Tips for Learning to Improvise on the Piano
1. The Freedom of Limitation
Improvising is essentially applied music theory and it is one of the greatest ways to test your musical ability. This means that it is a great way to work out whether you know a concept or you REALLY understand the concept.
Many music concepts are easily understood through logical thinking. For example, a major scale is a set of notes that requires one of each letter name on the piano (e.g. C D E F G A B or G A B C D E F#). This information makes sense to most learning musicians, particularly once the scales have been explained more fully and played several times. However, there is a difference between understanding the scale and being able to use the scale without thought. Improvisation allows you to learn the scale in a much more in-depth and innate way.
One of the biggest issues, however, is that it’s quite an overwhelming thing to do! You can play any keys on the piano, so what do you play?!
Well…one of the best ways to improve your improvisation skills, both instantly and over the long term, is to limit yourself. Using only 1-3 concepts allows you to really test and improve those concepts before adding more concepts to play with. It means that you are able to spend more time targeting individual ideas and therefore there are much fewer things to think about while playing.
Let’s say, for example, your concepts are “a melody using a C major scale”, “a C major, F major and G major triad” and “quarter notes (crotchets) and eighth notes (quavers)”. An improvisation using these three concepts is much more manageable and will allow you to become very familiar with the scale, chords and note lengths.
2. Spaced Repetition
A useful psychology concept to understand when thinking about getting better at improvisation is the concept of “spaced repetition”. Spaced repetition is a technique used to learn something. The idea is that initial you have to revisit a concept with more frequency and then over time you can revisit the concept less and less with a much greater understanding.
This technique is used for all kinds of learning but in the context of improvisation it’s very useful to utilise. As I previously mentioned, limiting what you are trying to do when you are improvising is going to help you build familiarity with the concepts. Once you have the techniques that you are trying to improve, initially you will need to revisit them frequently. Each time you practice you may want to use the same chords or the same scale over and over so that it starts to become ingrained in the way that you play. However, over time, as you introduce new techniques you can use those initial concepts less and less without fear that you will forget.
This is exactly the reason that when you listen to someone improvising that has practiced it for a long time, it sounds like they could play anything on the instrument. It isn’t the case that they are doing some crazy mental gymnastics to produce the desired sound. They are simply reproducing the concepts that they have played many times before. Let’s say one of the concepts you introduce to your improvisations is a Cmaj7 chord because you like how it sounds jazzy and warm. In a future improvisation if you want to produce a jazzy and warm feeling, then you are going to pull the Cmaj7 chord out of your back pocket and throw it in there! If you’ve practiced it alongside other concepts then you will also know how you can put it into your improvisation in a way that will work.
3. Stick or Twist
As you build up your catalogue of ideas that you can throw into an improvisation, you will begin to notice that you have options! You may have many chords, inversions, rhythms, note lengths and scales that you can use to create the effect that you are looking for. You will have spent a large amount of dedicated time on each of the ideas so that they are freely accessible to you.
To get an idea of how this might feel; imagine if I said “play a C major chord on the piano”, many learning pianists will be able to do this without much thought. Imagine this being the case for each of these techniques.
In order to keep expanding your ability, you will need to begin adding in more difficult concepts, that could be more challenging chords, voicing or rhythms. The best way to do this is to keep everything else very simple so that you only have one new thing to focus on. I would usually recommend trying to do this very occasionally and in places where you have the best chance of being able to retain the flow of the improvisation. This is because improvisation is largely centred around keeping a flowing stream of music for a listener, so being able to practice this with new concepts will help you have confidence that you can use the technique in any situation.
Improvisation is an often neglected form of music making, yet it is probably one of the most significant things you can do to both learn and become proficient at music and playing an instrument. So if improvisation is something you haven’t tried before, try it out and see how well you know the elements of music!
Matthew Cawood
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