Improvisation
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Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
I’ve been reading a lot about Gabriela Montero these last few days. She’s a classical pianist who is known for improvising on themes given to her on the spot, both on record and in concerts.
I find this exciting on many levels: not only because it brings improvisation to a mainstream classical audience, but also because [...]
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
Ok, so you’ve learned all the fingerings for every inversion of the basic arpeggios in C, right? Or at the very least you should be somewhat familiar with them. If not, this next step may prove pretty frustrating.
What we’ll do now is apply these fingerings to a tune. It can be any tune…choose one you [...]
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
In a previous post I mentioned having to really know you’re arpeggios. The first thing I did which really helped me out was to figure out the fingerings for all the inversions. Once you have the shapes under your fingers, everything else becomes a lot easier.
So I took the four basic chord types: maj7, m7, [...]
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
I just wanted to share my approach to learning to play over changes. What has worked for me is to stick to playing the basic chord-tones: 1-3-5-7. I take whatever tune I’m working on, and improvise at a very slow tempo, only with chord tones.
The objective is to really get inside the changes, to really [...]
Sunday, March 30th, 2008
I started messing around with applying patterns to some standards. Here is one I came up with for All The Things You Are:
Because of the constant movement in fourths, it pretty easy to apply a repetitive pattern like this. Other progressions require a little more creativity.
Here’s the same pattern with some added melodic movement:
[...]
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Continuing some ideas from my last post, here are some examples of combining intervals. Instead of parallel thirds, I’m alternating between thirds and sixths:
And here’s a pattern derived from that:
Now, maybe if we were looking for something a bit more modern, we could try other intervals. How about seconds and fourths?
And the [...]
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
I’ve been leafing though a book called "Gehörbildung" by Ulrich Kaise. It’s a pretty interesting take on ear-training, though a little hard to read for me since it’s in German.
The second half of the book deals with 2 simultaneous voices, and he mentions some figures from "Dritten Theil des sich selbst informierenden Clavier-Spieler" by Michael [...]
Monday, February 18th, 2008
As promised, here is a recording of the etude I posted not too long ago. I learned it as is, and then slowly started to improvise with it…mostly just playing with rhythmic anticipations and adding a little motion to the bass line. I still need to work on it a bit, but I [...]
Monday, January 21st, 2008
I’ve always been very interested in improvisation practices in classical music. It was obviously a very respected ability in the baroque era…it seemed a way of showing one’s level of musicianship and creativity. Many musicians like J.S. Bach and Sylvius Leopold Weiss were highly revered for their improvisational skills.
But how was this taught? It’s one [...]
Friday, December 28th, 2007
In an effort to add contrapuntal textures to my playing, I’ve been messing around with species counterpoint and trying to apply it to jazz tunes.
Here is my first attempt, a cantus firmus for the blues in Bb:
So first, I started playing it and improvising a line on top of it in first species. This proved [...]
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