Mental approach to improvisation

Question

Improvisation for guitar is a fairly well-covered topic, with good resources to be found within multiple contexts (Web, traditional literature, etc).

However, most of what I've read is basically designed to "arm" your playing with resources, so that you have something to base on while improvising.

Still, I don't feel like I "get" improvising. I consider my overall creativity for composing fairly good, but with improvisation I can't really express myself like I wanted to.

So - for those of you analytic enough to have ever thought about it - how do you mentally approach improvising? Here's a few more specific "trigger" questions that - I hope - will clarify what I want to know more about:

• Do you think in terms of "musical phrases"?
• How long are they?
• How "complete" are they when you start them (sometimes I only know the start and end note)?
• Do you make them up "along the way" or "outline them in your head" a few moments before starting?
• Do you have explicit strategies to "keep track" of "where you are" in the rythm section (in order to "not get lost")?

PS: as far as open-ended questions go, I hope this one is still insightful enough to be helpful for those wanting to improve (or kick-start) their improvisation chops?

Answer 1

If you have to think about what you're going to play, then you've already missed the moment in the tune to play it. Thinking and playing need to happen simultaneously, they need to be the same thing. I may think about a solo in some larger sense, like where I want to go through a chord progression or how my melody interplays with a vocal line, but I don't tend to give it too much thought on a measure by measure or note by note basis. That's kind of hard to get to though, and I've been improvising for 18 years now.

So what do I teach my students?

• Practice - A lot. I start kids improvising in the first 10 lessons with the minor pentatonic scale and spend 5 minutes a lesson making them jam. It's not an obvious or an easy thing to do, and it takes a lot of time. Since you are, by definition, making it up as you go, you have to practice it a lot to get any good at it.
• Sing - It's much easier to imagine a melody line than to play one. Try singing (in your head if you must) along with a tune that you want to improvise over. Then sing while you're playing. Singing the notes and playing them will sync your hands and your thoughts. After a couple of years (yeah, this isn't easy), you'll find that you can play anything you can sing. At this point thinking and playing become the same thing.
• Copy - If you want to play a style of music, learn a solo (or ten). You'll figure out what people (great people none the less) are doing with phrasing, notes, bends, technique, etc. Once you know a solo cold, improvise over the same tune in the style of the guitarist. Having already learned the solo, you'll have all the tools to make it sound "right". This ends up being a much more practical approach to the idea that you learn licks and then use them. It's much less abstract since you've already got a great example on cd (or whatever the cool kids are using these days).

Although, like everything else on this site, that first one is the real killer. You have to practice. A lot. All the time.