "enclosure" of the chord notes.  So:: D-F-Eb encloses the first note (Eb) of the chord. Then F-Ab-G encloses the second note of the Chord (G), and so on up and down the arpeggiated chord, trying to play them fluidly without interruption (which takes a little practice).  The foregoing example uses the diatonic neighboring notes of the scale for the enclosure, but you could also use chromatic neighbors (e.g. F#-Ab-G to enclose the G) or even chordal neighbors (e.g. C-G-Eb to enclose the Eb, effectively enclosing it in a C minor Chord) to add color and variety

      That exercise gives you some useful little "Riffs" that you can throw in the next time that chord shows up in the piece you are playing.  

      • Mark_Cooper
      • 3 days ago
      • Reported - view

       Hi Ken , I like this approach and I might use it myself 

      but I agree with Peter , that I prefer practicing over actual tunes 

       I might take a short section , and loop it using a backing track such as irealpro, and see what I can come up with 

      I also like listening to  recordings and copying short licks which I try to incorporate into my solo , as a way of building up my vocabulary , I tend not to transcribe whole solos because I don’t find it that beneficial 

      • Ken_Radford
      • 3 days ago
      • Reported - view

      Thanks Peter. I will try out some enclosures at my next session.

    • Unfrozen Barroom Piano Player
    • Peter_G
    • 3 days ago
    • Reported - view

    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):

    https://youtu.be/MoouZkDanek

    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) :

    https://youtu.be/9X73-B607xg

    Sleigh Ride (Leroy Anderson & Mitchell Parish)  - as recorded for a ToneBase Winter holiday concert:

    https://youtu.be/AWuTHCdvgpA

    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.

      • Ken_Radford
      • 3 days ago
      • Reported - view

       Hi Peter. A thought occurred to me after listening to your three great performances. As you have said, what you do (and you do it very well IMHO) is take existing   pieces and improvise on them. What I am trying to get to should probably be called extemporising, by which I mean taking a chord sequence with no reference to an existing piece and making something up on the fly. My main focus is on taking the chord I am playing and using a scale or scales that I believe will work over that chord.

      As an example, if I play a II-V-I-VI in C Major, I treat the II chord (Dm7) as chord II of the C Major scale. Over the V chord (G7) if I add a regular 9th I treat it as chord IV of the D jazz melodic Minor scale. (If I add a b9 or #9 to the G7 I treat it as chord I of G diminished.) I treat the I chord (C Major 7) as chord I of the C Major scale, and chord VI (A+7) I treat as chord VII of the Bb Jazz Melodic Minor scale.

      Looking forward to hearing how other folk approach this topic.

      • Unfrozen Barroom Piano Player
      • Peter_G
      • 2 days ago
      • Reported - view

       Hi Ken.  first, thanks for the feedback on my little improvisational forays on these tunes!

      Secondly, yes, I understand what you're talking about and can hear from your video exactly what you're doing with the I -IV chords in that case.  It leads to some very nice and beautiful sounds (worthy of a Note to Self: retain and develop!) and it also helps one to learn what doesn't work (Note to Self: avoid!).

      Regarding your description in the comment above, I had a couple of questions. First, I note that you've designated an A+7 (i.e. an augmented dominant) as your VI chord.  Is that the default chord that you would use in this setting?  I ask because I would tend to default to the diatonic Am7, and use other characters (dominant, augmented, altered] as available substitutes.

      Next, regarding your 'jazz natural minor' scales, --I'm not quite up to speed on some of this terminology. Do these scales employ the natural 6th and natural 7th, or is it the natural 6th and flat 7th? e.g. in your D minor scale is it a C natural or a C#, and similarly in the Bb minor scale is it an Ab or an A natural? [understanding that these are defaults which one is free to vary] 

      My hesitation about totally unstructured extemporizing is that, among other things, it might not allow for distinguishing strong beats from weak beats.  This could be important in determining whether a particular sound is naughty or nice. e.g. when you play an Ab note over the EbMaj7 chord -- it could be more permissible on a weak beat as e.g. a suspension or passing tone (especially if you left out the g in the LH at that moment), and perhaps less acceptable as a resolution on a strong beat, where it might clash with your home key harmony (i.e. the EbMaj.7 chord in that case). 

      A melody provides a target down beat and a skeletal structure for the improv, which can be useful when you are ready to utilize some of the lessons learned from the more free-form extemporizing.

      • Ken_Radford
      • 2 days ago
      • Reported - view

       Hi Peter.

      Thanks for your questions. My go-to VI in a II-V-I-VI sequence is the augmented 7th. I feel that the notes of the JMM scale give it a little lift - more so than the notes that would accompany the diatonic m7.

      The Jazz Melodic Minor scale has a flat 3 and every other note natural, so my D JMM has D, E, F, G, A, B, C#, D.

      As you point out, distinguishing the strong from the weak beats is one of my many challenges.

      Here is an example of a few choruses of a II-V-I-VI in C Major. On the first chorus I use G7 with a natural 9 (F A B E) with D JMM in the melody. In the subsequent choruses i use a flat 9 (F Ab B E) with G diminished in the melody.

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