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 [...]
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:
[...]
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 [...]
