-
Improv exercises to get better fast!
What are some of the best improvisation exercises you used that have helped a lot?
-
4 Replies
-
Hi Brenden,
The best “exercise” is just to remember that you are the teacher (the best I ever had) and I am the student. At the age of 91 I’m too old to continue rebelling against my teachers. This specialty course on improvisation spurs the very best efforts.
Keep up your energetic indefatigable work and wishing you all success with golf,
Roger Smook
-
I should get a little more specific. Most fruitful for me was Improvised Practice System– and to be still more specific it was the wonderful Controlled No Time. One doesn’t have to a genius to get tremendous fun out of this!
-
Thanks for sharing this Roger! I appreciate your support and I’m glad you’re highlighting this area of the Improvisation Mastery Specialty Course for others. Thanks again for the post. 🙂
-
-
-
One of the biggest problems is having too many choices. A good idea is imposing constraints or accepting already existing constraints. This can be very radical like using just one or two or maybe 5 notes and making something interesting with it (remember Beethoven or One Note Samba?).
What makes something interesting? A motif. It raises expectations one can play with: play what is expected or create a surprise.
Playing lots of notes tends to be rather uninteresting unless you want to make piano playing a sports game. Less is more. Develop, change register, play the same thing twice or half as fast, do it in octaves…
Log in to reply.