Seamus Kirkpatrick

Improvising is something that you
should cover at some point in your music lessons and is a skill that
really enhances your abilities to play guitar or play piano or
whatever it is you might use to make music!

Before we talk about actually
improvising on your instrument of choice, let’s talk for a minute
about what improvising actually is.

Improvising is making things up as you
go. That can mean using a wire coat hanger for your car aerial
or using an old cardboard box for the wickets in a game of backyard
cricket. In fact next time that you have a conversation with someone
you’ll be improvising the entire conversation! You’re using words
that you know, putting them into sentences and using those sentences
to express yourself.

If you’re really angry, and if you play
the piano (and even if you don’t play the piano), you can really
express anger at the piano. You put the sustain pedal down (that’s
the one on the right, it makes all the notes keep going even if you
have stopped pushing on the keys) and then you begin to play the
piano, in a way that expresses how you feel…. first you might use
your left hand to make a rumbling sound down on the left hand side of
the keyboard, where all the low notes are… then you will move
slowly up the piano, playing the piano more intensely, slowly getting
louder, then you might add in some stabbing chord clusters up high on
that right… (a chord cluster is where you bash a bunch of notes
next to each other randomly with your hand… I’m sure you can do
that). And then you start just pounding at it BAM BAM BAM BOOM
CRASH!!!! This goes on until you physically can’t do it anymore or
until the owner of the piano races into the room and shouts “What
are you doing to my piano!!!!”.

Well, you’re improvising. You’re
playing the piano. You’re not playing jazz, or rock, or classical,
you’re playing your music in a way that expresses yourself and how
you feel. That’s improvising. Honestly. That’s it. It may not be the
most refined way to play the piano, but you were expressing yourself
on a musical instrument.

You could imagine that our experiment
could travel easily across some instruments; get an electric guitar
and turn it up REALLY loud and go! Or beat the hell out of a drum
kit!… you get the idea. Now, you will be thinking, “But anyone
can do that, that’s not playing music” and you’re kind of right.
There are much more refined ways that you can play those instruments,
and you’ll also find that the more technique you have, the BETTER you
can express your feelings on the instrument, even if you’re having a
wild bash (you’ll sound wilder and be able to do it longer if you
know what you’re doing..).

So anyway, the point is – you can
improvise. All of us can. It’s inherent in all of us.

The next question is, how can I
improvise in a way that sounds attractive to others or is suitable
when I learn to play jazz or rock music?

For the answer to that question keep an
eye on this blog where I’ll get some answers for you or if you can’t
wait, head over to our contacts page, and sign up for a free
introductory lesson at IMA!