Improvisation part 2
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Now that you have improvised a little in class, we will consider the advice given by experienced improvisers in order to improve our skills. Watch the youtube clip below, then read the advice by opening the hyperlink below it, which gives you 11 tips to help you improvise. If you keep in mind the advice I have provided thus far in our lessons regarding your role as a performer, i.e. as a communicator of ideas and feelings, your improvisations will have a powerful effect on your audience. Keep in mind too, that you and those you play with, are an audience of the performance as it it happening, so be open to listening and responding to the sounds that you and your fellow improvisers are making as you are making them. This will keep you in the moment, as Dave Morris explains below:
It may now be useful to consider why we study and practice on our instruments for hours, days and years; playing scales, arpeggios etc. if we can make effective music by improvising. The reason we dedicate so much time to practicing on our instrument is to attain mastery over the technical difficulties that every instrument has when we are connected to it, and through that mastery, become transparent vessels through which the music (ideas and feelings) can flow. By mastery I mean for it to become easy.
Consider this analogy to language. What happens when we don't have a large enough vocabulary to say what we mean? We will be either ignored, or misunderstood. We need to know enough words to say what we mean, and enough control over how we say those words for their meaning to be clear.
To master your instrument means to easily use that instrument's potential to express the ideas and feelings that are in you. Without your input, the instrument is not communicating. Notice, I did not say silent, because silence plays a very important part in music. To investigate silence, go to the silence page on this site.
Consider this analogy to language. What happens when we don't have a large enough vocabulary to say what we mean? We will be either ignored, or misunderstood. We need to know enough words to say what we mean, and enough control over how we say those words for their meaning to be clear.
To master your instrument means to easily use that instrument's potential to express the ideas and feelings that are in you. Without your input, the instrument is not communicating. Notice, I did not say silent, because silence plays a very important part in music. To investigate silence, go to the silence page on this site.
Open this link in your browser to read this excellent advice:
http://blog.discmakers.com/2012/02/11-improvisation-tips-to-help-you-make-music-in-the-moment/