For the improvising guitarists in there!

[Guillaume]

Great ways to practice from all, thanks for the contribution!

@Ney :

So this is what it's all about. I've been playing for 8 years and did not get it that clearly until now. I must be a slow learner haha But now I know what to shoot for. Great unfiltered spontaneity and saying goodbye to the ego for a moment. Thanks for your post.

[Guillaume]

Ney,

Say I'm improvising over a track I recorded, and I go by pure inspiration, not playing anything until it comes to me. As musical energy comes through me, I attempt to play it without trying to sound good whatsoever. Just good ol' inspiration straight to fingers.

What if it does not come out the way it should? do I just stop improvising and practice it to make it sound like I should have sounded? I would also practice it in all 12 keys just like we have to do with the exercises in John McLaughlin "This is the way I do it" . That would be my guess. What do you think?

Guillaume

[guitar66]

Ney - thanks for sharing your thoughts on this topic. I sometimes wonder if my practice sessions are going in the right direction (75 % improv to long blues songs, 25% finger exercises), but after reading your post feel more confident that my heart and mind have not wandered too far from the correct path to progress. Thanks also for sharing the link.

[AXE]

What if it does not come out the way it should?

I see two potential obstacles to this approach.
1. Translating the melody in your mind onto the guitar.
2. Playing that melody in the correct key.

The was to deal with 1 is clear I think - you just need to develop your aural skills. This includes a lot of different exercises but there is a lot of info on the subject and I think nobody is confused by it. So, it's just hard work.
About number 2: if you really don't think and just play a melody you imagined at a random place on the neck, you have a good chance to play it in the wrong key. How do you deal with that!? I think you still need to keep a little thought about where to play the melody and maybe if it needs some tweak to fit better.

Just my thoughts on the subject. I'm not a good improviser at all.

[doilinodonald]

Hey, i would like too add too the subject by asking what you should do if you were trying too learn too how improvise chords as a way of playing a song?
you see im starting a jazz degree in a month and one day and would like too know how the principles apply too "all that jazz"

[Tomakemusic]

Hey, i would like too add too the subject by asking what you should do if you were trying too learn too how improvise chords as a way of playing a song?
you see im starting a jazz degree in a month and one day and would like too know how the principles apply too "all that jazz"

Hello, I am not sure if I got your point properly - you said: "how improvise chords"
it can be either:
- playing any song in "chord-melody style" - then it's a big task - look at Jamie's lessons on that subject as well as many great songbooks from Joe Pass and other great players
- improvise chords progressions - meaning reharmonize existing songs or create new songs with fresh progression ideas - that is also a quite big challenge - dozens of classical, modal and jazz harmony handbooks to study but it is one of the most exciting jourrneys in music ( for me at least)

best regards

[Augustine]

The music will always come out "the way it should", if you understand Jamie's teachings you know there are no accidents. But let's go past "correct preparation" and talk about something else that Jamie has mentioned, and that is mindset.

Anything you play is filtered through your mindset and the limits of your technique. Mindset is something that you can practice. You could practice improvising over nothing but a blues progression, playing tender one time around, angry the next, lyrical the next, etc. and make great advances. Roy Buchanan was a master at this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y591NfU7t9g

A good actor will strive to illuminate every conceivable emotion as part of their repertoire, and a master improviser would have no less a goal.

You will naturally gravitate towards mindsets (and music) that express your natural state of being, and it is healthy to work out your favourite guitar solos to give your brain a map for when these ideas naturally float out of your creativity. And they will. Also I have found myself playing melodies that I recognise as someone else's and have had to rack my brain after the show to work out where it came from, ideas that I am certain I have never transcribed or practiced.

Also realise that mindsets are built on past experiences, and even imagined ones - for example, George Clinton telling Eddie Hazel to play like his momma had died on "Maggot Brain".

[Augustine]

I finished the last post and realised I'd only done half the job. I want to talk about licks, identity, and originality.

It strikes me that a lot of people haven't fully considered what a "lick" is, partly because I believe it's impossible to have a discussion about improvisation in the traditions that birthed it - jazz, blues, and rock - without them; and partly because it is a topic that personally took me a long time to understand. The reasons I am saying this will become clear further down.

You're ripping into a solo in front of twenty thousand people, hit a purple patch that makes you marvel, and before you know it you've dropped out of the "zone", have gone blank, and have no idea what to play next. Got a strategy? More than one?

It took me many years to get over my aversion to learning "licks", thinking that if I practiced premeditated ideas it would make my playing hackneyed, clichéd and stale. Part of this aversion came out of a misunderstanding of what a "lick" was. I thought of the phrase that Jimmy Page uses to start the "Communication Breakdown" solo, the same phrase that Ace Frehley opens "Speedin' Back To My Baby" with, as a "lick". While, playing melodies using unison bends on the 2nd and 3rd strings was a favoured trick of mine, but it took a long time for it to occur to me that this was "a lick". In fact I had learned a few licks whether I liked it or not, by virtue of working out songs and solos from other guitarists. I have worked out hundreds of songs. It took a while for the penny to drop (thanks to my mental resistance) but I eventually realised the folly of thinking that I was not incorporating licks into my playing.

What I was really doing was limiting my improvisational vocabulary to whatever scales and melodic patterns (layovers) I had digested, along with the few ideas swimming around in my psyche that had made the greatest impression. Once that penny dropped of course I wanted to put intention into the process, add a few more colours and designs to the palette, as well as provide some more "bones" to the licks I was already using (mostly) unaware. It meant going back to some of the things I worked out when I was 16 and first "gathering my materials", re-examining them, correcting mistakes, and reinforcing: which is an obvious and natural thing to do. What you like are clues to what you are like. Or perhaps even the same thing.

As for my fear of sounding like nothing more than the sum of my influences - I became aware of two expressions of time that smashed my preconceptions of that: rhythm and context.

I have to have a little chuckle at Jamie's article regarding "Time". As much as I agree with that article, for something that doesn't exist it sure has a helluvan impact! It is the X-factor, the magic dust that undresses the arrogant record exec's platitude "there are only twelve notes and there's only so many ways you can use 'em" as an egregious lie. Rhythm, beat, pulse, dynamic, note activation - all of these things can contribute to make every musical expression unique to that moment.

(What a wonderful instrument the guitar is, with the incredible variety of note activation techniques we have at our disposal. Pinch harmonics anyone? The guy I linked to in my post above is widely recognised as the pioneer of that technique - not a heavy metal player at all. Out of the two main polyphonic instruments - guitar and piano - the guitar has it all over the piano for versatility in this aspect.)

Eddie Van Halen has been quoted often about having learnt Eric Clapton licks by slowing Bluesbreakers and Cream records down to 16rpm from 33-1/3 but I don't often hear anybody comment on that. Let's face it, on the surface Van Halen sounds nothing like Clapton. But I found something that intrigued me greatly when I transcribed Eddie's solo from "Outta Love Again". I had to slow the solo down to about 30-40% (the wonders of Pro Tools!) but when I did, it sounded to me like something Chuck Berry might have done. Chuck Berry at warp speed! Of course, Eddie adds his aggressive vibrato touch, whammy bar flourishes and tapping, through that unmistakeable sound of a maple-necked ash guitar's humbucker into a screaming Marshall JMP, and that's some of what gives you Eddie Van Halen. (Incidentally, slowing down a record from 33-1/3 to 16rpm involves a drop of an octave plus 2/3 of a semitone, which might explain Van Halen's preference for Eb tuning.)

From this point of view, you don't avoid your influences (assuming such a thing is possible!) - you go through them, and emerge as you.

Ritchie Blackmore's famous "Highway Star" solo was a composed piece but he is on record as saying that the great majority of his solos in Deep Purple were improvised, and this is corroborated by Purple's recording engineer Martin Birch. There are many instances in these solos of Blackmore's "Chuck Berry with spice" lick, including twice in the "Smoke On The Water" solo - in two different positions where their relationship to the underlying chords is also different. He starts the "Pictures Of Home" solo with this lick - twice - starting the second repetition half a beat early so that the accents are reversed.

What are all these materials and elements? Call them licks, call them what you will. But I don't see how you can avoid learning to recognise them when you hear them in others' playing, and in your own, if you are to evolve your creative voice. They don't all have to be borrowed, and part of your work to craft your personal style will sooner or later be to come up with your own. Then, if you want to make chord soloing an integral part of your style, and Joe Pass is the master of chord solos, don't you want to get a grip on Joe Pass' ideas to make sure you're not reinventing the wheel? What did Isaac Newton say about the shoulders of giants?

Whether it's Wes Montgomery's octaves or Joe Pass' chord movements, bends, double-stops, chromaticism, tapped harmonics, these are all materials that require preparation. They may emerge spontaneously during the course of improvisation but, if they are to become more than a fleeting part of your "style" or "vocabulary" they require practice - just as scales are.

Is a scale not a lick? What is a lick? It becomes semantics. It's all "stuff", all material to weave your tapestries from.

Can you truly improvise without licks, as in "borrowed phrases"? If you have worked with a scale enough to use it spontaneously over extended periods you will have found places you like to go with it. Are these not licks? True, they're your own. Is the distinction important?

Jimmy Page was a fluent improviser. The "Stairway To Heaven" solo was the first of three improvised takes that Page stated he used a premeditated phrase to kick off. He re-uses the phrase twice more in the solo. He used the same trick for the outro solo in "Black Dog". Strategies like this are also part of the toolkit for improvisation. This is a player who had played a hundred-plus gigs a year for half a decade, with shows up to three hours long made up of songs that were primarily platforms for improvisation. Kirk Hammett at 16 worked out Page's playing on the 30-minute "Dazed And Confused" from Song Remains The Same, which Hammett later described as a "riff encyclopedia". Like Van Halen, Hammett's playing is a long way from his formative influences; the instructive point is, he didn't go around them but through them, assimilating more advanced (and original) ideas as he grew.

[Tomakemusic]

Great post Augustine, thanks

[Augustine]

Thanks Tom. Actually I haven't written on this subject to this depth ever, which probably accounts for why I went through a moment of "am I barking mad?" after posting it, wondering if I could stand behind every point I made - even after carefully testing most of them in my mind before posting. The idea that is perhaps the weakest is the one about time, which makes my forum name quite fitting! I chose it partly because it is very close to my real name.

Now I want to go back to Guillaume's question which was left unanswered, and which was always my intention to address so long as I hadn't bit off more than I could chew.

Guillaume, I think to do what you are talking about requires, at the very least, not only a familiarity with the creative state - the "zone" - but also how it behaves, how to trigger it, and what you are going to do when you fall out of it - which you will, and often more likely than not.

If you are going to play nothing but what comes through you then the first pre-requisite is that the music itself has to act as the trigger, and that means it has to inspire you. If it doesn't, you're dead in the water, and all that will float up out of the void after awhile will be familiar places and automatic behaviours.

I'm going to step back and talk through an exercise to make sure we're on the same plane of understanding about the creative state.

I'd like to go back to what I said about my "fear" of licks: that they would make me sound hackneyed, clichéd and stale. Why would I fear that?

1. Because, essentially, a lick is a programmed behaviour.
2. Because I failed to understand, or didn't trust, the true purpose of using licks.

Actually, licks have two purposes. The first is to add structure and texture to your solos. The second is to act as a trigger for the pure creative state.

And this is what we are after, a trigger for the creative state. For the purposes of this exercise you want a lick, a phrase that is not too long. You also need a jam track with a chord progression that is not too busy or complex, in a style or idiom that you like.

Now. Play the lick. Over and over.

Start the lick on different beats.

Play it at half speed.

Change up the rhythm.

Modulate it. Move it up or down an octave. Move it chromatically.

Fragment it. Play only a couple of notes.

Add a note.

Keep finding new things to to with this lick. You can see where I'm going here. Allow yourself to wander off and play something else if it comes to you, and if you "run dry", go back to the lick.

The most important thing in this whole exercise is to keep finding new things to do. If you have done this kind of improvisation enough you will have observed that the Mind that is being engaged and asked to find new things to do is the same Mind that brings forth spontaneous melodies that you hadn't conceived before. What this exercise is doing is relieving you of the burden of having to come up with spontaneous music. You can't force the creative Mind to do such a thing. You have to invoke it. Furthermore, it's important that you see this activity as the creative Mind at work, because this is what will give you the confidence that you can invoke it.

What you will also have noticed, given time, is that your awareness of yourself shifts. As you fall into the "zone", the ideas will appear to be coming from somebody else, except that somebody else is you also!

With regular practice you will have recognised this state when it arrives, and learned to trust that it will. You will also learn that it is slippery, and hard to maintain, although regular practice will allow you to enter the state for longer periods. It's like surfing. You'll catch a wave, paddle back out and prepare so you can catch the next one.

Back to the lick you used in the exercise. Next time, pick two licks. Find ways of alternating them. If you just use the one lick you are going to get bored pretty quickly once you get over the initial novelty to be had in this exercise, your creative Mind will decide it's not wanted and go quiet. Here comes another analogy: it's like a muscle. Keep using it, and it gets stronger. Keep asking your creative Mind to work for you, and it will.

You are also going to find, over time, that you go through phases. Sometimes you are going to find your "well is dry" and you have to rely on your automatic behaviours more than you'd like. Stress will cause this. You will need to pay attention to what else is going on in your life and find solutions. Sometimes it is just a cycle you have to ride out. Sometimes it is your psyche telling you that you have to move on and find something new.

On automatic behaviours: these are part of your toolkit. You need a repertoire of tricks for different situations that will get you through your creative stalls - slow tricks, fast, funky, swinging, jagged, aggressive, off-the-wall. The key to this is practicing over different styles and progressions.

If there is such a thing as being able to improvise robotically, the way that would certainly accomplish this is to keep using the same material over and over until they have lost their spark and you are thoroughly bored of them. Or learn from a book or course where you have no emotional attachment to the material. There is only so much you will be able to take before you lose interest, get stuck, and are forced to rely on familiar ideas and automatic behaviours. The less attachment you have, the quicker you will get bored.

Record your jams. Listen back to them. What don't you like about it? Is there an element you'd like to introduce? Practice the ideas you'd like to include in your solos. Set yourself challenges to introduce them in your jam track exercise.

Journal everything. Keep track of your ideas. Review regularly.

Dig deeper. Find new ideas. Apply them regularly with a system that works for you. Capture. Review. Examine. Repeat.

Back to the case of just using a backing track over which you are freely improvising. You may find that what comes up is a preconceived idea or automatic behaviour, rather than a spontaneous melodic idea. If this happens it's important not to shut it down, judge it, or mentally constrict. Just let it happen and return to your resting state - if nothing else comes through. This may be trickier than it sounds. We are used to employing our critic, but doing so silences the creative voice. If this is a chronic problem, you may need to look at a concerted plan of attack such as Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. But the best use of this situation is to allow the automatic behaviour to trigger you into your creative state.

In a way, conceiving melodies in songwriting is done exactly like this. Sometimes you are just resting, waiting for the melody to come to you. Sometimes you graft an idea from someone else's song, until it mutates enough that you recognise the result as your own.

As for the backing track itself, you need to change the backing track, alternate, introduce new ones, and so on.

No method, regardless of its origin, will continue to work if you are not adding variety to it. You need variety, and you need to constantly be on the lookout for new ideas. Keeping a journal should help out immensely in this regard.

The "zone" is a state of thrall. It is a state of spiritual communion. Perhaps your passion is a yearning for that state.

There are profound creative states and lesser ones, and simple frameworks and complex ones. But the creative state should brook no elitism or snobbery based on these variables. That may even be a form of blasphemy.

It isn't rocket science. But it is perhaps a shamanic path of sorts, or a branch of which Jamie is the master of another. I'm not sure I would even call myself an adept - more a well-schooled initiate - so I reserve the right for any or all of these ideas to be wrong! But I think not. I think I will look back on these posts as a watershed, a crystallisation of ideas many of which I have held for a long time, and some more recently discovered, energised by my contact with (and application of) Jamie's ideas and teachings.